Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FOUR CHAPTER 3
that her love was happiness; and now she loved him as a woman can love when
love has outweighed for her all the good things of life–and he was much further
from happiness than when he had followed her from Moscow. Then he had thought
himself unhappy, but happiness was before him; now he felt that the best happiness
was already left behind. She was utterly unlike what she had been when he first saw
her. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. She had broadened
out all over, and in her face at the time when she was speaking of the actress there
was an evil expression of hatred that distorted it. He looked at her as a man looks at
a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which
he picked and ruined it. And in spite of this he felt that then, when his love was
stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love out of his heart;
but now, when as at that moment it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew
that what bound him to her could not be broken.
“Well, well, what was it you were going to say about the prince? I have driven
away the fiend,” she added. The fiend was the name they had given her jealousy.
“What did you begin to tell me about the prince? Why did you find it so tiresome?”
“Oh, it was intolerable!” he said, trying to pick up the thread of his interrupted
thought. “He does not improve on closer acquaintance. If you want him defined,
here he is: a prime, well-fed beast such as takes medals at the cattle shows, and
nothing more,” he said, with a tone of vexation that interested her.
“No; how so?” she replied. “He’s seen a great deal, anyway; he’s cultured?”
“It’s an utterly different culture–their culture. He’s cultivated, one sees, simply to
be able to despise culture, as they despise everything but animal pleasures.”
“But don’t you all care for these animal pleasures?” she said, and again he noticed
a dark look in her eyes that avoided him.
“How is it you’re defending him?” he said, smiling.
“I’m not defending him, it’s nothing to me; but I imagine, if you had not cared
for those pleasures yourself, you might have got out of them. But if it affords you
satisfaction to gaze at Thèrése in the attire of Eve...”
“Again, the devil again,” Vronsky said, taking the hand she had laid on the table
and kissing it.
“Yes; but I can’t help it. You don’t know what I have suffered waiting for you. I
believe I’m not jealous. I’m not jealous: I believe you when you’re here; but when
you’re away somewhere leading your life, so incomprehensible to me...”
She turned away from him, pulled the hook at last out of the crochet work, and
rapidly, with the help of her forefinger, began working loop after loop of the wool
that was dazzling white in the lamplight, while the slender wrist moved swiftly,
nervously in the embroidered cuff.
“How was it, then? Where did you meet Alexey Alexandrovitch?” Her voice
sounded in an unnatural and jarring tone.
“We ran up against each other in the doorway.”
“And he bowed to you like this?”
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