Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FOUR CHAPTER 18
Chapter 18
AFTER the conversation with Alexey Alexandrovitch, Vronsky went out onto the
steps of the Karenins’ house and stood still, with difficulty remembering where
he was, and where he ought to walk or drive. He felt disgraced, humiliated, guilty,
and deprived of all possibility of washing away his humiliation. He felt thrust out of
the beaten track along which he had so proudly and lightly walked till then. All the
habits and rules of his life that had seemed so firm, had turned out suddenly false
and inapplicable. The betrayed husband, who had figured till that time as a pitiful
creature, an incidental and somewhat ludicrous obstacle to his happiness, had suddenly
been summoned by her herself, elevated to an awe-inspiring pinnacle, and
on the pinnacle that husband had shown himself, not malignant, not false, not ludicrous,
but kind and straightforward and large. Vronsky could not but feel this, and
the parts were suddenly reversed. Vronsky felt his elevation and his own abasement,
his truth and his own falsehood. He felt that the husband was magnanimous even in
his sorrow, while he had been base and petty in his deceit. But this sense of his own
humiliation before the man he had unjustly despised made up only a small part of
his misery. He felt unutterably wretched now, for his passion for Anna, which had
seemed to him of late to be growing cooler, now that he knew he had lost her forever,
was stronger than ever it had been. He had seen all of her in her illness, had
come to know her very soul, and it seemed to him that he had never loved her till
then. And now when he had learned to know her, to love her as she should be loved,
he had been humiliated before her, and had lost her forever, leaving with her nothing
of himself but a shameful memory. Most terrible of all had been his ludicrous,
shameful position when Alexey Alexandrovitch had pulled his hands away from his
humiliated face. He stood on the steps of the Karenins’ house like one distraught,
and did not know what to do.
“A sledge, sir?” asked the porter.
“Yes, a sledge.”
On getting home, after three sleepless nights, Vronsky, without undressing, lay
down flat on the sofa, clasping his hands and laying his head on them. His head
was heavy. Images, memories, and ideas of the strangest description followed one
another with extraordinary rapidity and vividness. First it was the medicine he had
poured out for the patient and spilt over the spoon, then the midwife’s white hands,
then the queer posture of Alexey Alexandrovitch on the floor beside the bed.
“To sleep! To forget!” he said to himself with the serene confidence of a healthy
man that if he is tired and sleepy, he will go to sleep at once. And the same instant
his head did begin to feel drowsy and he began to drop off into forgetfulness. The
waves of the sea of unconsciousness had begun to meet over his head, when all at
once–it was as though a violent shock of electricity had passed over him. He started
so that he leaped up on the springs of the sofa, and leaning on his arms got in a panic
onto his knees. His eyes were wide open as though he had never been asleep. The
heaviness in his head and the weariness in his limbs that he had felt a minute before
had suddenly gone.
“You may trample me in the mud,” he heard Alexey Alexandrovitch’s words and
saw him standing before him, and saw Anna’s face with its burning flush and glitter-
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