Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 23
Chapter 23
THE Countess Lidia Ivanovna had, as a very young and sentimental girl, been
married to a wealthy man of high rank, an extremely good-natured, jovial, and
extremely dissipated rake. Two months after marriage her husband abandoned her,
and her impassioned protestations of affection he met with a sarcasm and even hostility
that people knowing the count’s good heart, and seeing no defects in the sentimental
Lidia, were at a loss to explain. Though they were divorced and lived apart,
yet whenever the husband met the wife, he invariably behaved to her with the same
malignant irony, the cause of which was incomprehensible.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna had long given up being in love with her husband, but
from that time she had never given up being in love with someone. She was in love
with several people at once, both men and women; she had been in love with almost
everyone who had been particularly distinguished in any way. She was in love with
all the new princes and princesses who married into the imperial family; she had
been in love with a high dignitary of the Church, a vicar, and a parish priest; she had
been in love with a journalist, three Slavophiles, with Komissarov, with a minister, a
doctor, an English missionary and Karenin. All these passions constantly waning or
growing more ardent, did not prevent her from keeping up the most extended and
complicated relations with the court and fashionable society. But from the time that
after Karenin’s trouble she took him under her special protection, from the time that
she set to work in Karenin’s household looking after his welfare, she felt that all her
other attachments were not the real thing, and that she was now genuinely in love,
and with no one but Karenin. The feeling she now experienced for him seemed to
her stronger than any of her former feelings. Analyzing her feeling, and comparing
it with former passions, she distinctly perceived that she would not have been in
love with Komissarov if he had not saved the life of the Tsar, that she would not
have been in love with Ristitch-Kudzhitsky if there had been no Slavonic question,
but that she loved Karenin for himself, for his lofty, uncomprehended soul, for the
sweet–to her–high notes of his voice, for his drawling intonation, his weary eyes,
his character, and his soft white hands with their swollen veins. She was not simply
overjoyed at meeting him, but she sought in his face signs of the impression she was
making on him. She tried to please him, not by her words only, but in her whole
person. For his sake it was that she now lavished more care on her dress than before.
She caught herself in reveries on what might have been, if she had not been married
and he had been free. She blushed with emotion when he came into the room, she
could not repress a smile of rapture when he said anything amiable to her.
For several days now Countess Lidia Ivanovna had been in a state of intense
excitement. She had learned that Anna and Vronsky were in Petersburg. Alexey
Alexandrovitch must be saved from seeing her, he must be saved even from the torturing
knowledge that that awful woman was in the same town with him, and that
he might meet her any minute.
Lidia Ivanovna made inquiries through her friends as to what those infamous people,
as she called Anna and Vronsky, intended doing, and she endeavored so to guide
every movement of her friend during those days that he could not come across them.
The young adjutant, an acquaintance of Vronsky, through whom she obtained her
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