Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 28
And with that he left her.
Vronsky knew that further efforts were useless, and that he had to spend these
few days in Petersburg as though in a strange town, avoiding every sort of relation
with his own old circle in order not to be exposed to the annoyances and humiliations
which were so intolerable to him. One of the most unpleasant features of his position
in Petersburg was that Alexey Alexandrovitch and his name seemed to meet him
everywhere. He could not begin to talk of anything without the conversation turning
on Alexey Alexandrovitch; he could not go anywhere without risk of meeting him.
So at least it seemed to Vronsky, just as it seems to a man with a sore finger that he is
continually, as though on purpose, grazing his sore finger on everything.
Their stay in Petersburg was the more painful to Vronsky that he perceived all
the time a sort of new mood that he could not understand in Anna. At one time
she would seem in love with him, and then she would become cold, irritable, and
impenetrable. She was worrying over something, and keeping something back from
him, and did not seem to notice the humiliations which poisoned his existence, and
for her, with her delicate intuition, must have been still more unbearable.
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