Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 31
Chapter 31
AS intensely as Anna had longed to see her son, and long as she had been thinking
of it and preparing herself for it, she had not in the least expected that seeing
him would affect her so deeply. On getting back to her lonely rooms in the hotel she
could not for a long while understand why she was there. “Yes, it’s all over, and I
am again alone,” she said to herself, and without taking off her hat she sat down
in a low chair by the hearth. Fixing her eyes on a bronze clock standing on a table
between the windows, she tried to think.
The French maid brought from abroad came in to suggest she should dress. She
gazed at her wonderingly and said, “Presently.” A footman offered her coffee. “Later
on,” she said.
The Italian nurse, after having taken the baby out in her best, came in with her,
and brought her to Anna. The plump, well-fed little baby, on seeing her mother, as
she always did, held out her fat little hands, and with a smile on her toothless mouth,
began, like a fish with a float, bobbing her fingers up and down the starched folds
of her embroidered skirt, making them rustle. It was impossible not to smile, not
to kiss the baby, impossible not to hold out a finger for her to clutch, crowing and
prancing all over; impossible not to offer her a lip which she sucked into her little
mouth by way of a kiss. And all this Anna did, and took her in her arms and made
her dance, and kissed her fresh little cheek and bare little elbows; but at the sight
of this child it was plainer than ever to her that the feeling she had for her could
not be called love in comparison with what she felt for Seryozha. Everything in this
baby was charming, but for some reason all this did not go deep to her heart. On her
first child, though the child of an unloved father, had been concentrated all the love
that had never found satisfaction. Her baby girl had been born in the most painful
circumstances and had not had a hundredth part of the care and thought which had
been concentrated on her first child. Besides, in the little girl everything was still
in the future, while Seryozha was by now almost a personality, and a personality
dearly loved. In him there was a conflict of thought and feeling; he understood her,
he loved her, he judged her, she thought, recalling his words and his eyes. And
she was forever–not physically only but spiritually–divided from him, and it was
impossible to set this right.
She gave the baby back to the nurse, let her go, and opened the locket in which
there was Seryozha’s portrait when he was almost of the same age as the girl. She
got up, and, taking off her hat, took up from a little table an album in which there
were photographs of her son at different ages. She wanted to compare them, and
began taking them out of the album. She took them all out except one, the latest
and best photograph. In it he was in a white smock, sitting astride a chair, with
frowning eyes and smiling lips. It was his best, most characteristic expression. With
her little supple hands, her white, delicate fingers, that moved with a peculiar intensity
today, she pulled at a corner of the photograph, but the photograph had caught
somewhere, and she could not get it out. There was no paper knife on the table, and
so, pulling out the photograph that was next to her son’s (it was a photograph of
Vronsky taken at Rome in a round hat and with long hair), she used it to push out
her son’s photograph. “Oh, here is he!” she said, glancing at the portrait of Vronsky,
498