Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 31
and she suddenly recalled that he was the cause of her present misery. She had not
once thought of him all the morning. But now, coming all at once upon that manly,
noble face, so familiar and so dear to her, she felt a sudden rush of love for him.
“But where is he? How is it he leaves me alone in my misery?” she thought all at
once with a feeling of reproach, forgetting she had herself kept from him everything
concerning her son. She sent to ask him to come to her immediately; with a throbbing
heart she awaited him, rehearsing to herself the words in which she would tell him
all, and the expressions of love with which he would console her. The messenger
returned with the answer that he had a visitor with him, but that he would come
immediately, and that he asked whether she would let him bring with him Prince
Yashvin, who had just arrived in Petersburg. “He’s not coming alone, and since
dinner yesterday he has not seen me,” she thought; “he’s not coming so that I could
tell him everything, but coming with Yashvin.” And all at once a strange idea came
to her: what if he had ceased to love her?
And going over the events of the last few days, it seemed to her that she saw in
everything a confirmation of this terrible idea. The fact that he had not dined at home
yesterday, and the fact that he had insisted on their taking separate sets of rooms in
Petersburg, and that even now he was not coming to her alone, as though he were
trying to avoid meeting her face to face.
“But he ought to tell me so. I must know that it is so. If I knew it, then I know
what I should do,” she said to herself, utterly unable to picture to herself the position
she would be in if she were convinced of his not caring for her. She thought he had
ceased to love her, she felt close upon despair, and consequently she felt exceptionally
alert. She rang for her maid and went to her dressing room. As she dressed,
she took more care over her appearance than she had done all those days, as though
he might, if he had grown cold to her, fall in love with her again because she had
dressed and arranged her hair in the way most becoming to her.
She heard the bell ring before she was ready. When she went into the drawing
room it was not he, but Yashvin, who met her eyes. Vronsky was looking through
the photographs of her son, which she had forgotten on the table, and he made no
haste to look round at her.
“We have met already,” she said, putting her little hand into the huge hand of
Yashvin, whose bashfulness was so queerly out of keeping with his immense frame
and coarse face. “We met last year at the races. Give them to me,” she said, with a
rapid movement snatching from Vronsky the photographs of her son, and glancing
significantly at him with flashing eyes. “Were the races good this year? Instead of
them I saw the races in the Corso in Rome. But you don’t care for life abroad,” she
said with a cordial smile. “I know you and all your tastes, though I have seen so
little of you.”
“I’m awfully sorry for that, for my tastes are mostly bad,” said Yashvin, gnawing
at his left mustache.
Having talked a little while, and noticing that Vronsky glanced at the clock,
Yashvin asked her whether she would be staying much longer in Petersburg, and
unbending his huge figure reached after his cap.
“Not long, I think,” she said hesitatingly, glancing at Vronsky.
499