Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 33
Chapter 33
VRONSKY for the first time experienced a feeling of anger against Anna, almost a
hatred for her willfully refusing to understand her own position. This feeling
was aggravated by his being unable to tell her plainly the cause of his anger. If he
had told her directly what he was thinking, he would have said:
“In that dress, with a princess only too well known to everyone, to show yourself
at the theater is equivalent not merely to acknowledging your position as a fallen
woman, but is flinging down a challenge to society, that is to say, cutting yourself off
from it forever.”
He could not say that to her. “But how can she fail to see it, and what is going
on in her?” he said to himself. He felt at the same time that his respect for her was
diminished while his sense of her beauty was intensified.
He went back scowling to his rooms, and sitting down beside Yashvin, who, with
his long legs stretched out on a chair, was drinking brandy and seltzer water, he
ordered a glass of the same for himself.
“You were talking of Lankovsky’s Powerful. That’s a fine horse, and I would
advise you to buy him,” said Yashvin, glancing at his comrade’s gloomy face. “His
hind-quarters aren’t quite first-rate, but the legs and head–one couldn’t wish for
anything better.”
“I think I will take him,” answered Vronsky.
Their conversation about horses interested him, but he did not for an instant forget
Anna, and could not help listening to the sound of steps in the corridor and looking
at the clock on the chimney piece.
“Anna Arkadyevna gave orders to announce that she has gone to the theater.”
Yashvin, tipping another glass of brandy into the bubbling water, drank it and got
up, buttoning his coat.
“Well, let’s go,” he said, faintly smiling under his mustache, and showing by this
smile that he knew the cause of Vronsky’s gloominess, and did not attach any significance
to it.
“I’m not going,” Vronsky answered gloomily.
“Well, I must, I promised to. Good-bye, then. If you do, come to the stalls; you can
take Kruzin’s stall,” added Yashvin as he went out.
“No, I’m busy.”
“A wife is a care, but it’s worse when she’s not a wife,” thought Yashvin, as he
walked out of the hotel.
Vronsky, left alone, got up from his chair and began pacing up and down the room.
“And what’s today? The fourth night.... Yegor and his wife are there, and my
mother, most likely. Of course all Petersburg’s there. Now she’s gone in, taken off her
cloak and come into the light. Tushkevitch, Yashvin, Princess Varvara,” he pictured
them to himself.... “What about me? Either that I’m frightened or have given up
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