Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SIX CHAPTER 16
best they’ll simply be decent people. That’s all I can hope for. And to gain simply
that–what agonies, what toil!... One’s whole life ruined!” Again she recalled what
the young peasant woman had said, and again she was revolted at the thought; but
she could not help admitting that there was a grain of brutal truth in the words.
“Is it far now, Mihail?” Darya Alexandrovna asked the counting house clerk, to
turn her mind from thoughts that were frightening her.
“From this village, they say, it’s five miles.” The carriage drove along the village
street and onto a bridge. On the bridge was a crowd of peasant women with coils
of ties for the sheaves on their shoulders, gaily and noisily chattering. They stood
still on the bridge, staring inquisitively at the carriage. All the faces turned to Darya
Alexandrovna looked to her healthy and happy, making her envious of their enjoyment
of life. “They’re all living, they’re all enjoying life,” Darya Alexandrovna still
mused when she had passed the peasant women and was driving uphill again at a
trot, seated comfortably on the soft springs of the old carriage, “while I, let out, as
it were from prison, from the world of worries that fret me to death, am only looking
about me now for an instant. They all live; those peasant women and my sister
Natalia and Varenka and Anna, whom I am going to see–all, but not I.
“And they attack Anna. What for? am I any better? I have, anyway, a husband
I love–not as I should like to love him, still I do love him, while Anna never loved
hers. How is she to blame? She wants to live. God has put that in our hearts. Very
likely I should have done the same. Even to this day I don’t feel sure I did right in
listening to her at that terrible time when she came to me in Moscow. I ought then
to have cast off my husband and have begun my life fresh. I might have loved and
have been loved in reality. And is it any better as it is? I don’t respect him. He’s
necessary to me,” she thought about her husband, “and I put up with him. Is that
any better? At that time I could still have been admired, I had beauty left me still,”
Darya Alexandrovna pursued her thoughts, and she would have liked to look at
herself in the looking glass. She had a traveling looking glass in her handbag, and
she wanted to take it out; but looking at the backs of the coachman and the swaying
counting house clerk, she felt that she would be ashamed if either of them were to
look round, and she did not take out the glass.
But without looking in the glass, she thought that even now it was not too late;
and she thought of Sergey Ivanovitch, who was always particularly attentive to her,
of Stiva’s good-hearted friend, Turovtsin, who had helped her nurse her children
through the scarlatina, and was in love with her. And there was someone else, a quite
young man, who–her husband had told her it as a joke–thought her more beautiful
than either of her sisters. And the most passionate and impossible romances rose before
Darya Alexandrovna’s imagination. “Anna did quite right, and certainly I shall
never reproach her for it. She is happy, she makes another person happy, and she’s
not broken down as I am, but most likely just as she always was, bright, clever, open
to every impression,” thought Darya Alexandrovna,–and a sly smile curved her lips,
for, as she pondered on Anna’s love affair, Darya Alexandrovna constructed on parallel
lines an almost identical love affair for herself, with an imaginary composite
figure, the ideal man who was in love with her. She, like Anna, confessed the whole
affair to her husband. And the amazement and perplexity of Stepan Arkadyevitch
at this avowal made her smile.
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