Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SIX CHAPTER 18
Chapter 18
ANNA looked at Dolly’s thin, care-worn face, with its wrinkles filled with dust
from the road, and she was on the point of saying what she was thinking, that
is, that Dolly had got thinner. But, conscious that she herself had grown handsomer,
and that Dolly’s eyes were telling her so, she sighed and began to speak about herself.
“You are looking at me,” she said, “and wondering how I can be happy in my
position? Well! it’s shameful to confess, but I... I’m inexcusably happy. Something
magical has happened to me, like a dream, when you’re frightened, panic-stricken,
and all of a sudden you wake up and all the horrors are no more. I have waked up.
I have lived through the misery, the dread, and now for a long while past, especially
since we’ve been here, I’ve been so happy!...” she said, with a timid smile of inquiry
looking at Dolly.
“How glad I am!” said Dolly smiling, involuntarily speaking more coldly than she
wanted to. “I’m very glad for you. Why haven’t you written to me?”
“Why?... Because I hadn’t the courage.... You forget my position...”
“To me? Hadn’t the courage? If you knew how I...I look at...”
Darya Alexandrovna wanted to express her thoughts of the morning, but for some
reason it seemed to her now out of place to do so.
“But of that we’ll talk later. What’s this, what are all these buildings?” she asked,
wanting to change the conversation and pointing to the red and green roofs that
came into view behind the green hedges of acacia and lilac. “Quite a little town.”
But Anna did not answer.
“No, no! How do you look at my position, what do you think of it?” she asked.
“I consider...” Darya Alexandrovna was beginning, but at that instant Vassenka
Veslovsky, having brought the cob to gallop with the right leg foremost, galloped
past them, bumping heavily up and down in his short jacket on the chamois leather
of the side saddle. “He’s doing it, Anna Arkadyevna!” he shouted.
Anna did not even glance at him; but again it seemed to Darya Alexandrovna out
of place to enter upon such a long conversation in the carriage, and so she cut short
her thought.
“I don’t think anything,” she said, “but I always loved you, and if one loves anyone,
one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to
be....”
Anna, taking her eyes off her friend’s face and dropping her eyelids (this was
a new habit Dolly had not seen in her before), pondered, trying to penetrate the
full significance of the words. And obviously interpreting them as she would have
wished, she glanced at Dolly.
“If you had any sins,” she said, “they would all be forgiven you for your coming
to see me and these words.”
And Dolly saw that tears stood in her eyes. She pressed Anna’s hand in silence.
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