Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SIX CHAPTER 24
Chapter 24
“Then there is all the more reason for you to legalize your position, if possible,” said
Dolly.
“Yes, if possible,” said Anna, speaking all at once in an utterly different tone, subdued
and mournful.
“Surely you don’t mean a divorce is impossible? I was told your husband had
consented to it.”
“Dolly, I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Oh, we won’t then,” Darya Alexandrovna hastened to say, noticing the expression
of suffering on Anna’s face. “All I see is that you take too gloomy a view of
things.”
“I? Not at all! I’m always bright and happy. You see, je fais des passions.
Veslovsky...”
“Yes, to tell the truth, I don’t like Veslovsky’s tone,” said Darya Alexandrovna,
anxious to change the subject.
“Oh, that’s nonsense! It amuses Alexey, and that’s all; but he’s a boy, and quite
under my control. You know, I turn him as I please. It’s just as it might be with your
Grisha.... Dolly!”– she suddenly changed the subject–”you say I take too gloomy a
view of things. You can’t understand. It’s too awful! I try not to take any view of it
at all.”
“But I think you ought to. You ought to do all you can.”
“But what can I do? Nothing. You tell me to marry Alexey, and say I don’t think
about it. I don’t think about it!” she repeated, and a flush rose into her face. She got
up, straightening her chest, and sighed heavily. With her light step she began pacing
up and down the room, stopping now and then. “I don’t think of it? Not a day, not
an hour passes that I don’t think of it, and blame myself for thinking of it...because
thinking of that may drive me mad. Drive me mad!” she repeated. “When I think of
it, I can’t sleep without morphine. But never mind. Let us talk quietly. They tell me,
divorce. In the first place, he won’t give me a divorce. He’s under the influence of
Countess Lidia Ivanovna now.”
Darya Alexandrovna, sitting erect on a chair, turned her head, following Anna
with a face of sympathetic suffering.
“You ought to make the attempt,” she said softly.
“Suppose I make the attempt. What does it mean?” she said, evidently giving utterance
to a thought, a thousand times thought over and learned by heart. “It means
that I, hating him, but still recognizing that I have wronged him–and I consider him
magnanimous–that I humiliate myself to write to him.... Well, suppose I make the
effort; I do it. Either I receive a humiliating refusal or consent.... Well, I have received
his consent, say...” Anna was at that moment at the furthest end of the room, and she
stopped there, doing something to the curtain at the window. “I receive his consent,
but my...my son? They won’t give him up to me. He will grow up despising me,
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