Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SIX CHAPTER 24
with his father, whom I’ve abandoned. Do you see, I love... equally, I think, but both
more than myself–two creatures, Seryozha and Alexey.”
She came out into the middle of the room and stood facing Dolly, with her arms
pressed tightly across her chest. In her white dressing gown her figure seemed more
than usually grand and broad. She bent her head, and with shining, wet eyes looked
from under her brows at Dolly, a thin little pitiful figure in her patched dressing
jacket and nightcap, shaking all over with emotion.
“It is only those two creatures that I love, and one excludes the other. I can’t have
them together, and that’s the only thing I want. And since I can’t have that, I don’t
care about the rest. I don’t care about anything, anything. And it will end one way
or another, and so I can’t, I don’t like to talk of it. So don’t blame me, don’t judge
me for anything. You can’t with your pure heart understand all that I’m suffering.”
She went up, sat down beside Dolly, and with a guilty look, peeped into her face and
took her hand.
“What are you thinking? What are you thinking about me? Don’t despise me.
I don’t deserve contempt. I’m simply unhappy. If anyone is unhappy, I am,” she
articulated, and turning away, she burst into tears.
Left alone, Darya Alexandrovna said her prayers and went to bed. She had felt for
Anna with all her heart while she was speaking to her, but now she could not force
herself to think of her. The memories of home and of her children rose up in her
imagination with a peculiar charm quite new to her, with a sort of new brilliance.
That world of her own seemed to her now so sweet and precious that she would not
on any account spend an extra day outside it, and she made up her mind that she
would certainly go back next day.
Anna meantime went back to her boudoir, took a wine glass and dropped into it
several drops of a medicine, of which the principal ingredient was morphine. After
drinking it off and sitting still a little while, she went into her bedroom in a soothed
and more cheerful frame of mind.
When she went into the bedroom, Vronsky looked intently at her. He was looking
for traces of the conversation which he knew that, staying so long in Dolly’s room,
she must have had with her. But in her expression of restrained excitement, and of
a sort of reserve, he could find nothing but the beauty that always bewitched him
afresh though he was used to it, the consciousness of it, and the desire that it should
affect him. He did not want to ask her what they had been talking of, but he hoped
that she would tell him something of her own accord. But she only said:
“I am so glad you like Dolly. You do, don’t you?”
“Oh, I’ve known her a long while, you know. She’s very good-hearted, I suppose,
mais excessivement terre-à -terre. Still, I’m very glad to see her.”
He took Anna’s hand and looked inquiringly into her eyes.
Misinterpreting the look, she smiled to him. Next morning, in spite of the protests
of her hosts, Darya Alexandrovna prepared for her homeward journey. Levin’s
coachman, in his by no means new coat and shabby hat, with his ill-matched horses
and his coach with the patched mud-guards, drove with gloomy determination into
the covered gravel approach.
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