Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SIX CHAPTER 32
Chapter 32
BEFORE Vronsky’s departure for the elections, Anna had reflected that the scenes
constantly repeated between them each time he left home, might only make him
cold to her instead of attaching him to her, and resolved to do all she could to control
herself so as to bear the parting with composure. But the cold, severe glance with
which he had looked at her when he came to tell her he was going had wounded her,
and before he had started her peace of mind was destroyed.
In solitude afterwards, thinking over that glance which had expressed his right
to freedom, she came, as she always did, to the same point–the sense of her own
humiliation. “He has the right to go away when and where he chooses. Not simply
to go away, but to leave me. He has every right, and I have none. But knowing that,
he ought not to do it. What has he done, though?... He looked at me with a cold,
severe expression. Of course that is something indefinable, impalpable, but it has
never been so before, and that glance means a great deal,” she thought. “That glance
shows the beginning of indifference.”
And though she felt sure that a coldness was beginning, there was nothing she
could do, she could not in any way alter her relations to him. Just as before, only by
love and by charm could she keep him. And so, just as before, only by occupation
in the day, by morphine at night, could she stifle the fearful thought of what would
be if he ceased to love her. It is true there was still one means; not to keep him–for
that she wanted nothing more than his love–but to be nearer to him, to be in such a
position that he would not leave her. That means was divorce and marriage. And
she began to long for that, and made up her mind to agree to it the first time he or
Stiva approached her on the subject.
Absorbed in such thoughts, she passed five days without him, the five days that
he was to be at the elections.
Walks, conversation with Princess Varvara, visits to the hospital, and, most of all,
reading–reading of one book after another–filled up her time. But on the sixth day,
when the coachman came back without him, she felt that now she was utterly incapable
of stifling the thought of him and of what he was doing there, just at that time
her little girl was taken ill. Anna began to look after her, but even that did not distract
her mind, especially as the illness was not serious. However hard she tried, she
could not love this little child, and to feign love was beyond her powers. Towards the
evening of that day, still alone, Anna was in such a panic about him that she decided
to start for the town, but on second thoughts wrote him the contradictory letter that
Vronsky received, and without reading it through, sent it off by a special messenger.
The next morning she received his letter and regretted her own. She dreaded a repetition
of the severe look he had flung at her at parting, especially when he knew that
the baby was not dangerously ill. But still she was glad she had written to him. At
this moment Anna was positively admitting to herself that she was a burden to him,
that he would relinquish his freedom regretfully to return to her, and in spite of that
she was glad he was coming. Let him weary of her, but he would be here with her,
so that she would see him, would know of every action he took.
She was sitting in the drawing room near a lamp, with a new volume of Taine,
and as she read, listening to the sound of the wind outside, and every minute ex-
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