Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART ONE CHAPTER 19
Chapter 19
WHEN Anna went into the room, Dolly was sitting in the little drawing-room
with a white-headed fat little boy, already like his father, giving him a lesson
in French reading. As the boy read, he kept twisting and trying to tear off a button
that was nearly off his jacket. His mother had several times taken his hand from it,
but the fat little hand went back to the button again. His mother pulled the button
off and put it in her pocket.
“Keep your hands still, Grisha,” she said, and she took up her work, a coverlet
she had long been making. She always set to work on it at depressed moments,
and now she knitted at it nervously, twitching her fingers and counting the stitches.
Though she had sent word the day before to her husband that it was nothing to her
whether his sister came or not, she had made everything ready for her arrival, and
was expecting her sister-in-law with emotion.
Dolly was crushed by her sorrow, utterly swallowed up by it. Still she did not
forget that Anna, her sister-in-law, was the wife of one of the most important personages
in Petersburg, and was a Petersburg grande dame. And, thanks to this circumstance,
she did not carry out her threat to her husband–that is to say, she remembered
that her sister-in-law was coming. “And, after all, Anna is in no wise
to blame,” thought Dolly. “I know nothing of her except the very best, and I have
seen nothing but kindness and affection from her towards myself.” It was true that
as far as she could recall her impressions at Petersburg at the Karenins’, she did not
like their household itself; there was something artificial in the whole framework of
their family life. “But why should I not receive her? If only she doesn’t take it into
her head to console me!” thought Dolly. “All consolation and counsel and Christian
forgiveness, all that I have thought over a thousand times, and it’s all no use.”
All these days Dolly had been alone with her children. She did not want to talk
of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of outside matters.
She knew that in one way or another she would tell Anna everything, and she
was alternately glad at the thought of speaking freely, and angry at the necessity
of speaking of her humiliation with her, his sister, and of hearing her ready-made
phrases of good advice and comfort. She had been on the lookout for her, glancing
at her watch every minute, and, as so often happens, let slip just that minute when
her visitor arrived, so that she did not hear the bell.
Catching a sound of skirts and light steps at the door, she looked round, and her
care-worn face unconsciously expressed not gladness, but wonder. She got up and
embraced her sister-in-law.
“What, here already!” she said as she kissed her.
“Dolly, how glad I am to see you!”
“I am glad, too,” said Dolly, faintly smiling, and trying by the expression of Anna’s
face to find out whether she knew. “Most likely she knows,” she thought, noticing
the sympathy in Anna’s face. “Well, come along, I’ll take you to your room,” she
went on, trying to defer as long as possible the moment of confidences.
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