Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SEVEN CHAPTER 18
Chapter 18
“Now there is something I want to talk about, and you know what it is. About
Anna,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said, pausing for a brief space, and shaking off the
unpleasant impression.
As soon as Oblonsky uttered Anna’s name, the face of Alexey Alexandrovitch was
completely transformed; all the life was gone out of it, and it looked weary and dead.
“What is it exactly that you want from me?” he said, moving in his chair and
snapping his pince-nez.
“A definite settlement, Alexey Alexandrovitch, some settlement of the position.
I’m appealing to you” (“not as an injured husband,” Stepan Arkadyevitch was going
to say, but afraid of wrecking his negotiation by this, he changed the words) “not as a
statesman” (which did not sound à propos), “but simply as a man, and a good-hearted
man and a Christian. You must have pity on her,” he said.
“That is, in what way precisely?” Karenin said softly.
“Yes, pity on her. If you had seen her as I have!–I have been spending all the winter
with her–you would have pity on her. Her position is awful, simply awful!”
“I had imagined,” answered Alexey Alexandrovitch in a higher, almost shrill
voice, “that Anna Arkadyevna had everything she had desired for herself.”
“Oh, Alexey Alexandrovitch, for heaven’s sake, don’t let us indulge in recriminations!
What is past is past, and you know what she wants and is waiting for–
divorce.”
“But I believe Anna Arkadyevna refuses a divorce, if I make it a condition to leave
me my son. I replied in that sense, and supposed that the matter was ended. I
consider it at an end,” shrieked Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“But, for heaven’s sake, don’t get hot!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, touching his
brother-in-law’s knee. “The matter is not ended. If you will allow me to recapitulate,
it was like this: when you parted, you were as magnanimous as could possibly
be; you were ready to give her everything–freedom, divorce even. She appreciated
that. No, don’t think that. She did appreciate it–to such a degree that at the first
moment, feeling how she had wronged you, she did not consider and could not consider
everything. She gave up everything. But experience, time, have shown that
her position is unbearable, impossible.”
“The life of Anna Arkadyevna can have no interest for me,” Alexey Alexandrovitch
put in, lifting his eyebrows.
“Allow me to disbelieve that,” Stepan Arkadyevitch replied gently. “Her position
is intolerable for her, and of no benefit to anyone whatever. She has deserved it, you
will say. She knows that and asks you for nothing; she says plainly that she dare not
ask you. But I, all of us, her relatives, all who love her, beg you, entreat you. Why
should she suffer? Who is any the better for it?”
“Excuse me, you seem to put me in the position of the guilty party,” observed
Alexey Alexandrovitch.
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