Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART ONE CHAPTER 19
Dolly grew calmer, and for two minutes both were silent.
“What’s to be done? Think for me, Anna, help me. I have thought over everything,
and I see nothing.”
Anna could think of nothing, but her heart responded instantly to each word, to
each change of expression of her sister-in-law.
“One thing I would say,” began Anna. “I am his sister, I know his character, that
faculty of forgetting everything, everything” (she waved her hand before her forehead),
“that faculty for being completely carried away, but for completely repenting
too. He cannot believe it, he cannot comprehend now how he can have acted as he
did.”
“No; he understands, he understood!” Dolly broke in. “But I...you are forgetting
me...does it make it easier for me?”
“Wait a minute. When he told me, I will own I did not realize all the awfulness
of your position. I saw nothing but him, and that the family was broken up. I felt
sorry for him, but after talking to you, I see it, as a woman, quite differently. I see
your agony, and I can’t tell you how sorry I am for you! But, Dolly, darling, I fully
realize your sufferings, only there is one thing I don’t know; I don’t know...I don’t
know how much love there is still in your heart for him. That you know–whether
there is enough for you to be able to forgive him. If there is, forgive him!”
“No,” Dolly was beginning, but Anna cut her short, kissing her hand once more.
“I know more of the world than you do,” she said. “I know how men like Stiva
look at it. You speak of his talking of you with her. That never happened. Such men
are unfaithful, but their home and wife are sacred to them. Somehow or other these
women are still looked on with contempt by them, and do not touch on their feeling
for their family. They draw a sort of line that can’t be crossed between them and
their families. I don’t understand it, but it is so.”
“Yes, but he has kissed her...”
“Dolly, hush, darling. I saw Stiva when he was in love with you. I remember the
time when he came to me and cried, talking of you, and all the poetry and loftiness
of his feeling for you, and I know that the longer he has lived with you the loftier
you have been in his eyes. You know we have sometimes laughed at him for putting
in at every word: ‘Dolly’s a marvelous woman.’ You have always been a divinity for
him, and you are that still, and this has not been an infidelity of the heart...”
“But if it is repeated?”
“It cannot be, as I understand it...”
“Yes, but could you forgive it?”
“I don’t know, I can’t judge.... Yes, I can,” said Anna, thinking a moment; and
grasping the position in her thought and weighing it in her inner balance, she added:
“Yes, I can, I can, I can. Yes, I could forgive it. I could not be the same, no; but I could
forgive it, and forgive it as though it had never been, never been at all...”
“Oh, of course,” Dolly interposed quickly, as though saying what she had more
than once thought, “else it would not be forgiveness. If one forgives, it must be
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