Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SEVEN CHAPTER 23
Even the rare moments of tenderness that came from time to time did not soothe
her; in his tenderness now she saw a shade of complacency, of self-confidence, which
had not been of old, and which exasperated her.
It was dusk. Anna was alone, and waiting for him to come back from a bachelor
dinner. She walked up and down in his study (the room where the noise from the
street was least heard), and thought over every detail of their yesterday’s quarrel.
Going back from the well-remembered, offensive words of the quarrel to what had
been the ground of it, she arrived at last at its origin. For a long while she could
hardly believe that their dissension had arisen from a conversation so inoffensive, of
so little moment to either. But so it actually had been. It all arose from his laughing
at the girls’ high schools, declaring they were useless, while she defended them. He
had spoken slightingly of women’s education in general, and had said that Hannah,
Anna’s English protegée, had not the slightest need to know anything of physics.
This irritated Anna. She saw in this a contemptuous reference to her occupations.
And she bethought her of a phrase to pay him back for the pain he had given her.
“I don’t expect you to understand me, my feelings, as anyone who loved me might,
but simple delicacy I did expect,” she said.
And he had actually flushed with vexation, and had said something unpleasant.
She could not recall her answer, but at that point, with an unmistakable desire to
wound her too, he had said:
“I feel no interest in your infatuation over this girl, that’s true, because I see it’s
unnatural.”
The cruelty with which he shattered the world she had built up for herself so
laboriously to enable her to endure her hard life, the injustice with which he had
accused her of affectation, of artificiality, aroused her.
“I am very sorry that nothing but what’s coarse and material is comprehensible
and natural to you,” she said and walked out of the room.
When he had come in to her yesterday evening, they had not referred to the quarrel,
but both felt that the quarrel had been smoothed over, but was not at an end.
Today he had not been at home all day, and she felt so lonely and wretched in
being on bad terms with him that she wanted to forget it all, to forgive him, and be
reconciled with him; she wanted to throw the blame on herself and to justify him.
“I am myself to blame. I’m irritable, I’m insanely jealous. I will make it up with
him, and we’ll go away to the country; there I shall be more at peace.”
“Unnatural!” She suddenly recalled the word that had stung her most of all, not
so much the word itself as the intent to wound her with which it was said. “I know
what he meant; he meant– unnatural, not loving my own daughter, to love another
person’s child. What does he know of love for children, of my love for Seryozha,
whom I’ve sacrificed for him? But that wish to wound me! No, he loves another
woman, it must be so.”
And perceiving that, while trying to regain her peace of mind, she had gone round
the same circle that she had been round so often before, and had come back to her
former state of exasperation, she was horrified at herself. “Can it be impossible? Can
it be beyond me to control myself?” she said to herself, and began again from the
678