Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SEVEN CHAPTER 25
Chapter 25
FEELING that the reconciliation was complete, Anna set eagerly to work in the
morning preparing for their departure. Though it was not settled whether they
should go on Monday or Tuesday, as they had each given way to the other, Anna
packed busily, feeling absolutely indifferent whether they went a day earlier or later.
She was standing in her room over an open box, taking things out of it, when he
came in to see her earlier than usual, dressed to go out.
“I’m going off at once to see maman; she can send me the money by Yegorov. And
I shall be ready to go tomorrow,” he said.
Though she was in such a good mood, the thought of his visit to his mother’s gave
her a pang.
“No, I shan’t be ready by then myself,” she said; and at once reflected, “so then
it was possible to arrange to do as I wished.” “No, do as you meant to do. Go
into the dining room, I’m coming directly. It’s only to turn out those things that
aren’t wanted,” she said, putting something more on the heap of frippery that lay in
Annushka’s arms.
Vronsky was eating his beefsteak when she came into the dining- room.
“You wouldn’t believe how distasteful these rooms have become to me,” she said,
sitting down beside him to her coffee. “There’s nothing more awful than these chambres
garnies. There’s no individuality in them, no soul. These clocks, and curtains,
and, worst of all, the wallpapers–they’re a nightmare. I think of Vozdvizhenskoe as
the promised land. You’re not sending the horses off yet?”
“No, they will come after us. Where are you going to?”
“I wanted to go to Wilson’s to take some dresses to her. So it’s really to be tomorrow?”
she said in a cheerful voice; but suddenly her face changed.
Vronsky’s valet came in to ask him to sign a receipt for a telegram from Petersburg.
There was nothing out of the way in Vronsky’s getting a telegram, but he said, as
though anxious to conceal something from her, that the receipt was in his study, and
he turned hurriedly to her.
“By tomorrow, without fail, I will finish it all.”
“From whom is the telegram?” she asked, not hearing him.
“From Stiva,” he answered reluctantly.
“Why didn’t you show it to me? What secret can there be between Stiva and me?”
Vronsky called the valet back, and told him to bring the telegram.
“I didn’t want to show it to you, because Stiva has such a passion for telegraphing:
why telegraph when nothing is settled?”
“About the divorce?”
“Yes; but he says he has not been able to come at anything yet. He has promised a
decisive answer in a day or two. But here it is; read it.”
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