Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SEVEN CHAPTER 25
With trembling hands Anna took the telegram, and read what Vronsky had told
her. At the end was added: “Little hope; but I will do everything possible and impossible.”
“I said yesterday that it’s absolutely nothing to me when I get, or whether I never
get, a divorce,” she said, flushing crimson. “There was not the slightest necessity to
hide it from me.” “So he may hide and does hide his correspondence with women
from me,” she thought.
“Yashvin meant to come this morning with Voytov,” said Vronsky; “I believe he’s
won from Pyevtsov all and more than he can pay, about sixty thousand.”
“No,” she said, irritated by his so obviously showing by this change of subject that
he was irritated, “why did you suppose that this news would affect me so, that you
must even try to hide it? I said I don’t want to consider it, and I should have liked
you to care as little about it as I do.”
“I care about it because I like definiteness,” he said.
“Definiteness is not in the form but the love,” she said, more and more irritated,
not by his words, but by the tone of cool composure in which he spoke. “What do
you want it for?”
“My God! love again,” he thought, frowning.
“Oh, you know what for; for your sake and your children’s in the future.”
“There won’t be children in the future.”
“That’s a great pity,” he said.
“You want it for the children’s sake, but you don’t think of me?” she said, quite
forgetting or not having heard that he had said, “for your sake and the children’s.”
The question of the possibility of having children had long been a subject of dispute
and irritation to her. His desire to have children she interpreted as a proof he
did not prize her beauty.
“Oh, I said: for your sake. Above all for your sake,” he repeated, frowning as
though in pain, “because I am certain that the greater part of your irritability comes
from the indefiniteness of the position.”
“Yes, now he has laid aside all pretense, and all his cold hatred for me is apparent,”
she thought, not hearing his words, but watching with terror the cold, cruel judge
who looked mocking her out of his eyes.
“The cause is not that,” she said, “and, indeed, I don’t see how the cause of my irritability,
as you call it, can be that I am completely in your power. What indefiniteness
is there in the position? on the contrary...”
“I am very sorry that you don’t care to understand,” he interrupted, obstinately
anxious to give utterance to his thought. “The indefiniteness consists in your imagining
that I am free.”
“On that score you can set your mind quite at rest,” she said, and turning away
from him, she began drinking her coffee.
She lifted her cup, with her little finger held apart, and put it to her lips. After
drinking a few sips she glanced at him, and by his expression, she saw clearly that
he was repelled by her hand, and her gesture, and the sound made by her lips.
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