Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART ONE CHAPTER 31
Chapter 31
VRONSKY had not even tried to sleep all that night. He sat in his armchair, looking
straight before him or scanning the people who got in and out. If he had indeed
on previous occasions struck and impressed people who did not know him by his air
of unhesitating composure, he seemed now more haughty and self-possessed than
ever. He looked at people as if they were things. A nervous young man, a clerk in a
law court, sitting opposite him, hated him for that look. The young man asked him
for a light, and entered into conversation with him, and even pushed against him,
to make him feel that he was not a thing, but a person. But Vronsky gazed at him
exactly as he did at the lamp, and the young man made a wry face, feeling that he
was losing his self-possession under the oppression of this refusal to recognize him
as a person.
Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself a king, not because he believed
that he had made an impression on Anna–he did not yet believe that,–but because
the impression she had made on him gave him happiness and pride.
What would come of it all he did not know, he did not even think. He felt that
all his forces, hitherto dissipated, wasted, were centered on one thing, and bent with
fearful energy on one blissful goal. And he was happy at it. He knew only that he
had told her the truth, that he had come where she was, that all the happiness of his
life, the only meaning in life for him, now lay in seeing and hearing her. And when
he got out of the carriage at Bologova to get some seltzer water, and caught sight of
Anna, involuntarily his first word had told her just what he thought. And he was
glad he had told her it, that she knew it now and was thinking of it. He did not sleep
all night. When he was back in the carriage, he kept unceasingly going over every
position in which he had seen her, every word she had uttered, and before his fancy,
making his heart faint with emotion, floated pictures of a possible future.
When he got out of the train at Petersburg, he felt after his sleepless night as keen
and fresh as after a cold bath. He paused near his compartment, waiting for her to
get out. “Once more,” he said to himself, smiling unconsciously, “once more I shall
see her walk, her face; she will say something, turn her head, glance, smile, maybe.”
But before he caught sight of her, he saw her husband, whom the station-master was
deferentially escorting through the crowd. “Ah, yes! The husband.” Only now for
the first time did Vronsky realize clearly the fact that there was a person attached
to her, a husband. He knew that she had a husband, but had hardly believed in his
existence, and only now fully believed in him, with his head and shoulders, and his
legs clad in black trousers; especially when he saw this husband calmly take her arm
with a sense of property.
Seeing Alexey Alexandrovitch with his Petersburg face and severely self-confident
figure, in his round hat, with his rather prominent spine, he believed in him, and was
aware of a disagreeable sensation, such as a man might feel tortured by thirst, who,
on reaching a spring, should find a dog, a sheep, or a pig, who has drunk of it and
muddied the water. Alexey Alexandrovitch’s manner of walking, with a swing of
the hips and flat feet, particularly annoyed Vronsky. He could recognize in no one
but himself an indubitable right to love her. But she was still the same, and the sight
of her affected him the same way, physically reviving him, stirring him, and filling
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