Anna Karenina | Page 8

generally did, made her sit down, heard her to the end attentively
without interrupting her, and gave her detailed advice as to how and to
whom to apply, and even wrote her, in his large, sprawling, good and
legible hand, a confident and fluent little note to a personage who
might be of use to her. Having got rid of the staff captain's widow,
Stepan Arkadyevitch took his hat and stopped to recollect whether he
had forgotten anything. It appeared that he had forgotten nothing except
what he wanted to forget--his wife.

"Ah, yes!" He bowed his head, and his handsome face assumed a
harassed expression. "To go, or not to go!" he said to himself; and an
inner voice told him he must not go, that nothing could come of it but
falsity; that to amend, to set right their relations was impossible,
because it was impossible to make her attractive again and able to
inspire love, or to make him an old man, not susceptible to love. Except
deceit and lying nothing could come of it now; and deceit and lying
were opposed to his nature.
"It must be some time, though: it can't go on like this," he said, trying
to give himself courage. He squared his chest, took out a cigarette, took
two whiffs at it, flung it into a mother-of-pearl ashtray, and with rapid
steps walked through the drawing room, and opened the other door into
his wife's bedroom.





Chapter 4
Darya Alexandrovna, in a dressing jacket, and with her now scanty,
once luxuriant and beautiful hair fastened up with hairpins on the nape
of her neck, with a sunken, thin face and large, startled eyes, which
looked prominent from the thinness of her face, was standing among a
litter of all sorts of things scattered all over the room, before an open
bureau, from which she was taking something. Hearing her husband's
steps, she stopped, looking towards the door, and trying assiduously to
give her features a severe and contemptuous expression. She felt she
was afraid of him, and afraid of the coming interview. She was just
attempting to do what she had attempted to do ten times already in
these last three days--to sort out the children's things and her own, so as

to take them to her mother's--and again she could not bring herself to
do this; but now again, as each time before, she kept saying to herself,
"that things cannot go on like this, that she must take some step" to
punish him, put him to shame, avenge on him some little part at least of
the suffering he had caused her. She still continued to tell herself that
she should leave him, but she was conscious that this was impossible; it
was impossible because she could not get out of the habit of regarding
him as her husband and loving him. Besides this, she realized that if
even here in her own house she could hardly manage to look after her
five children properly, they would be still worse off where she was
going with them all. As it was, even in the course of these three days,
the youngest was unwell from being given unwholesome soup, and the
others had almost gone without their dinner the day before. She was
conscious that it was impossible to go away; but, cheating herself, she
went on all the same sorting out her things and pretending she was
going.
Seeing her husband, she dropped her hands into the drawer of the
bureau as though looking for something, and only looked round at him
when he had come quite up to her. But her face, to which she tried to
give a severe and resolute expression, betrayed bewilderment and
suffering.
"Dolly!" he said in a subdued and timid voice. He bent his head
towards his shoulder and tried to look pitiful and humble, but for all
that he was radiant with freshness and health. In a rapid glance she
scanned his figure that beamed with health and freshness. "Yes, he is
happy and content!" she thought; "while I.... And that disgusting good
nature, which every one likes him for and praises--I hate that good
nature of his," she thought. Her mouth stiffened, the muscles of the
cheek contracted on the right side of her pale, nervous face.
"What do you want?" she said in a rapid, deep, unnatural voice.
"Dolly!" he repeated, with a quiver in his voice. "Anna is coming
today."
"Well, what is that to me? I can't see her!" she cried.

"But you must, really, Dolly..."
"Go away, go away, go away!" she shrieked, not looking at him, as
though this shriek were called up by physical pain.
Stepan Arkadyevitch could be calm when he thought of