No one except the people closest to Alexei Alexandrovich knew that this ostensibly most cold and reasonable man had one weakness that contradicted the general cast of his character. Alexei Alexandrovich was unable to hear and see the tears of a child or a woman with indifference. The sight of tears perplexed him and made him lose all ability to reason. His office manager and his secretary knew it and warned lady petitioners that they should not weep, if they did not want to ruin their chances. ‘He’ll get angry and won’t listen to you,’ they said. And, indeed, in such cases the inner disturbance produced in Alexei Alexandrovich by tears expressed itself in quick anger. ‘I can do nothing, nothing. Kindly get out!’ he usually shouted.
When, on the way home from the race, Anna told him about her relations with Vronsky and immediately after that covered her face with her hands and wept, Alexei Alexandrovich, despite the anger aroused in him against her, felt at the same time the surge of that inner disturbance which tears always produced in him. Aware of it and aware that an expression of his feelings at that moment would be unsuitable to the situation, he tried to suppress in himself any manifestation of life, and therefore did not move and did not look at her. From this came that strange expression of deadness on his face, which so struck Anna.
When they drove up to their house, he helped her out of the carriage and, making an inner effort, took leave of her with his usual courtesy, uttering words that did not oblige him to anything; he said that he would tell her his decision tomorrow.
His wife’s words, confirming his worst doubts, produced a cruel pain in Alexei Alexandrovich’s heart. This pain was further intensified by a strange feeling of physical pity for her, produced in him by her tears. But, left alone in the carriage, Alexei Alexandrovich, to his own surprise and joy, felt complete deliverance both from this pity and from the doubt and suffering of jealousy that had lately tormented him.
He felt like a man who has had a long-aching tooth pulled out. After the terrible pain and the sensation of something huge, bigger than his head, being drawn from his jaw, the patient, still not believing his good fortune, suddenly feels that what had poisoned his life and absorbed all his attention for so long exists no more, and that he can again live, think and be interested in something other than his tooth. This was the feeling Alexei Alexandrovich experienced. The pain had been strange and terrible, but now it was gone; he felt that he could again live and think about something other than his wife.
‘No honour, no heart, no religion - a depraved woman! I always knew it, and always saw it, though I tried to deceive myself out of pity for her,’ he said to himself. And indeed it seemed to him that he had always seen it; he recalled details of their past life which before had not seemed to him to be anything bad - now these details showed clearly that she had always been depraved. ‘I made a mistake in binding my life to hers, but there is nothing bad in this mistake, and therefore I cannot be unhappy. I am not the guilty one,’ he said to himself, ‘she is. But I have nothing to do with her. For me she doesn’t exist...’
All that was going to befall her and their son, towards whom his feeling had changed just as it had towards her, ceased to concern him. The only thing that concerned him now was the question of how to shake off in the best, most decent, most convenient for him, and therefore most just way, the mud she had spattered on him in her fall, and to continue on his path of active, honest and useful life.
‘I cannot be unhappy because a despicable woman has committed a crime; I must only find the best way out of the painful situation she has put me in. And I will find it,’ he said to himself, frowning more and more. ‘I am not the first, nor am I the last.’ And, to say nothing of historical examples, beginning with Menelaus, refreshed in everyone’s memory by
