‘Ah, what am I doing!’ she said to herself, suddenly feeling pain in both sides of her head. When she came to herself, she saw that she was clutching the hair on her temples and squeezing them with both hands. She jumped up and began pacing.
‘Coffee’s ready, and Mamzelle and Seryozha are waiting,’ said Annushka, coming back again and finding Anna in the same position.
‘Seryozha? What about Seryozha?’ Anna asked, suddenly becoming animated, remembering her son’s existence for the first time that whole morning.
‘He’s been naughty, it seems,’ Annushka answered, smiling.
‘What has he done?’
‘You had some peaches on the table in the corner room, and it seems he ate one on the sly.’
The reminder of her son suddenly brought Anna out of that state of hopelessness which she had been in. She remembered the partly sincere, though much exaggerated, role of the mother who lives for her son, which she had taken upon herself in recent years, and felt with joy that, in the circumstances she was in, she had her domain, independent of her relations with her husband and Vronsky. That domain was her son. Whatever position she was in, she could not abandon her son. Let her husband disgrace her and turn her out, let Vronsky grow cool towards her and continue to lead his independent life (again she thought of him with bitterness and reproach), she could not desert her son. She had a goal in life. And she had to act, to act in order to safeguard that position with her son, so that he would not be taken from her. She even had to act soon, as soon as possible, while he had not yet been taken from her. She had to take her son and leave. Here was the one thing she now had to do. She needed to be calm and to get out of this painful situation. The thought of a matter directly connected with her son, of leaving with him at once for somewhere, gave her that calm.
She dressed quickly, went downstairs, and with a resolute stride entered the drawing room where, as usual, coffee and Seryozha with the governess were waiting for her. Seryozha, all in white, stood by the table under the mirror and, his back and head bowed, with an expression of strained attention which she knew in him and in which he resembled his father, was doing something with the flowers he had brought.
The governess had an especially severe look. Seryozha cried out shrilly, as he often did: ‘Ah, mama!’ and stopped, undecided whether to go and greet his mother, abandoning the flowers, or to finish the garland and go to her with the flowers.
The governess, having greeted her, began to tell her at length and with qualifications about Seryozha’s trespass, but Anna was not listening to her; she was thinking whether she would take her along or not. ‘No, I won‘t,’ she decided. ‘I’ll go alone with my son.’
‘Yes, that’s very bad,’ said Anna and, taking her son by the shoulder, she looked at him not with a severe but with a timid gaze, which embarrassed and delighted the boy, and kissed him. ‘Leave him with me,’ she said to the astonished governess and, not letting go of her son’s hand, sat down at the table where the coffee was waiting.
‘Mama! I ... I ... didn’t ...’ he said, trying to guess from her expression how he would be punished for the peach.
‘Seryozha,’ she said, as soon as the governess left the room, ‘that’s bad, but you won’t do it again? ... Do you love me?’
She felt tears coming to her eyes. ‘How can I help loving him?’ she said to herself, peering into his frightened and at the same time joyful eyes. ‘And can it be that he will join with his father to punish me? Won’t he pity me?’ The tears ran down her cheeks and, to hide them, she got up impulsively and all but ran out to the terrace.
After the thunderstorms of the past few days, cold, clear weather had set in. The bright sun shone through the washed leaves, but there was a chill in the air.
She shivered both from the cold and from the inner horror that seized her with new force in the fresh air.
‘Go, go to Mariette,’ she said to Seryozha, who came out after her, and she began pacing the straw matting of the terrace. ‘Can it be that they won’t forgive me, won’t understand that all this could not be otherwise?’ she said to herself.
She stopped and looked at the tops of the aspens swaying in the wind, their washed leaves glistening brightly in the cold sun, and she understood that they would not forgive, that everything and everyone would be merciless to her now, like this sky, like this greenery. And again she felt things beginning to go double in her soul. ‘I mustn’t, I mustn’t think,’ she said to herself. ‘I must get ready to go. Where? When? Whom shall I take with me? Yes, to Moscow, on the evening train. Annushka and Seryozha, and only the most necessary things. But first I must write to them both.’ She quickly went into the house, to her boudoir, sat down at the desk and wrote to her husband:
