‘I didn’t tell you yesterday,’ she began, breathing rapidly and heavily, ‘that on the way home with Alexei Alexandrovich I told him everything ... I said that I could not be his wife, that ... I told him everything.’
He listened to her, involuntarily leaning his whole body towards her, as if wishing in this way to soften the difficulty of her situation. But as soon as she had said it, he suddenly straightened up and his face acquired a proud and stern expression.
‘Yes, yes, it’s better, a thousand times better! I understand how difficult it was,’ he said.
But she was not listening to his words, she was reading his thoughts in the expression of his face. She could not have known that his expression reflected the first thought that occurred to him - that a duel was now inevitable. The thought of a duel had never entered her head and therefore she explained this momentary expression of sternness differently.
Having received her husband’s letter, she already knew in the depths of her soul that everything would remain as before, that she would be unable to scorn her position, to leave her son and unite herself with her lover. The morning spent at Princess Tverskoy’s had confirmed her still more in that. But all the same this meeting was extremely important for her. She hoped it would change their situation and save her. If at this news he should say to her resolutely, passionately, without a moment’s hesitation: ‘Abandon everything and fly away with me!’ - she would leave her son and go with him. But the news did not produce in him what she expected: he only seemed insulted by something.
‘It wasn’t the least bit difficult. It got done by itself,’ she said irritably. ‘Here ...’ She took her husband’s letter from her glove.
‘I understand, I understand,’ he interrupted, taking the letter without reading it and trying to calm her. ‘I wished for one thing, I asked for one thing - to break up this situation, in order to devote my life to your happiness.’
‘Why are you telling me that?’ she said. ‘Could I possibly doubt it? If I did...’
‘Who’s that coming?’ Vronsky said suddenly, pointing at two ladies coming towards them. ‘Maybe they know us,’ and he hastened to turn down a side walk, drawing her after him.
‘Oh, I don’t care!’ she said. Her lips were trembling. And it seemed to him that her eyes looked at him with a strange spite from behind the veil. ‘As I said, that’s not the point, I cannot doubt that, but here is what he writes to me. Read it.’ She stopped again.
Again, as in the first moment, at the news of her break with her husband, Vronsky, while reading the letter, involuntarily yielded to the natural impression aroused in him by his attitude towards the insulted husband. Now, as he held his letter in his hands, he involuntarily pictured to himself the challenge he would probably find today or tomorrow at his place, and the duel itself, during which he would stand, with the same cold and proud expression that was now on his face, having fired into the air, awaiting the insulted husband’s shot. And at once there flashed in his head the thought of what Serpukhovskoy had just said to him and what he himself had thought that morning - that it was better not to bind himself - and he knew that he could not tell her this thought.
Having read the letter, he raised his eyes to her, and there was no firmness in his look. She understood at once that he had already thought it over to himself. She knew that whatever he might tell her, he would not say everything he thought. And she understood that her last hope had been disappointed. This was not what she had expected.
‘You see what sort of man he is,’ she said in a trembling voice, ‘he ...’
‘Forgive me, but I’m glad of it,’ Vronsky interrupted. ‘For God’s sake, let me finish,’ he added, his eyes begging her to give him time to explain his words. ‘I’m glad, because it cannot, it simply cannot remain as he suggests.’
‘Why not?’ Anna asked, holding back her tears, obviously no longer attaching any significance to what he was going to say. She felt that her fate was decided.
Vronsky wanted to say that after the duel, in his opinion inevitable, this could not go on, but he said something else.
‘It cannot go on. I hope you will leave him now. I hope,’ he became confused and blushed, ‘that you will allow me to arrange and think over our life. Tomorrow ...’ he began.
She did not let him finish.
‘And my son?’ she cried out. ‘Do you see what he writes? I must leave him, and I cannot and will not do it.’
‘But for God’s sake, which is better? To leave your son or to go on in this humiliating situation?’
‘Humiliating for whom?’
‘For everyone and most of all for you.’
