‘What a position!’ he thought. ‘If he’d fight, if he’d stand up for his honour, I’d be able to act, to express my feelings; but this weakness or meanness ... He puts me in the position of a deceiver, which is something I never wanted and do not want to be.’
Since the time of his talk with Anna in Vrede’s garden, Vronsky’s thinking had changed greatly. Involuntarily submitting to the weakness of Anna, who had given herself to him entirely and expected the deciding of her fate from him alone, submitting to everything beforehand, he had long ceased to think that this liaison might end, as he had thought earlier. His ambitious plans retreated into the background again, and, feeling that he had left the circle of activity in which everything was definite, he gave himself wholly to his feeling, and this feeling bound him to her more and more strongly.
Still in the front hall, he heard her retreating footsteps. He realized that she had been waiting for him, listening, and had now returned to the drawing room.
‘No!’ she cried, seeing him, and at the first sound of her voice, tears came to her eyes. ‘No, if it goes on like this, it will happen much, much sooner!’
‘What is it, my love?’
‘What? I’ve been waiting, suffering, one hour, two ... No, I won’t! ... I cannot quarrel with you. Surely you couldn’t help it. No, I won‘t!’
She placed both hands on his shoulders and gazed at him for a long time with a deep, rapturous and at the same time searching look. She studied his face to make up for the time in which she had not seen him. As at every meeting, she was bringing together her imaginary idea of him (an incomparably better one, impossible in reality) with him as he was.
III
‘You met him?’ she asked, when they sat down by the table under the lamp. ‘That’s your punishment for being late.’
‘Yes, but how? Wasn’t he supposed to be at the council?’
‘He went and came back and went somewhere again. But never mind that. Don’t talk about it. Where have you been? With the prince all the time?’
She knew all the details of his life. He wanted to say that he had not slept all night and had fallen asleep, but, looking at her excited and happy face, he felt ashamed. And he said that he had had to go and give a report about the prince’s departure.
‘But it’s over now? He’s gone?’
‘Yes, thank God. You wouldn’t believe how unbearable it was for me.’
‘Why so? It’s the usual life for all you young men,’ she said, frowning, and taking up her crochet, which was lying on the table, she began extricating the hook from it without looking at Vronsky.
‘I gave up that life long ago,’ he said, surprised at the change of expression in her face and trying to penetrate its meaning. ‘And I confess,’ he said, his smile revealing his close-set white teeth, ‘looking at that life all this week, it was as if I were seeing myself in a mirror, and I didn’t like it.’
She held her crochet in her hands, not crocheting but looking at him with strange, shining and unfriendly eyes.
‘This morning Liza came to see me - they’re not afraid to visit me yet, in spite of Countess Lydia Ivanovna,’ she put in. ‘She told me about your Athenian night.2 How vile!’
‘I was just going to say that ...’
She interrupted him:
‘Was it the Thérèse you knew before?’
‘I was going to say ...’
‘How vile you men are! How can you not imagine to yourselves that a woman cannot forget that?’ she said, becoming increasingly angry and thereby betraying the cause of her vexation. ‘Especially a woman who cannot know your life. What do I know? What did I know?’ she said. ‘Only what you tell me. And how do I know whether what you’ve told me is true ...’
‘Anna! That’s insulting. Don’t you believe me? Haven’t I told you that I don’t have a single thought that I wouldn’t reveal to you?’
‘Yes, yes,’ she said, obviously trying to drive the jealous thoughts away. ‘But if you knew how painful it is for me! I believe you, I do! ... So what were you saying?’
