But he could not immediately recall what he was going to say. These fits of jealousy, which had come over her more and more often lately, horrified him and, no matter how he tried to conceal it, made him cooler towards her, though he knew that the cause of her jealousy was her love for him. How many times he had told himself that her love was happiness; and here she loved him as only a woman can for whom love outweighs all that is good in life - yet he was much further from happiness than when he had followed her from Moscow. Then he had considered himself unhappy, but happiness was ahead of him; while now he felt that the best happiness was already behind. She was not at all as he had seen her in the beginning. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. She had broadened out, and her face, when she spoke of the actress, was distorted by a spiteful expression. He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has plucked, in which he can barely recognize the beauty that had made him pluck and destroy it. And, despite that, he felt that when his love was stronger, he might have torn that love from his heart, had he strongly wished to do so, but now, when it seemed to him, as it did at that moment, that he felt no love for her, he knew that his bond with her could not be broken.
‘Well, what did you want to tell me about the prince? I’ve driven him away, I’ve driven the demon away,’ she added. The demon was their name for jealousy. ‘Yes, what did you start to tell me about the prince? Why was it so burdensome for you?’
‘Ah, unbearable!’ he said, trying to catch the thread of his lost thought. ‘He doesn’t gain from closer acquaintance. If I were to define him, he’s a superbly nourished animal, the sort that gets first prize at exhibitions, and nothing more,’ he said with a vexation that she found interesting.
‘No, how can you,’ she objected. ‘After all, he’s seen a lot, he’s educated, isn’t he?’
‘It’s quite a different education - their education. You can see he’s been educated only so that he can have the right to despise education, as they despise everything except animal pleasures.’
‘But you all love those animal pleasures,’ she said, and again he noticed her gloomy eyes, which avoided him.
‘Why do you defend him so?’ he said, smiling.
‘I’m not defending him, it makes absolutely no difference to me; but I think that if you didn’t like those pleasures yourself, you might have refused. But it gives you pleasure to look at Teresa in the costume of Eve...’
‘Again, again the devil!’ said Vronsky, taking the hand she had placed on the table and kissing it.
‘Yes, but I can’t bear it! You don’t know how I suffered waiting for you! I don’t think I’m jealous. I’m not jealous. I believe you when you’re here with me, but when you’re alone somewhere leading your life, which is incomprehensible to me ...’
She drew back from him, finally extricated the hook from her crochet, and quickly, with the help of her index finger, began drawing stitches of white woollen yarn, shining in the lamplight, one after another, and quickly, nervously flicking her wrist in its embroidered cuff.
‘Well, what then? Where did you meet Alexei Alexandrovich?’ her voice suddenly rang unnaturally.
‘We bumped into each other in the doorway.’
‘And he bowed to you like this?’ She pulled a long face and, half closing her eyes, quickly changed expression, folded her arms, and in her beautiful face Vronsky suddenly saw the very expression with which Alexei Alexandrovich had bowed to him. He smiled, and she gaily laughed that lovely deep laugh that was one of her main charms.
‘I decidedly do not understand him,’ said Vronsky. ‘If he had broken with you after your talk in the country, if he had challenged me to a duel ... but this I do not understand: how can he bear such a situation? He suffers, it’s obvious.’
‘He?’ she said with a laugh. ‘He’s perfectly content.’
‘Why are we all tormented when everything could be so good?’
‘Only not him. Don’t I know him, the lie he’s all steeped in? ... Is it possible, if he has any feeling, to live with me as he does? He doesn’t understand or feel anything. Can a man who has any feeling live in the same house with his “criminal” wife? Can he talk to her? Call her “my dear”?’
And again she involuntarily pictured him:
‘He’s not a man, not a human being, he’s a puppet! Nobody else knows it, but I do. Oh, if I were in his place, I’d have killed a wife like me long ago, I’d have torn her to pieces, I wouldn’t say to her:
‘You’re not right, not right, my love,’ said Vronsky, trying to calm her. ‘But never mind, let’s not talk about him. Tell me, what have you been doing? What’s wrong with you? What is this illness and what did the doctor say?’
