Despite the ebulliently merry mood he was in, Stepan Arkadyich naturally changed at once to the compassionate, poetically agitated tone that suited her mood. He asked about her health and how she had spent the night.
‘Very, very badly. And the afternoon, and the morning, and all days past and to come,’ she said.
‘I think you’re surrendering to dejection. You must shake yourself up, look at life straight on. I know it’s hard, but ...’
‘I’ve heard that women love people even for their vices,’ Anna suddenly began, ‘but I hate him for his virtues. I cannot live with him. You understand, the look of him affects me physically, I get beside myself. I cannot, cannot live with him. What am I to do? I was unhappy and thought it was impossible to be more unhappy, but I could not have imagined the terrible state I live in now. Would you believe that, though I know he’s a good and excellent man and I’m not worth his fingernail, I hate him even so? I hate him for his magnanimity. And I have nothing left, except...’
She was about to say ‘death’, but Stepan Arkadyich did not let her finish.
‘You’re ill and annoyed,’ he said. ‘Believe me, you exaggerate terribly. There’s nothing so dreadful in it.’
And Stepan Arkadyich smiled. No one in Stepan Arkadyich’s place, having to deal with such despair, would have allowed himself to smile (a smile would seem crude), but in his smile there was so much kindness and almost feminine tenderness that it could not be offensive. His quiet words and smiles worked softeningly and soothingly, like almond butter. And Anna soon felt it.
‘No, Stiva,’ she said. ‘I’m lost, lost! Worse than lost. I’m not lost yet, I can’t say it’s all ended, on the contrary, I feel that it hasn’t ended. I’m like a tightened string that’s about to snap. It hasn’t ended ... and it will end horribly.’
‘Never mind, the string can be gently loosened. There’s no situation that has no way out.’
‘I’ve been thinking and thinking. There’s only one ...’
Again he understood from her frightened eyes that this one way out, in her opinion, was death, and he did not let her finish.
‘Not at all,’ he said, ‘excuse me. You can’t see your situation as I can see it. Allow me to tell you frankly my opinion.’ Again he warily smiled his almond-butter smile. ‘I’ll begin from the beginning: you married a man twenty years older than yourself. You married without love or not knowing what love is. That was a mistake, let’s assume.’
‘A terrible mistake!’ said Anna.
‘But I repeat: it’s an accomplished fact. Then you had, let’s say, the misfortune to fall in love with someone other than your husband. That is a misfortune, but it’s also an accomplished fact. And your husband has accepted and forgiven it.’ He paused after each sentence, expecting her to object, but she made no reply. ‘That’s so. The question now is: can you go on living with your husband? Do you want that? Does he want it?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know anything.’
‘But you said yourself that you can’t stand him.’
‘No, I didn’t. I take it back. I don’t know anything, I don’t understand anything.’
‘Yes, but excuse me ...’
‘You can’t understand. I feel I’m flying headlong into some abyss, but I mustn’t try to save myself. And I can’t.’
‘Never mind, we’ll hold something out and catch you. I understand you, I understand that you can’t take it upon yourself to speak your wish, your feeling.’
‘There’s nothing I wish for, nothing ... only that it should all end.’
‘But he sees it and knows it. And do you really think it’s less burdensome for him than for you? You suffer, he suffers, and what on earth can come of it? Whereas a divorce would resolve everything.’ Stepan Arkadyich, not without effort, spoke his main thought and looked at her meaningfully.
She made no reply and shook her cropped head negatively. But by the expression on her face, which suddenly shone with its former beauty, he saw that she did not want it only because to her it seemed an impossible happiness.
‘I’m terribly sorry for you both! And how happy I’d be if I could settle it!’ Stepan Arkadyich said, now with a bolder smile. ‘No, don’t say anything! If only God grants me to speak as I feel. I’ll go to him.’
Anna looked at him with pensive, shining eyes and said nothing.
XXII
Stepan Arkadyich, with that somewhat solemn face with which he usually took the presiding chair in his office, entered Alexei Alexandrovich’s study. Alexei Alexandrovich, his hands behind his back, was pacing the room and thinking about the same thing that Stepan Arkadyich had talked about with his wife.
‘Am I disturbing you?’ said Stepan Arkadyich, who, on seeing his brother-in-law, experienced what was for him an unaccustomed feeling of embarrassment. To hide this embarrassment he produced a cigarette case with a new-fangled clasp he had just bought, sniffed the leather and took out a cigarette.
‘No. Is there something you need?’ Alexei Alexandrovich replied reluctantly.
