She gave the girl to the wet nurse, dismissed her, and opened a locket which held a portrait of Seryozha when he was nearly the same age as the girl. She got up and, after removing her hat, took an album from a little table in which there were photographs of her son at other ages. She wanted to compare the photographs and began taking them out of the album. She took them all out. One remained, the last, the best picture. He was sitting astride a chair, in a white shirt, his eyes sulky and his mouth smiling. This was his most special, his best expression. With her small, deft hands, which today moved their thin, white fingers with a peculiar strain, she picked at the corner several times, but the picture was stuck and she could not get it out. As there was no paper-knife on the table, she took out the picture next to it (it was a picture of Vronsky in a round hat and with long hair, taken in Rome) and pushed her son’s picture out with it. ‘Yes, here he is!’ she said, glancing at the picture of Vronsky, and she suddenly remembered who had been the cause of her present grief. She had not thought of him once all morning. But now suddenly, seeing that noble, manly face, so familiar and dear to her, she felt an unexpected surge of love for him.
‘But where is he? Why does he leave me alone with my sufferings?’ she suddenly thought, with a feeling of reproach, forgetting that she herself had concealed from him everything to do with her son. She sent to him asking him to come to her at once; with a sinking heart she waited for him, thinking up the words in which she would tell him everything, and the expressions of love with which he would comfort her. The messenger came back with the reply that he had a visitor but would come presently, and with the question whether she could receive him with Prince Yashvin, who had come to Petersburg. ‘He won’t come alone, and yet he hasn’t seen me since dinner yesterday,’ she thought. ‘He won’t come so that I can tell him everything, but will come with Yashvin.’ And suddenly a strange thought occurred to her: what if he had stopped loving her?
And, going over the events of the last few days, it seemed to her that she found the confirmation of this horrible thought in everything: in the fact that he had dined out the previous evening, and that he had insisted they stay separately in Petersburg, and that even now he was not coming to her alone, as if to avoid meeting her tête-à-tête.
‘But he ought to tell me that. I need to know that. If I knew it, then I know what I’d do,’ she said to herself, unable to imagine the position she would be in once she became convinced of his indifference. She thought he had stopped loving her, she felt herself close to despair, and as a result she became peculiarly agitated. She rang for the maid and went to her dressing room. As she dressed, she paid more attention to her toilette than she had all those days, as if, having ceased to love her, he might start loving her again because she was wearing a dress or had done her hair in a way more becoming to her.
She heard the bell ring before she was ready.
When she came out of the drawing room, it was not his but Yashvin’s eyes that met hers. Vronsky was looking at the photographs of her son, which she had forgotton on the table, and in no hurry to look at her.
‘We’re acquainted,’ she said, putting her small hand into the enormous hand of Yashvin, whose embarrassment went strangely with his huge stature and coarse face. ‘Since last year, at the races. Give them to me,’ she said, and with a quick movement she took from Vronsky the pictures of her son that he had been looking at, glancing at him meaningfully with her shining eyes. ‘Were the races good this year? I watched the races at the Corso in Rome instead. However, you don’t like life abroad,’ she said, smiling gently. ‘I know you and know all your tastes, though we’ve met so seldom.’
‘I’m very sorry for that, because my tastes are mostly bad,’ Yashvin said, biting the left side of his moustache.
Having talked for a while and noticing that Vronsky was glancing at the clock, Yashvin asked her how long she would be in Petersburg and, unbending his enormous figure, took his cap.
‘Not long, it seems,’ she said in perplexity, glancing at Vronsky.
‘So we won’t see more of each other?’ said Yashvin, standing up and addressing Vronsky. ‘Where will you dine?’
‘Come and dine with me,’ Anna said resolutely, as if angry with herself for her embarrassment, but blushing as she always did when she revealed her position to a new person. ‘The dinners aren’t good here, but at least you’ll see each other. Of all his comrades in the regiment, there’s no one Alexei loves more than you.’
‘Delighted,’ Yashvin said with a smile, by which Vronsky could see that he liked Anna very much.
Yashvin bowed and left. Vronsky stayed behind.
‘You’re going, too?’ she asked him.
‘I’m late already,’ he answered. ‘Go on! I’ll catch up with you in a minute,’ he called to Yashvin.
