‘Suppose I try. What does it mean?’ She was obviously saying something she had thought over a thousand times and learned by heart. ‘It means that I, who hate him but still acknowledge myself guilty before him - and I consider him magnanimous - that I must humiliate myself by writing to him ... Well, suppose I make an effort and do it. I’ll either get an insulting reply or his consent. Good, so I get his consent ...’ Just then Anna was at the far end of the room, and she stopped there, doing something to the window curtain. ‘I get his consent, but my ... my son? They won’t give him to me. He’ll grow up despising me, with the father I abandoned. You must understand that I love two beings - equally, I think, but both more than myself - Seryozha and Alexei.’
She came to the middle of the room and stopped in front of Dolly, her arms pressed to her breast. In the white peignoir her figure seemed especially big and wide. She bowed her head and with shining wet eyes looked from under her brows at the small, thin Dolly, trembling all over with agitation, pathetic in her mended chemise and night-cap.
‘I love only these two beings, and the one excludes the other. I can’t unite them, yet I need only that. And if there isn’t that, the rest makes no difference. It all makes no difference. And it will end somehow, and so I can’t, I don’t like talking about it. Don’t reproach me, then, don’t judge me for anything. You with your purity can’t understand all that I suffer over.’
She went up to Dolly, sat down beside her and, peering into her face with a guilty expression, took her by the hand.
‘What are you thinking? What do you think of me? Don’t despise me. I’m not worthy of being despised. I’m just unhappy. If anyone is unhappy, I am,’ she said and, turning away, she wept.
Left alone, Dolly prayed and went to bed. She had pitied Anna with all her soul while talking with her; but now she was unable to make herself think about her. Memories of her home and children arose in her imagination with some new radiance, some special loveliness she had not known before. That world of hers now seemed so precious and dear to her that she did not want to spend an extra day outside it for anything and decided to leave the next morning without fail.
Anna meanwhile, on returning to her boudoir, took a glass and into it put a few drops of medicine, of which morphine made up a significant part, and after drinking it and sitting motionless for a time, grown quiet, she went to the bedroom in calm and cheerful spirits.
When she came into the bedroom, Vronsky looked at her attentively. He sought traces of the conversation which he knew she must have had with Dolly, since she had stayed so long in her room. But in her expression, excitedly restrained and concealing something, he found only that beauty which, familiar as it was, still captivated him, and her awareness of that beauty and her desire that it affect him. He did not want to ask her what they had talked about, but hoped she would say something herself. But all she said was:
‘I’m glad you like Dolly. You do, don’t you?’
‘But I’ve known her for a long time. She’s very kind, I think,
He took Anna’s hand and looked questioningly into her eyes.
She, understanding that look differently, smiled at him.
The next morning, despite her hosts’ entreaties, Darya Alexandrovna made ready to leave. Levin’s driver, in his none-too-new caftan and something half resembling a post-boy’s hat, with his ill-matched horses, gloomily and resolutely drove the carriage with patched splash-boards under the covered, sand-strewn portico.
Taking leave of Princess Varvara and the men was unpleasant for Darya Alexandrovna. After a day together, both she and her hosts clearly felt that they were unsuited to each other and that it was better for them not to get together. Only Anna felt sad. She knew that now, with Dolly’s departure, there would be no one to stir up in her soul those feelings that had been aroused in her at this meeting. To stir up those feelings was painful for her; but she knew all the same that that was the best part of her soul and that it was quickly being overgrown in the life she led.
Driving out into the fields, Dolly felt pleasantly relieved, and she was about to ask the servants how they had liked it at Vronsky’s when the driver, Filipp, suddenly spoke himself:
‘Maybe they’re rich, but they only gave the horses three measures of oats. They cleaned the bottom before cockcrow. What’s three measures? Just a snack. Nowadays innkeepers sell oats for forty-five kopecks. At home we give visitors as much as they can eat.’
‘A miserly master,’ the clerk agreed.
‘Well, and did you like their horses?’ asked Dolly.
‘Horses is the word. And the food’s good. Found it a bit boring otherwise, Darya Alexandrovna, I don’t know about you,’ he said, turning his handsome and kindly face to her.
