Stepan Arkadyich went out to look. It was the rejuvenated Pyotr Oblonsky. He was so drunk that he was unable to climb the stairs; but he ordered them to stand him on his feet when he saw Stepan Arkadyich, and, hanging on to him, went with him to his room, there began telling about how he had spent the evening, and fell asleep on the spot.
Stepan Arkadyich was in low spirits, which rarely happened to him, and could not fall asleep for a long time. Everything he recalled, everything, was vile, but vilest of all was the recollection, as if of something shameful, of the evening at Countess Lydia Ivanovna’s.
The next day he received from Alexei Alexandrovich a definitive refusal to divorce Anna and understood that this decision was based on what the Frenchman had said in his real or feigned sleep.
XXIII
In order to undertake anything in family life, it is necessary that there be either complete discord between the spouses or loving harmony. But when the relations between spouses are uncertain and there is neither the one nor the other, nothing can be undertaken.
Many families stay for years in the same old places, hateful to both spouses, only because there is neither full discord nor harmony.
For both Vronsky and Anna, Moscow life in the heat and dust, when the sun no longer shone as in spring but as in summer, and all the trees on the boulevards had long been in leaf, and the leaves were already covered with dust, was unbearable. But instead of moving to Vozdvizhenskoe, as they had long ago decided to do, they went on living in the Moscow they both hated, because lately there had been no harmony between them.
The irritation that divided them had no external cause, and all attempts to talk about it not only did not remove it but increased it. This was an inner irritation, which for her was based on the diminishing of his love, and for him on his regret at having put himself, for her sake, in a difficult situation, which she, instead of making easier, made still more difficult. Neither of them spoke of the causes of their irritation, but each considered the other in the wrong and tried to prove it at every opportunity.
For her, all of him, with all his habits, thoughts, desires, with his entire mental and physical cast, amounted to one thing: love for women. And that love, which, as she felt, should have been concentrated on her alone, had diminished. Therefore, she reasoned, he must have transferred part of it to other women, or to another woman - and she was jealous. She was jealous not of any one woman, but of the diminishing of his love. Having as yet no object for her jealousy, she was looking for one. Following the slightest hint, she transferred her jealousy from one object to another. Now she was jealous of those coarse women with whom he could so easily associate himself thanks to his bachelor connections; then she was jealous of the society women he might meet, or again of some imaginary girl he wanted to marry after breaking the liaison with her. And this last jealousy tormented her most of all, especially as he himself, in a moment of candour, had imprudently told her that his mother understood him so little that she allowed herself to insist that he should marry Princess Sorokin.
And, being jealous, Anna was indignant with him and sought pretexts for indignation in everything. She blamed him for everything that was difficult in her situation. The painful state of expectation, between heaven and earth, in which she lived in Moscow, Alexei Alexandrovich’s slowness and indecision, her seclusion - she ascribed it all to him. If he loved her, he would understand the full difficulty of her situation and would take her out of it. The fact that she was living in Moscow and not in the country was also his fault. He could not live buried in the country, as she wanted to. Society was necessary for him, and he put her into that terrible position, the difficulty of which he did not wish to understand. And it was he again who was to blame for her being for ever separated from her son.
Even the rare moments of tenderness that occurred between them did not bring her peace: in his tenderness she now saw a tinge of tranquillity, of assurance, which had not been there before and which irritated her.
