‘How they looked at me as if at something frightful, incomprehensible and curious. What can he be talking about so ardently with the other one?’ she thought, looking at two passers-by. ‘Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels? I wanted to tell Dolly, and it’s a good thing I didn’t. How glad she would be of my unhappiness! She would hide it, but her main feeling would be joy that I’ve been punished for the pleasures she envied me. Kitty, she would be even more glad. How I see right through her! She knows that I was more than usually friendly to her husband. And she’s jealous, and she hates me. And also despises me. In her eyes I’m an immoral woman. If I were an immoral woman, I could get her husband to fall in love with me ... if I wanted to. And I did want to. This one is pleased with himself,’ she thought of a fat, red-cheeked gentleman who, as he drove by in the opposite direction, took her for an acquaintance and raised a shiny hat over his bald, shiny head and then realized he was mistaken. ‘He thought he knew me. And he knows me as little as anyone else in the world knows me. I don’t know myself. I know my appetites, as the French say. Those two want that dirty ice cream. That they know for certain,’ she thought, looking at two boys who had stopped an ice-cream man, who was taking the barrel down from his head and wiping his sweaty face with the end of a towel. ‘We all want something sweet, tasty. If not candy, then dirty ice cream. And Kitty’s the same: if not Vronsky, then Levin. And she envies me. And hates me. We all hate each other. I Kitty, Kitty me. That’s the truth. Twitkin, Coiffeur ...
In these thoughts, which carried her away so much that she even stopped thinking about her situation, she pulled up at the entrance of her house. Only on seeing the hall porter coming out to meet her did she remember that she had sent the note and the telegram.
‘Is there an answer?’ she asked.
‘I’ll look at once,’ said the porter and, glancing at the desk, he picked up the thin, square envelope of a telegram and handed it to her. ‘I cannot come before ten. Vronsky,’ she read.
‘And the messenger hasn’t come back yet?’
‘No, ma’am,’ replied the porter.
‘Ah, in that case I know what to do,’ she said, and, feeling a vague wrath surge up in her, and a need for revenge, she ran upstairs. ‘I’ll go to him myself. Before going away for ever, I’ll tell him everything. I’ve never hated anyone as I do this man!’ she thought. Seeing his hat on the coat rack, she shuddered with revulsion. She did not realize that his telegram was a reply to her telegram and that he had not yet received her note. She imagined him now, calmly talking with his mother and Princess Sorokin and rejoicing at her suffering. ‘Yes, I must go quickly,’ she said to herself, still not knowing where to go. She wanted to get away quickly from the feelings she experienced in that terrible house. The servants, the walls, the things in the house - it all gave her a feeling of revulsion and anger and pressed her down with its weight.
‘Yes, I must go to the railway station, and if I don’t find him, I’ll go there myself and expose him.’ Anna looked up the train schedule in the newspaper. The evening train left at 8:02. ‘Yes, I can make it.’ She ordered other horses to be harnessed and began packing her travelling bag with the things necessary for several days. She knew she would not come back there any more. Among other plans that entered her head, she also vaguely decided that after whatever happened there at the station or at the countess’s estate, she would take the Nizhni Novgorod railway to the first town and stay there.
Dinner was on the table; she went up to it, smelled the bread and cheese and, convinced that the smell of all food disgusted her, ordered the carriage to be brought and went out. The house already cast its shadow across the whole street, and the clear evening was still warm in the sun. Annushka, who accompanied her with her things, and Pyotr, who put them into the carriage, and the obviously disgruntled driver - they all disgusted her and irritated her with their words and movements.
‘I don’t need you, Pyotr.’
‘And what about your ticket?’
‘Well, as you like, it makes no difference to me,’she said with vexation.
Pyotr jumped up on the box and, arms akimbo, told the driver to go to the railway station.
XXX
