But in sleep, when she had no power over her thoughts, her situation presented itself to her in all its ugly nakedness. One dream visited her almost every night. She dreamed that they were both her husbands, that they both lavished their caresses on her. Alexei Alexandrovich wept, kissing her hands and saying: ‘It’s so good now!’ And Alexei Vronsky was right there, and he, too, was her husband. And, marvelling that it had once seemed impossible to her, she laughingly explained to them that this was much simpler and that now they were both content and happy. But this dream weighed on her like a nightmare, and she would wake up in horror.
XII
In the first period after his return from Moscow, when he still gave a start and blushed each time he remembered the disgrace of the refusal, Levin said to himself: ‘I blushed and shuddered in the same way, thinking all was lost, when I got the lowest grade in physics and had to repeat my second year; I thought myself lost in the same way after I bungled my sister’s affair, which had been entrusted to me. And what happened? Now that years have passed, I remember it and wonder how it could have upset me. It will be the same with this grief. Time will pass, and I’ll grow indifferent to it.’
But three months passed and he did not grow indifferent to it, and it was as painful for him to remember it as in the first days. He could not be at peace, because he, who had dreamed of family life for so long, who felt himself so ripe for it, was still not married and was further than ever from marriage. He himself felt painfully, as all those around him also felt, that at his age it was not good for a man to be alone. He remembered how, before his departure for Moscow, he had said once to his cow-man Nikolai, a naive muzhik with whom he liked to talk: ‘Well, Nikolai, I mean to get married!’ — and Nikolai had quickly replied, as if to something of which there could be no doubt: ‘It’s high time you did, Konstantin Dmitrich.’ But marriage was now further from him than ever. The place was taken, and when in imagination he put some of the girls he knew into that place, he felt it was completely impossible. Besides, the memory of the refusal and of the role he had played then tormented him with shame. However often he said to himself that he was in no way to blame, this memory, on a par with other shameful memories of the same sort, made him start and blush. In his past, as in any man’s past, there were actions he recognized as bad, for which his conscience ought to have tormented him; yet the memory of the bad actions tormented him far less than these insignificant but shameful memories. These wounds never healed. And alongside these memories there now stood the refusal and the pitiful position in which he must have appeared to others that evening. But time and work did their part. Painful memories were screened from him more and more by the inconspicuous but significant events of country life. With every week he remembered Kitty less often. He impatiently awaited the news that she was already married or would be married any day, hoping that this news, like the pulling of a tooth, would cure him completely.
