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She said to herself: “No, just now I can’t think of it, later on, when I
am calmer.” But this calm for thought never came; every time the
thought rose of what she had done and what would happen to her, and
what she ought to do, a horror came over her and she drove those
thoughts away.
“Later, later,” she said—”when I am calmer.”
But in dreams, when she had no control over her thoughts, her
position presented itself to her in all its hideous nakedness. Once
dream haunted her almost every night. She dreamed that both were
her husbands at once, that both were lavishing caresses on her. Alexey
Alexandrovitch was weeping, kissing her hands, and saying, “How
happy we are now!” And Alexey Vronsky was there too, and he too
was her husband. And she was marveling that it had once seemed
impossible to her, was explaining to them, laughing, that this was ever
so much simpler, and that now both of them were happy and con-
tented. But this dream weighed on her like a nightmare, and she
awoke from it in terror.
Chapter 12.
In the early days after his return from Moscow, whenever Levin
shuddered and grew red, remembering the disgrace of his rejection, he
said to himself: “This was just how I used to shudder and blush,
thinking myself utterly lost, when I was plucked in physics and did not
get my remove; and how I thought myself utterly ruined after I had
mismanaged that affair of my sister’s that was entrusted to me. And
yet, now that years have passed, I recall it and wonder that it could
distress me so much. It will be the same thing too with this trouble.
Time will go by and I shall not mind about this either.”
But three months had passed and he had not left off minding
about it; and it was as painful for him to think of it as it had been those
first days. He could not be at peace because after dreaming so long of
family life, and feeling himself so ripe for it, he was still not married, and
was further than ever from marriage. He was painfully conscious him-
self, as were all about him, that at his years it is not well for man to be
alone. He remembered how before starting for Moscow he had once
said to his cowman Nikolay, a simple-hearted peasant, whom he liked
talking to: “Well, Nikolay! I mean to get married,” and how Nikolay
had promptly answered, as of a matter on which there could be no
possible doubt: “And high time too, Konstantin Demitrievitch.” But
marriage had now become further off than ever. The place was taken,