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that sleepless night, all the resolutions he had made, all vanished at
once. He recalled with horror his dreams of marrying a peasant girl.
There only, in the carriage that had crossed over to the other side of the
road, and was rapidly disappearing, there only could he find the solu-
tion of the riddle of his life, which had weighed so agonizingly upon
him of late.
She did not look out again. The sound of the carriage-springs was
no longer audible, the bells could scarcely be heard. The barking of
dogs showed the carriage had reached the village, and all that was left
was the empty fields all round, the village in front, and he himself
isolated and apart from it all, wandering lonely along the deserted
highroad.
He glanced at the sky, expecting to find there the cloud shell he
had been admiring and taking as the symbol of the ideas and feelings
of that night. There was nothing in the sky in the least like a shell.
There, in the remote heights above, a mysterious change had been
accomplished. There was no trace of shell, and there was stretched
over fully half the sky an even cover of tiny and ever tinier cloudlets.
The sky had grown blue and bright; and with the same softness, but
with the same remoteness, it met his questioning gaze.
“No,” he said to himself, “however good that life of simplicity and
toil may be, I cannot go back to it. I love HER.”
Chapter 13.
None but those who were most intimate with Alexey
Alexandrovitch knew that, while on the surface the coldest and most
reasonable of men, he had one weakness quite opposed to the general
trend of his character. Alexey Alexandrovitch could not hear or see a
child or woman crying without being moved. The sight of tears threw
him into a state of nervous agitation, and he utterly lost all power of
reflection. The chief secretary of his department and his private secre-
tary were aware of this, and used to warn women who came with
petitions on no account to give way to tears, if they did not want to ruin
their chances. “He will get angry, and will not listen to you,” they used
to say. And as a fact, in such cases the emotional disturbance set up in
Alexey Alexandrovitch by the sight of tears found expression in hasty
anger. “I can do nothing. Kindly leave the room!” he would commonly
cry in such cases.
When returning from the races Anna had informed him of her
relations with Vronsky, and immediately afterwards had burst into
tears, hiding her face in her hands, Alexey Alexandrovitch, for all the
fury aroused in him against her, was aware at the same time of a rush of
that emotional disturbance always produced in him by tears. Con-
scious of it, and conscious that any expression of his feelings at that
minute would be out of keeping with the position, he tried to suppress