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most likely by their stupid law he can. But I know very well why he
says it. He doesn’t believe even in my love for my child, or he despises
it (just as he always used to ridicule it). He despises that feeling in me,
but he knows that I won’t abandon my child, that I can’t abandon my
child, that there could be no life for me without my child, even with him
whom I love; but that if I abandoned my child and ran away from him,
I should be acting like the most infamous, basest of women. He knows
that, and knows that I am incapable of doing that.”
She recalled another sentence in the letter. “Our life must go on as
it has done in the past....” “That life was miserable enough in the old
days; it has been awful of late. What will it be now? And he knows all
that; he knows that I can’t repent that I breathe, that I love; he knows
that it can lead to nothing but lying and deceit; but he wants to go on
torturing me. I know him; I know that he’s at home and is happy in
deceit, like a fish swimming in the water. No, I won’t give him that
happiness. I’ll break through the spiderweb of lies in which he wants
to catch me, come what may. Anything’s better than lying and deceit.
“But how? My God! my God! Was ever a woman so miserable as
I am?...”
“No; I will break through it, I will break through it!” she cried,
jumping up and keeping back her tears. And she went to the writing
table to write him another letter. But at the bottom of her heart she felt
that she was not strong enough to break through anything, that she
was not strong enough to get out of her old position, however false and
dishonorable it might be.
She sat down at the writing table, but instead of writing she clasped
her hands on the table, and, laying her head on them, burst into tears,
with sobs and heaving breast like a child crying. She was weeping that
her dream of her position being made clear and definite had been
annihilated forever. She knew beforehand that everything would go
on in the old way, and far worse, indeed, than in the old way. She felt
that the position in the world that she enjoyed, and that had seemed to
her of so little consequence in the morning, that this position was
precious to her, that she would not have the strength to exchange it for
the shameful position of a woman who has abandoned husband and
child to join her lover; that however much she might struggle, she could
not be stronger than herself. She would never know freedom in love,
but would remain forever a guilty wife, with the menace of detection
hanging over her at every instant; deceiving her husband for the sake
of a shameful connection with a man living apart and away from her,
whose life she could never share. She knew that this was how it would
be, and at the same time it was so awful that she could not even
conceive what it would end in. And she cried without restraint, as
children cry when they are punished.
The sound of the footman’s steps forced her to rouse herself, and
hiding her face from him, she pretended to be writing.
“The courier asks if there’s an answer,” the footman announced.
“An answer? Yes,” said Anna. “Let him wait. I’ll ring.”
“What can I write?” she thought. “What can I decide upon alone?
What do I know? What do I want? What is there I care for?” Again
she felt that her soul was beginning to be split in two. She was terrified
again at this feeling, and clutched at the first pretext for doing some-
thing which might divert her thoughts from herself. “I ought to see
Alexey” (so she called Vronsky in her thoughts); “no one but he can tell
me what I ought to do. I’ll go to Betsy’s, perhaps I shall see him there,”
she said to herself, completely forgetting that when she had told him
the day before that she was not going to Princess Tverskaya’s, he had
said that in that case he should not go either. She went up to the table,