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uncertainty, and in efforts to find the nurse, two days had slipped by.
Hearing of the close intimacy between Alexey Alexandrovitch and
Countess Lidia Ivanovna, Anna decided on the third day to write to
her a letter, which cost her great pains, and in which she intentionally
said that permission to see her son must depend on her husband’s
generosity. She knew that if the letter were shown to her husband, he
would keep up his character of magnanimity, and would not refuse her
request.
The commissionaire who took the letter had brought her back the
most cruel and unexpected answer, that there was no answer. She had
never felt so humiliated as at the moment when, sending for the
commissionaire, she heard from him the exact account of how he had
waited, and how afterwards he had been told there was no answer.
Anna felt humiliated, insulted, but she saw that from her point of view
Countess Lidia Ivanovna was right. Her suffering was the more poi-
gnant that she had to bear it in solitude. She could not and would not
share it with Vronsky. She knew that to him, although he was the
primary cause of her distress, the question of her seeing her son would
seem a matter of very little consequence. She knew that he would
never be capable of understanding all the depth of her suffering, that
for his cool tone at any allusion to it she would begin to hate him. And
she dreaded that more than anything in the world, and so she hid from
him everything that related to her son. Spending the whole day at
home she considered ways of seeing her son, and had reached a deci-
sion to write to her husband. She was just composing this letter when
she was handed the letter from Lidia Ivanovna. The countess’s silence
had subdued and depressed her, but the letter, all that she read be-
tween the lines in it, so exasperated her, this malice was so revolting
beside her passionate, legitimate tenderness for her son, that she turned
against other people and left off blaming herself.
“This coldness—this pretense of feeling!” she said to herself. “They
must needs insult me and torture the child, and I am to submit to it!
Not on any consideration! She is worse than I am. I don’t lie, anyway.”
And she decided on the spot that next day, Seryozha’s birthday, she
would go straight to her husband’s house, bribe or deceive the servants,
but at any cost see her son and overturn the hideous deception with
which they were encompassing the unhappy child.
She went to a toy shop, bought toys and thought over a plan of
action. She would go early in the morning at eight o’clock, when Alexey
Alexandrovitch would be certain not to be up. She would have money
in her hand to give the hall porter and the footman, so that they should
let her in, and not raising her veil, she would say that she had come
from Seryozha’s godfather to congratulate him, and that she had been
charged to leave the toys at his bedside. She had prepared everything
but the words she should say to her son. Often as she had dreamed of
it, she could never think of anything.
The next day, at eight o’clock in the morning, Anna got out of a
hired sledge and rang at the front entrance of her former home.
“Run and see what’s wanted. Some lady,” said Kapitonitch, who,
not yet dressed, in his overcoat and galoshes, had peeped out of the
window and seen a lady in a veil standing close up to the door. His
assistant, a lad Anna did not know, had no sooner opened the door to
her than she came in, and pulling a three-rouble note out of her muff
put it hurriedly into his hand.
“Seryozha—Sergey Alexeitch,” she said, and was going on. Scruti-
nizing the note, the porter’s assistant stopped her at the second glass
door.
“Whom do you want?” he asked.