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matter for Levin to make up the number, but the duties of hospitality
would not let him allow Darya Alexandrovna to hire horses when
staying in his house. Moreover, he was well aware that the twenty
roubles that would be asked for the journey were a serious matter for
her; Darya Alexandrovna’s pecuniary affairs, which were in a very
unsatisfactory state, were taken to heart by the Levins as if they were
their own.
Darya Alexandrovna, by Levin’s advice, started before daybreak.
The road was good, the carriage comfortable, the horses trotted along
merrily, and on the box, besides the coachman, sat the counting-house
clerk, whom Levin was sending instead of a groom for greater security.
Darya Alexandrovna dozed and waked up only on reaching the inn
where the horses were to be changed.
After drinking tea at the same well-to-do peasant’s with whom
Levin had stayed on the way to Sviazhsky’s, and chatting with the
women about their children, and with the old man about Count Vronsky,
whom the latter praised very highly, Darya Alexandrovna, at ten o’clock,
went on again. At home, looking after her children, she had no time to
think. So now, after this journey of four hours, all the thoughts she had
suppressed before rushed swarming into her brain, and she thought
over all her life as she never had before, and from the most different
points of view. Her thoughts seemed strange even to herself. At first
she thought about the children, about whom she was uneasy, although
the princess and Kitty (she reckoned more upon her) had promised to
look after them. “If only Masha does not begin her naughty tricks, if
Grisha isn’t kicked by a horse, and Lily’s stomach isn’t upset again!” she
thought. But these questions of the present were succeeded by ques-
tions of the immediate future. She began thinking how she had to get
a new flat in Moscow for the coming winter, to renew the drawing room
furniture, and to make her elder girl a cloak. Then questions of the
more remote future occurred to her: how she was to place her children
in the world. ‘The girls are all right,” she thought; “but the boys?”
“It’s very well that I’m teaching Grisha, but of course that’s only
because I am free myself now, I’m not with child. Stiva, of course,
there’s no counting on. And with the help of good-natured friends I
can bring them up; but if there’s another baby coming?...” And the
thought struck her how untruly it was said that the curse laid on woman
was that in sorrow she should bring forth children.
“The birth itself, that’s nothing; but the months of carrying the
child—that’s what’s so intolerable,” she thought, picturing to herself
her last pregnancy, and the death of the last baby. And she recalled
the conversation she had just had with the young woman at the inn.
On being asked whether she had any children, the handsome young
woman had answered cheerfully:
“I had a girl baby, but God set me free; I buried her last Lent.”
“Well, did you grieve very much for her?” asked Darya
Alexandrovna.
“Why grieve? The old man has grandchildren enough as it is. It
was only a trouble. No working, nor nothing. Only a tie.”
This answer had struck Darya Alexandrovna as revolting in spite
of the good-natured and pleasing face of the young woman; but now
she could not help recalling these words. In those cynical words there
was indeed a grain of truth.
“Yes, altogether,” thought Darya Alexandrovna, looking back over
her whole existence during those fifteen years of her married life, “preg-
nancy, sickness, mental incapacity, indifference to everything, and most
of all—hideousness. Kitty, young and pretty as she is, even Kitty has
lost her looks; and I when I’m with child become hideous, I know it.