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will receive Anna in Moscow.... Or isn’t it Vassenka Veslovsky and his
relations with Anna? Or perhaps about Kitty, that he feels he was to
blame?” All her conjectures were unpleasant, but she did not guess
what he really wanted to talk about to her.
“You have so much influence with Anna, she is so fond of you,” he
said; “do help me.”
Darya Alexandrovna looked with timid inquiry into his energetic
face, which under the lime-trees was continually being lighted up in
patches by the sunshine, and then passing into complete shadow again.
She waited for him to say more, but he walked in silence beside her,
scratching with his cane in the gravel.
“You have come to see us, you, the only woman of Anna’s former
friends—I don’t count Princess Varvara—but I know that you have
done this not because you regard our position as normal, but because,
understanding all the difficulty of the position, you still love her and
want to be a help to her. Have I understood you rightly?” he asked,
looking round at her.
“Oh, yes,” answered Darya Alexandrovna, putting down her sun-
shade, “but...”
“No,” he broke in, and unconsciously, oblivious of the awkward
position into which he was putting his companion, he stopped abruptly,
so that she had to stop short too. “No one feels more deeply and
intensely than I do all the difficulty of Anna’s position; and that you
may well understand, if you do me the honor of supposing I have any
heart. I am to blame for that position, and that is why I feel it.”
“I understand,” said Darya Alexandrovna, involuntarily admiring
the sincerity and firmness with which he said this. “But just because
you feel yourself responsible, you exaggerate it, I am afraid,” she said.
“Her position in the world is difficult, I can well understand.”
“In the world it is hell!” he brought out quickly, frowning darkly.
“You can’t imagine moral sufferings greater than what she went through
in Petersburg in that fortnight...and I beg you to believe it.”
“Yes, but here, so long as neither Anna...nor you miss society...”
“Society!” he said contemptuously, “how could I miss society?”
“So far—and it may be so always—you are happy and at peace. I
see in Anna that she is happy, perfectly happy, she has had time to tell
me so much already,” said Darya Alexandrovna, smiling; and involun-
tarily, as she said this, at the same moment a doubt entered her mind
whether Anna really were happy.
But Vronsky, it appeared, had no doubts on that score.
“Yes, yes,” he said, “I know that she has revived after all her suffer-
ings; she is happy. She is happy in the present. But I?... I am afraid of
what is before us...I beg your pardon, you would like to walk on?”
“No, I don’t mind.”
“Well, then, let us sit here.”
Darya Alexandrovna sat down on a garden seat in a corner of the
avenue. He stood up facing her.
“I see that she is happy,” he repeated, and the doubt whether she
were happy sank more deeply into Darya Alexandrovna’s mind. “But
can it last? Whether we have acted rightly or wrongly is another
question, but the die is cast,” he said, passing from Russian to French,
“and we are bound together for life. We are united by all the ties of
love that we hold most sacred. We have a child, we may have other
children. But the law and all the conditions of our position are such
that thousands of complications arise which she does not see and does
not want to see. And that one can well understand. But I can’t help
seeing them. My daughter is by law not my daughter, but Karenin’s. I
cannot bear this falsity!” he said, with a vigorous gesture of refusal, and