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I don’t think about it. I don’t think about it!” she repeated, and a flush
rose into her face. She got up, straightening her chest, and sighed
heavily. With her light step she began pacing up and down the room,
stopping now and then. “I don’t think of it? Not a day, not an hour
passes that I don’t think of it, and blame myself for thinking of
it...because thinking of that may drive me mad. Drive me mad!” she
repeated. “When I think of it, I can’t sleep without morphine. But
never mind. Let us talk quietly. They tell me, divorce. In the first place,
he won’t give me a divorce. He’s under the influence of Countess Lidia
Ivanovna now.”
Darya Alexandrovna, sitting erect on a chair, turned her head, fol-
lowing Anna with a face of sympathetic suffering.
“You ought to make the attempt,” she said softly.
“Suppose I make the attempt. What does it mean?” she said,
evidently giving utterance to a thought, a thousand times thought over
and learned by heart. “It means that I, hating him, but still recognizing
that I have wronged him—and I consider him magnanimous—that I
humiliate myself to write to him.... Well, suppose I make the effort; I
do it. Either I receive a humiliating refusal or consent.... Well, I have
received his consent, say...” Anna was at that moment at the furthest
end of the room, and she stopped there, doing something to the curtain
at the window. “I receive his consent, but my...my son? They won’t give
him up to me. He will grow up despising me, with his father, whom I’ve
abandoned. Do you see, I love... equally, I think, but both more than
myself—two creatures, Seryozha and Alexey.”
She came out into the middle of the room and stood facing Dolly,
with her arms pressed tightly across her chest. I her white dressing
gown her figure seemed more than usually grand and broad. She bent
her head, and with shining, wet eyes looked from under her brows at
Dolly, a thin little pitiful figure in her patched dressing jacket and
nightcap, shaking all over with emotion.
“It is only those two creatures that I love, and one excludes the
other. I can’t have them together, and that’s the only thing I want. And
since I can’t have that, I don’t care about the rest. I don’t care about
anything, anything. And it will end one way or another, and so I can’t,
I don’t like to talk of it. So don’t blame me, don’t judge me for anything.
You can’t with your pure heart understand all that I’m suffering.” She
went up, sat down beside Dolly, and with a guilty look, peeped into her
face and took her hand.
“What are you thinking? What are you thinking about me? Don’t
despise me. I don’t deserve contempt. I’m simply unhappy. If anyone
is unhappy, I am,” she articulated, and turning away, she burst into
tears.
Left alone, Darya Alexandrovna said her prayers and went to bed.
She had felt for Anna with all her heart while she was speaking to her,
but now she could not force herself to think of her. The memories of
home and of her children rose up in her imagination with a peculiar
charm quite new to her, with a sort of new brilliance. That world of her
own seemed to her now so sweet and precious that she would not on
any account spend an extra day outside it, and she made up her mind
that she would certainly go back next day.
Anna meantime went back to her boudoir, took a wine glass and
dropped into it several drops of a medicine, of which the principal
ingredient was morphine. After drinking it off and sitting still a little
while, she went into her bedroom in a soothed and more cheerful frame
of mind.
When she went into the bedroom, Vronsky looked intently at her.
He was looking for traces of the conversation which he knew that,