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before yesterday, and yesterday, and now I am sending to find out
where you are and what you are doing. I wanted to come myself, but
thought better of it, knowing you would dislike it. Send some answer,
that I may know what to do.”
The child ill, yet she had thought of coming herself. Their daughter
ill, and this hostile tone.
The innocent festivities over the election, and this gloomy, burden-
some love to which he had to return struck Vronsky by their contrast.
But he had to go, and by the first train that night he set off home.
Chapter 32.
Before Vronsky’s departure for the elections, Anna had reflected
that the scenes constantly repeated between them each time he left
home, might only make him cold to her instead of attaching him to her,
and resolved to do all she could to control herself so as to bear the
parting with composure. But the cold, severe glance with which he had
looked at her when he came to tell her he was going had wounded her,
and before he had started her peace of mind was destroyed.
In solitude afterwards, thinking over that glance which had ex-
pressed his right to freedom, she came, as she always did, to the same
point—the sense of her own humiliation. “He has the right to go away
when and where he chooses. Not simply to go away, but to leave me.
He has every right, and I have none. But knowing that, he ought not to
do it. What has he done, though?... He looked at me with a cold,
severe expression. Of course that is something indefinable, impal-
pable, but it has never been so before, and that glance means a great
deal,” she thought. “That glance shows the beginning of indiffer-
ence.”
And though she felt sure that a coldness was beginning, there was
nothing she could do, she could not in any way alter her relations to
him. Just as before, only by love and by charm could she keep him.
And so, just as before, only by occupation in the day, by morphine at