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Chapter 18.
“Now there is something I want to talk about, and you know what
it is. About Anna,” Stepan Arkadyevitch said, pausing for a brief
space, and shaking off the unpleasant impression.
As soon as Oblonsky uttered Anna’s name, the face of Alexey
Alexandrovitch was completely transformed; all the life was gone out
of it, and it looked weary and dead.
“What is it exactly that you want from me?” he said, moving in his
chair and snapping his pince-nez.
“A definite settlement, Alexey Alexandrovitch, some settlement of
the position. I’m appealing to you” (“not as an injured husband,” Stepan
Arkadyevitch was going to say, but afraid of wrecking his negotiation
by this, he changed the words) “not as a statesman” (which did not
sound a propos), “but simply as a man, and a good-hearted man and a
Christian. You must have pity on her,” he said.
“That is, in what way precisely?” Karenin said softly.
“Yes, pity on her. If you had seen her as I have!—I have been
spending all the winter with her—you would have pity on her. Her
position is awful, simply awful!”
“I had imagined,” answered Alexey Alexandrovitch in a higher,
almost shrill voice, “that Anna Arkadyevna had everything she had
desired for herself.”
“Oh, Alexey Alexandrovitch, for heaven’s sake, don’t let us indulge
in recriminations! What is past is past, and you know what she wants
and is waiting for—divorce.”
“But I believe Anna Arkadyevna refuses a divorce, if I make it a
condition to leave me my son. I replied in that sense, and supposed
that the matter was ended. I consider it at an end,” shrieked Alexey
Alexandrovitch.
“But, for heaven’s sake, don’t get hot!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
touching his brother-in-law’s knee. “The matter is not ended. If you
will allow me to recapitulate, it was like this: when you parted, you were
as magnanimous as could possibly be; you were ready to give her
everything—freedom, divorce even. She appreciated that. No, don’t
think that. She did appreciate it—to such a degree that at the first
moment, feeling how she had wronged you, she did not consider and
could not consider everything. She gave up everything. But experi-
ence, time, have shown that her position is unbearable, impossible.”
“The life of Anna Arkadyevna can have no interest for me,” Alexey
Alexandrovitch put in, lifting his eyebrows.
“Allow me to disbelieve that,” Stepan Arkadyevitch replied gently.
“Her position is intolerable for her, and of no benefit to anyone what-
ever. She has deserved it, you will say. She knows that and asks you for
nothing; she says plainly that she dare not ask you. But I, all of us, her
relatives, all who love her, beg you, entreat you. Why should she
suffer? Who is any the better for it?”
“Excuse me, you seem to put me in the position of the guilty party,”
observed Alexey Alexandrovitch.
“Oh, no, oh, no, not at all! please understand me,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, touching his hand again, as though feeling sure this
physical contact would soften his brother-in-law. “All I say is this: her