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grievance, but they considered each other in the wrong, and tried on
every pretext to prove this to one another.
In her eyes the whole of him, with all his habits, ideas, desires, with
all his spiritual and physical temperament, was one thing—love for
women, and that love, she felt, ought to be entirely concentrated on her
alone. That love was less; consequently, as she reasoned, he must have
transferred part of his love to other women or to another woman—and
she was jealous. She was jealous not of any particular woman but of
the decrease of his love. Not having got an object for her jealousy, she
was on the lookout for it. At the slightest hint she transferred her
jealousy from one object to another. At one time she was jealous of
those low women with whom he might so easily renew his old bachelor
ties; then she was jealous of the society women he might meet; then
she was jealous of the imaginary girl whom he might want to marry, for
whose sake he would break with her. And this last form of jealousy
tortured her most of all, especially as he had unwarily told her, in a
moment of frankness, that his mother knew him so little that she had
had the audacity to try and persuade him to marry the young Princess
Sorokina.
And being jealous of him, Anna was indignant against him and
found grounds for indignation in everything. For everything that was
difficult in her position she blamed him. The agonizing condition of
suspense she had passed in Moscow, the tardiness and indecision of
Alexey Alexandrovitch, her solitude—she put it all down to him. If he
had loved her he would have seen all the bitterness of her position, and
would have rescued her from it. For her being in Moscow and not in the
country, he was to blame too. He could not live buried in the country as
she would have liked to do. He must have society, and he had put her
in this awful position, the bitterness of which he would not see. And
again, it was his fault that she was forever separated from her son.
Even the rare moments of tenderness that came from time to time
did not soothe her; in his tenderness now she saw a shade of compla-
cency, of self-confidence, which had not been of old and which exas-
perated her.
It was dusk. Anna was alone, and waiting for him to come back
from a bachelor dinner. She walked up and down in his study (the
room where the noise from the street was least heard), and thought
over every detail of their yesterday’s quarrel. Going back from the
well-remembered, offensive words of the quarrel to what had been the
ground of it, she arrived at last at its origin. For a long while she could
hardly believe that their dissension had arisen from a conversation so
inoffensive, of so little moment to either. But so it actually had been. It
all arose from his laughing at the girls’ high schools, declaring they were
useless, while she defended them. He had spoken slightingly of women’s
education in general, and had said that Hannah, Anna’s English pro-
tegee, had not the slightest need to know anything of physics.
This irritated Anna. She saw in this a contemptuous reference to
her occupations. And she bethought her of a phrase to pay him back
for the pain he had given her. “I don’t expect you to understand me, my
feelings, as anyone who loved me might, but simple delicacy I did
expect,” she said.
And he had actually flushed with vexation, and had said some-
thing unpleasant. She could not recall her answer, but at that point,
with an unmistakable desire to wound her too, he had said:
“I feel no interest in your infatuation over this girl, that’s true, be-
cause I see it’s unnatural.”
The cruelty with which he shattered the world she had built up for
herself so laboriously to enable her to endure her hard life, the injustice