166 167
though she had expected to see him different. She was especially
struck by the feeling of dissatisfaction with herself that she experi-
enced on meeting him. That feeling was an intimate, familiar feeling,
like a consciousness of hypocrisy, which she experienced in her rela-
tions with her husband. But hitherto she had not taken note of the
feeling, now she was clearly and painfully aware of it.
“Yes, as you see, your tender spouse, as devoted as the first year
after marriage, burned with impatience to see you,” he said in his
deliberate, high-pitched voice, and in that tone which he almost al-
ways took with her, a tone of jeering at anyone who should say in
earnest what he said.
“Is Seryozha quite well?” she asked.
“And is this all the reward,” said he, “for my ardor? He’s quite
well...”
Chapter 31.
Vronsky had not even tried to sleep all that night. He sat in his
armchair, looking straight before him or scanning the people who got in
and out. If he had indeed on previous occasions struck and impressed
people who did not know him by his air of unhesitating composure, he
seemed now more haughty and self-possessed than ever. He looked at
people as if they were things. A nervous young man, a clerk in a law
court, sitting opposite him, hated him for that look. The young man
asked him for a light, and entered into conversation with him, and even
pushed against him, to make him feel that he was not a thing, but a
person. But Vronsky gazed at him exactly as he did at the lamp, and
the young man made a wry face, feeling that he was losing his self-
possession under the oppression of this refusal to recognize him as a
person.
Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself a king, not be-
cause he believed that he had made an impression on Anna—he did
not yet believe that,—but because the impression she had made on
him gave him happiness and pride.
What would come if it all he did not know, he did not even think.
He felt that all his forces, hitherto dissipated, wasted, were centered on
one thing, and bent with fearful energy on one blissful goal. And he
was happy at it. He knew only that he had told her the truth, that he