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Chapter 9.
Anna came in with hanging head, playing with the tassels of her
hood. Her face was brilliant and glowing; but this glow was not one of
brightness; it suggested the fearful glow of a conflagration in the midst
of a dark night. On seeing her husband, Anna raised her head and
smiled, as though she had just waked up.
“You’re not in bed? What a wonder!” she said, letting fall her hood,
and without stopping, she went on into the dressing room. “It’s late,
Alexey Alexandrovitch,” she said, when she had gone through the
doorway.
“Anna, it’s necessary for me to have a talk with you.”
“With me?” she said, wonderingly. She came out from behind the
door of the dressing room, and looked at him. “Why, what is it? What
about?” she asked, sitting down. “Well, let’s talk, if it’s so necessary.
But it would be better to get to sleep.”
Anna said what came to her lips, and marveled, hearing herself, at
her own capacity for lying. How simple and natural were her words,
and how likely that she was simply sleepy! She felt herself clad in an
impenetrable armor of falsehood. She felt that some unseen force had
come to her aid and was supporting her.
“Anna, I must warn you,” he began.
“Warn me?” she said. “Of what?”
She looked at him so simply, so brightly, that anyone who did not
know her as her husband knew her could not have noticed anything
unnatural, either in the sound or the sense of her words. But to him,
knowing her, knowing that whenever he went to bed five minutes later
than usual, she noticed it, and asked him the reason; to him, knowing
that every joy, every pleasure and pain that she felt she communicated
to him at once; to him, now to see that she did not care to notice his
state of mind, that she did not care to say a word about herself, meant
a great deal. He saw that the inmost recesses of her soul, that had
always hitherto lain open before him, were closed against him. More
than that, he saw from her tone that she was not even perturbed at
that, but as it were said straight out to him: “Yes, it’s shut up, and so it
must be, and will be in future.” Now he experienced a feeling such as
a man might have, returning home and finding his own house locked
up. “But perhaps the key may yet be found,” thought Alexey
Alexandrovitch.
“I want to warn you,” he said in a low voice, “that through thought-
lessness and lack of caution you may cause yourself to be talked about
in society. Your too animated conversation this evening with Count
Vronsky” (he enunciated the name firmly and with deliberate empha-
sis) “attracted attention.”
He talked and looked at her laughing eyes, which frightened him
now with their impenetrable look, and, as he talked, he felt all the
uselessness and idleness of his words.
“You’re always like that,” she answered as though completely mis-
apprehending him, and of all he had said only taking in the last phrase.
“One time you don’t like my being dull, and another time you don’t like
my being lively. I wasn’t dull. Does that offend you?”
Alexey Alexandrovitch shivered, and bent his hands to make the