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was sealed.
Vronsky meant that after the duel—inevitable, he thought— things
could not go on as before, but he said something different.
“It can’t go on. I hope that now you will leave him. I hope”— he
was confused, and reddened—”that you will let me arrange and plan
our life. Tomorrow...” he was beginning.
She did not let him go on.
“But my child!” she shrieked. “You see what he writes! I should
have to leave him, and I can’t and won’t do that.”
“But, for God’s sake, which is better?—leave your child, or keep up
this degrading position?”
“To whom is it degrading?”
“To all, and most of all to you.”
“You say degrading...don’t say that. Those words have no meaning
for me,” she said in a shaking voice. She did not want him now to say
what was untrue. She had nothing left her but his love, and she
wanted to love him. “Don’t you understand that from the day I loved
you everything has changed for me? For me there is one thing, and one
thing only—your love. If that’s mine, I feel so exalted, so strong, that
nothing can be humiliating to me. I am proud of my position,
because...proud of being... proud....” She could not say what she was
proud of. Tears of shame and despair choked her utterance. She stood
still and sobbed.
He felt, too, something swelling in his throat and twitching in his
nose, and for the first time in his life he felt on the point of weeping. He
could not have said exactly what it was touched him so. He felt sorry
for her, and he felt he could not help her, and with that he knew that he
was to blame for her wretchedness, and that he had done something
wrong.
“Is not a divorce possible?” he said feebly. She shook her head, not
answering. “Couldn’t you take your son, and still leave him?”
“Yes; but it all depends on him. Now I must go to him,” she said
shortly. Her presentiment that all would again go on in the old way
had not deceived her.
“On Tuesday I shall be in Petersburg, and everything can be
settled.”
“Yes,” she said. “But don’t let us talk any more of it.”
Anna’s carriage, which she had sent away, and ordered to come
back to the little gate of the Vrede garden, drove up. Anna said good-
bye to Vronsky, and drove home.