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down his spine.
“What nonsense!” thought Vronsky, and glanced at his watch.
It was half-past eight already. He rang up his servant, dressed in
haste, and went out onto the steps, completely forgetting the dream
and only worried at being late. As he drove up to the Karenins’ en-
trance he looked at his watch and saw it was ten minutes to nine. A
high, narrow carriage with a pair of grays was standing at the entrance.
He recognized Anna’s carriage. “She is coming to me,” thought Vronsky,
“and better she should. I don’t like going into that house. But no
matter; I can’t hide myself,” he thought, and with that manner peculiar
to him from childhood, as of a man who has nothing to be ashamed of,
Vronsky got out of his sledge and went to the door. The door opened,
and the hall porter with a rug on his arm called the carriage. Vronsky,
though he did not usually notice details, noticed at this moment the
amazed expression with which the porter glanced at him. In the very
doorway Vronsky almost ran up against Alexey Alexandrovitch. The
gas jet threw its full light on the bloodless, sunken face under the black
hat and on the white cravat, brilliant against the beaver of the coat.
Karenin’s fixed, dull eyes were fastened upon Vronsky’s face. Vronsky
bowed, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, chewing his lips, lifted his hand to
his hat and went on. Vronsky saw him without looking round get into
the carriage, pick up the rug and the opera-glass at the window and
disappear. Vronsky went into the hall. His brows were scowling, and
his eyes gleamed with a proud and angry light in them.
“What a position!” he thought. “If he would fight, would stand up
for his honor, I could act, could express my feelings; but this weakness
or baseness.... He puts me in the position of playing false, which I
never meant and never mean to do.”
Vronsky’s ideas had changed since the day of his conversation with
Anna in the Vrede garden. Unconsciously yielding to the weakness of
Anna—who had surrendered herself up to him utterly, and simply
looked to him to decide her fate, ready to submit to anything—he had
long ceased to think that their tie might end as he had thought then.
His ambitious plans had retreated into the background again, and
feeling that he had got out of that circle of activity in which everything
was definite, he had given himself entirely to his passion, and that
passion was binding him more and more closely to her.
He was still in the hall when he caught the sound of her retreating
footsteps. He knew she had been expecting him, had listened for him,
and was now going back to the drawing room.
“No,” she cried, on seeing him, and at the first sound of her voice
the tears came into her eyes. “No; if things are to go on like this, the end
will come much, much too soon.”
“What is it, dear one?”
“What? I’ve been waiting in agony for an hour, two hours...No, I
won’t...I can’t quarrel with you. Of course you couldn’t come. No, I
won’t.” She laid her two hands on his shoulders, and looked a long
while at him with a profound, passionate, and at the same time search-
ing look. She was studying his face to make up for the time she had not
seen him. She was, every time she saw him, making the picture of him
in her imagination (incomparably superior, impossible in reality) fit
with him as he really was.