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had seen all of her in her illness, had come to know her very soul, and
it seemed to him that he had never loved her till then. And now when
he had learned to know her, to love her as she should be loved, he had
been humiliated before her, and had lost her forever, leaving with her
nothing of himself but a shameful memory. Most terrible of all had
been his ludicrous, shameful position when Alexey Alexandrovitch
had pulled his hands away from his humiliated face. He stood on the
steps of the Karenins’ house like one distraught, and did not know
what to do.
“A sledge, sir?” asked the porter.
“Yes, a sledge.”
On getting home, after three sleepless nights, Vronsky, without
undressing, lay down fiat on the sofa, clasping his hands and laying his
head on them. His head was heavy. Images, memories, and ideas of
the strangest description followed one another with extraordinary ra-
pidity and vividness. First it was the medicine he had poured out for
the patient and spilt over the spoon, then the midwife’s white hands,
then the queer posture of Alexey Alexandrovitch on the floor beside
the bed.
“To sleep! To forget!” he said to himself with the serene confidence
of a healthy man that if he is tired and sleepy, he will go to sleep at once.
And the same instant his head did begin to feel drowsy and he began
to drop off into forgetfulness. The waves of the sea of unconsciousness
had begun to meet over his head, when all at once—it was as though a
violent shock of electricity had passed over him. He started so that he
leaped up on the springs of the sofa, and leaning on his arms got in a
panic onto his knees. His eyes were wide open as though he had never
been asleep. The heaviness in his head and the weariness in his limbs
that he had felt a minute before had suddenly gone.
“You may trample me in the mud,” he heard Alexey
Alexandrovitch’s words and saw him standing before him, and saw
Anna’s face with its burning flush and glittering eyes, gazing with love
and tenderness not at him but at Alexey Alexandrovitch; he saw his
own, as he fancied, foolish and ludicrous figure when Alexey
Alexandrovitch took his hands away from his face. He stretched out
his legs again and flung himself on the sofa in the same position and
shut his eyes.
“To sleep! To forget!” he repeated to himself. But with his eyes
shut he saw more distinctly than ever Anna’s face as it had been on the
memorable evening before the races.
“That is not and will not be, and she wants to wipe it out of her
memory. But I cannot live without it. How can we be reconciled? how
can we be reconciled?” he said aloud, and unconsciously began to
repeat these words. This repetition checked the rising up of fresh
images and memories, which he felt were thronging in his brain. But
repeating words did not check his imagination for long. Again in ex-
traordinarily rapid succession his best moments rose before his mind,
and then his recent humiliation. “Take away his hands,” Anna’s voice
says. He takes away his hands and feels the shamestruck and idiotic
expression of his face.
He still lay down, trying to sleep, though he felt there was not the
smallest hope of it, and kept repeating stray words from some chain of
thought, trying by this to check the rising flood of fresh images. He
listened, and heard in a strange, mad whisper words repeated: “I did
not appreciate it, did not make enough of it. I did not appreciate it, did
not make enough of it.”
“What’s this? Am I going out of my mind?” he said to himself.
“Perhaps. What makes men go out of their minds; what makes men