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In spite of these words and this smile, which so frightened Varya,
when the inflammation was over and he began to recover, he felt that
he was completely free from one part of his misery. By his action he
had, as it were, washed away the shame and humiliation he had felt
before. He could now think calmly of Alexey Alexandrovitch. He
recognized all his magnanimity, but he did not now feel himself hu-
miliated by it. Besides, he got back again into the beaten track of his
life. He saw the possibility of looking men in the face again without
shame, and he could live in accordance with his own habits. One thing
he could not pluck out of his heart, though he never ceased struggling
with it, was the regret, amounting to despair, that he had lost her for-
ever. That now, having expiated his sin against the husband, he was
bound to renounce her, and never in future to stand between her with
her repentance and her husband, he had firmly decided in his heart;
but he could not tear out of his heart his regret at the loss of her love, he
could not erase from his memory those moments of happiness that he
had so little prized at the time, and that haunted him in all their charm.
Serpuhovskoy had planned his appointment at Tashkend, and
Vronsky agreed to the proposition without the slightest hesitation. But
the nearer the time of departure came, the bitterer was the sacrifice he
was making to what he thought his duty.
His wound had healed, and he was driving about making prepara-
tions for his departure for Tashkend.
“To see her once and then to bury myself, to die,” he thought, and
as he was paying farewell visits, he uttered this thought to Betsy.
Charged with this commission, Betsy had gone to Anna, and brought
him back a negative reply.
“So much the better,” thought Vronsky, when he received the news.
“It was a weakness, which would have shattered what strength I have
left.”
Next day Betsy herself came to him in the morning, and announced
that she had heard through Oblonsky as a positive fact that Alexey
Alexandrovitch had agreed to a divorce, and that therefore Vronsky
could see Anna.
Without even troubling himself to see Betsy out of his fiat, forget-
ting all his resolutions, without asking when he could see her, where
her husband was, Vronsky drove straight to the Karenins’. He ran up
the stairs seeing no one and nothing, and with a rapid step, almost
breaking into a run, he went into her room. And without considering,
without noticing whether there was anyone in the room or not, he flung
his arms round her, and began to cover her face, her hands, her neck
with kisses.
Anna had been preparing herself for this meeting, had thought
what she would say to him, but she did not succeed in saying anything
of it; his passion mastered her. She tried to calm him, to calm herself,
but it was too late. His feeling infected her. Her lips trembled so that
for a long while she could say nothing.
“Yes, you have conquered me, and I am yours,” she said at last,
pressing his hands to her bosom.
“So it had to be,” he said. “So long as we live, it must be so. I know
it now.”
“That’s true,” she said, getting whiter and whiter, and embracing
his head. “Still there is something terrible in it after all that has hap-
pened.”
“It will all pass, it will all pass; we shall be so happy. Our love, if it
could be stronger, will be strengthened by there being something ter-
rible in it,” he said, lifting his head and parting his strong teeth in a
smile.