1164 1165
Next day he received from Alexey Alexandrovitch a final answer,
refusing to grant Anna’s divorce, and he understood that this decision
was based on what the Frenchman had said in his real or pretended
trance.
Chapter 23.
In order to carry through any undertaking in family life, there must
necessarily be either complete division between the husband and wife,
or loving agreement. When the relations of a couple are vacillating and
neither one thing nor the other, no sort of enterprise can be under-
taken.
Many families remain for years in the same place, though both
husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither com-
plete division nor agreement between them.
Both Vronsky and Anna felt life in Moscow insupportable in the
heat and dust, when the spring sunshine was followed by the glare of
summer, and all the trees in the boulevards had long since been in full
leaf, and the leaves were covered with dust. But they did not go back
to Vozdvizhenskoe, as they had arranged to do long before; they went
on staying in Moscow, though they both loathed it, because of late
there had been no agreement between them.
The irritability that kept them apart had no external cause, and all
efforts to come to an understanding intensified it, instead of removing
it. It was an inner irritation, grounded in her mind on the conviction
that his love had grown less; in his, on regret that he had put himself for
her sake in a difficult position, which she, instead of lightening, made
still more difficult. Neither of them gave full utterance to their sense of