he heard below the ponderous tramp of the servants, carrying something
heavy.
Stepan Arkadyevitch went out to look. It was the rejuvenated Pyotr
Oblonsky. He was so drunk that he could not walk upstairs; but he told
them to set him on his legs when he saw Stepan Arkadyevitch, and clinging
to him, walked with him into his room and there began telling him how he
had spent the evening, and fell asleep doing so.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was in very low spirits, which happened rarely with
him, and for a long while he could not go to sleep. Everything he could
recall to his mind, everything was disgusting; but most disgusting of all, as
if it were something shameful, was the memory of the evening he had spent
at Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s.
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 undertaken.
Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband
and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete 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 grievance, but they
considered each other in the wrong, and tried on every pretext to prove this
to one another.
In her eyes the whole of him, with all his habits, ideas, desires, with all
his spiritual and physical temperament, was one thing—love for women,
and that love, she felt, ought to be entirely concentrated on her alone. That
love was less; consequently, as she reasoned, he must have transferred part
of his love to other women or to another woman—and she was jealous. She
was jealous not of any particular woman but of the decrease of his love. Not
having got an object for her jealousy, she was on the lookout for it. At the
slightest hint she transferred her jealousy from one object to another. At one
time she was jealous of those low women with whom he might so easily
renew his old bachelor ties; then she was jealous of the society women he
might meet; then she was jealous of the imaginary girl whom he might want
to marry, for whose sake he would break with her. And this last form of
jealousy tortured her most of all, especially as he had unwarily told her, in a
moment of frankness, that his mother knew him so little that she had had
the audacity to try and persuade him to marry the young Princess Sorokina.
And being jealous of him, Anna was indignant against him and found
grounds for indignation in everything. For everything that was difficult in
her position she blamed him. The agonizing condition of suspense she had
passed in Moscow, the tardiness and indecision of Alexey Alexandrovitch,
her solitude—she put it all down to him. If he had loved her he would have
seen all the bitterness of her position, and would have rescued her from it.
For her being in Moscow and not in the country, he was to blame too. He
could not live buried in the country as she would have liked to do. He must
have society, and he had put her in this awful position, the bitterness of
which he would not see. And again, it was his fault that she was forever
separated from her son.
Even the rare moments of tenderness that came from time to time did not
soothe her; in his tenderness now she saw a shade of complacency, of self-
confidence, which had not been of old, and which exasperated her.
It was dusk. Anna was alone, and waiting for him to come back from a
bachelor dinner. She walked up and down in his study (the room where the
noise from the street was least heard), and thought over every detail of their
yesterday’s quarrel. Going back from the well-remembered, offensive
words of the quarrel to what had been the ground of it, she arrived at last at
its origin. For a long while she could hardly believe that their dissension
had arisen from a conversation so inoffensive, of so little moment to either.
But so it actually had been. It all arose from his laughing at the girls’ high
schools, declaring they were useless, while she defended them. He had
spoken slightingly of women’s education in general, and had said that
Hannah, Anna’s English protégée, had not the slightest need to know
anything of physics.
This irritated Anna. She saw in this a contemptuous reference to her
occupations. And she bethought her of a phrase to pay him back for the pain
he had given her. “I don’t expect you to understand me, my feelings, as
anyone who loved me might, but simple delicacy I did expect,” she said.
And he had actually flushed with vexation, and had said something
unpleasant. She could not recall her answer, but at that point, with an
unmistakable desire to wound her too, he had said:
“I feel no interest in your infatuation over this girl, that’s true, because I
see it’s unnatural.”
The cruelty with which he shattered the world she had built up for herself
so laboriously to enable her to endure her hard life, the injustice with which
he had accused her of affectation, of artificiality, aroused her.
“I am very sorry that nothing but what’s coarse and material is
comprehensible and natural to you,” she said and walked out of the room.
When he had come in to her yesterday evening, they had not referred to
the quarrel, but both felt that the quarrel had been smoothed over, but was
not at an end.
Today he had not been at home all day, and she felt so lonely and
wretched in being on bad terms with him that she wanted to forget it all, to
forgive him, and be reconciled with him; she wanted to throw the blame on
herself and to justify him.
“I am myself to blame. I’m irritable, I’m insanely jealous. I will make it
up with him, and we’ll go away to the country; there I shall be more at
