Anna Karenina

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 peace.”

“Unnatural!” She suddenly recalled the word that had stung her most of
all, not so much the word itself as the intent to wound her with which
it was said. “I know what he meant; he meant—unnatural, not loving my
own daughter, to love another person’s child. What does he know of love
for children, of my love for Seryozha, whom I’ve sacrificed for him?
But that wish to wound me! No, he loves another woman, it must be so.”

And perceiving that, while trying to regain her peace of mind, she had
gone round the same circle that she had been round so often before, and
had come back to her former state of exasperation, she was horrified at
herself. “Can it be impossible? Can it be beyond me to control myself?”
she said to herself, and began again from the beginning. “He’s
truthful, he’s honest, he loves me. I love him, and in a few days the
divorce will come. What more do I want? I want peace of mind and trust,
and I will take the blame on myself. Yes, now when he comes in, I will
tell him I was wrong, though I was not wrong, and we will go away
tomorrow.”

And to escape thinking any more, and being overcome by irritability,
she rang, and ordered the boxes to be brought up for packing their
things for the country.

At ten o’clock Vronsky came in.