Anna Karenina

nna got into the carriage again in an even worse frame of mind than
when she set out from home. To her previous tortures was added now that
sense of mortification and of being an outcast which she had felt so
distinctly on meeting Kitty.

“Where to? Home?” asked Pyotr.

“Yes, home,” she said, not even thinking now where she was going.

“How they looked at me as something dreadful, incomprehensible, and
curious! What can he be telling the other with such warmth?” she
thought, staring at two men who walked by. “Can one ever tell anyone
what one is feeling? I meant to tell Dolly, and it’s a good thing I
didn’t tell her. How pleased she would have been at my misery! She
would have concealed it, but her chief feeling would have been delight
at my being punished for the happiness she envied me for. Kitty, she
would have been even more pleased. How I can see through her! She knows
I was more than usually sweet to her husband. And she’s jealous and
hates me. And she despises me. In her eyes I’m an immoral woman. If I
were an immoral woman I could have made her husband fall in love with
me ... if I’d cared to. And, indeed, I did care to. There’s someone
who’s pleased with himself,” she thought, as she saw a fat, rubicund
gentleman coming towards her. He took her for an acquaintance, and
lifted his glossy hat above his bald, glossy head, and then perceived
his mistake. “He thought he knew me. Well, he knows me as well as
anyone in the world knows me. I don’t know myself. I know my appetites,
as the French say. They want that dirty ice cream, that they do know
for certain,” she thought, looking at two boys stopping an ice cream
seller, who took a barrel off his head and began wiping his perspiring
face with a towel. “We all want what is sweet and nice. If not
sweetmeats, then a dirty ice. And Kitty’s the same—if not Vronsky, then
Levin. And she envies me, and hates me. And we all hate each other. I
Kitty, Kitty me. Yes, that’s the truth. ‘Tiutkin, coiffeur.’ Je me
fais coiffer par Tiutkin.... I’ll tell him that when he comes,” she
thought and smiled. But the same instant she remembered that she had no
one now to tell anything amusing to. “And there’s nothing amusing,
nothing mirthful, really. It’s all hateful. They’re singing for
vespers, and how carefully that merchant crosses himself! as if he were
afraid of missing something. Why these churches and this singing and
this humbug? Simply to conceal that we all hate each other like these
cab drivers who are abusing each other so angrily. Yashvin says, ‘He
wants to strip me of my shirt, and I him of his.’ Yes, that’s the
truth!”

She was plunged in these thoughts, which so engrossed her that she left
off thinking of her own position, when the carriage drew up at the
steps of her house. It was only when she saw the porter running out to
meet her that she remembered she had sent the note and the telegram.

“Is there an answer?” she inquired.

“I’ll see this minute,” answered the porter, and glancing into his
room, he took out and gave her the thin square envelope of a telegram.
“I can’t come before ten o’clock.—Vronsky,” she read.

“And hasn’t the messenger come back?”

“No,” answered the porter.

“Then, since it’s so, I know what I must do,” she said, and feeling a
vague fury and craving for revenge rising up within her, she ran
upstairs. “I’ll go to him myself. Before going away forever, I’ll tell
him all. Never have I hated anyone as I hate that man!” she thought.
Seeing his hat on the rack, she shuddered with aversion. She did not
consider that his telegram was an answer to her telegram and that he
had not yet received her note. She pictured him to herself as talking
calmly to his mother and Princess Sorokina and rejoicing at her
sufferings. “Yes, I must go quickly,” she said, not knowing yet where
she was going. She longed to get away as quickly as possible from the
feelings she had gone through in that awful house. The servants, the
walls, the things in that house—all aroused repulsion and hatred in her
and lay like a weight upon her.

“Yes, I must go to the railway station, and if he’s not there, then go
there and catch him.” Anna looked at the railway timetable in the
newspapers. An evening train went at two minutes past eight. “Yes, I
shall be in time.” She gave orders for the other horses to be put in
the carriage, and packed in a traveling-bag the things needed for a few
days. She knew she would never come back here again.

Among the plans that came into her head she vaguely determined that
after what would happen at the station or at the countess’s house, she
would go as far as the first town on the Nizhni road and stop there.

Dinner was on the table; she went up, but the smell of the bread and
cheese was enough to make her feel that all food was disgusting. She
ordered the carriage and went out. The house threw a shadow now right
across the street, but it was a bright evening and still warm in the
sunshine. Annushka, who came down with her things, and Pyotr, who put
the things in the carriage, and the coachman, evidently out of humor,
were all hateful to her, and irritated her by their words and actions.

“I don’t want you, Pyotr.”

“But how about the ticket?”

“Well, as you like, it doesn’t matter,” she said crossly.

Pyotr jumped on the box, and putting his arms akimbo, told the coachman
to drive to the booking-office.