"All right," answered Vronsky, smiling; and jumping into his
carriage, he told the man to drive to Peterhof.
Before he had driven many paces away, the dark clouds that had
been threatening rain all day broke, and there was a heavy
downpour of rain.
"What a pity!" thought Vronsky, putting up the roof of the
carriage. "It was muddy before, now it will be a perfect swamp."
As he sat in solitude in the closed carriage, he took out his
mother's letter and his brother's note, and read them through.
Yes, it was the same thing over and over again. Everyone, his
mother, his brother, everyone thought fit to interfere in the
affairs of his heart. This interference aroused in him a feeling
of angry hatred--a feeling he had rarely known before. "What
business is it of theirs? Why does everybody feel called upon to
concern himself about me? And why do they worry me so? Just
because they see that this is something they can't understand.
If it were a common, vulgar, worldly intrigue, they would have
left me alone. They feel that this is something different, that
this is not a mere pastime, that this woman is dearer to me than
life. And this is incomprehensible, and that's why it annoys
them. Whatever our destiny is or may be, we have made it
ourselves, and we do not complain of it," he said, in the word
_we_ linking himself with Anna. "No, they must needs teach us
how to live. They haven't an idea of what happiness is; they
don't know that without our love, for us there is neither
happiness nor unhappiness--no life at all," he thought.
He was angry with all of them for their interference just because
he felt in his soul that they, all these people, were right. He
felt that the love that bound him to Anna was not a momentary
impulse, which would pass, as worldly intrigues do pass, leaving
no other traces in the life of either but pleasant or unpleasant
memories. He felt all the torture of his own and her position,
all the difficulty there was for them, conspicuous as they were
in the eye of all the world, in concealing their love, in lying
and deceiving; and in lying, deceiving, feigning, and continually
thinking of others, when the passion that united them was so
intense that they were both oblivious of everything else but
their love.
He vividly recalled all the constantly recurring instances of
inevitable necessity for lying and deceit, which were so against
his natural bent. He recalled particularly vividly the shame he
had more than once detected in her at this necessity for lying
and deceit. And he experienced the strange feeling that had
sometimes come upon him since his secret love for Anna. This was
a feeling of loathing for something--whether for Alexey
Alexandrovitch, or for himself, or for the whole world, he could
not have said. But he always drove away this strange feeling.
Now, too, he shook it off and continued the thread of his
thoughts.