Anna Karenina - Part 3

"No honor, no heart, no religion; a corrupt woman. I always

knew it and always saw it, though I tried to deceive myself to

spare her," he said to himself. And it actually seemed to him

that he always had seen it: he recalled incidents of their past

life, in which he had never seen anything wrong before--now

these incidents proved clearly that she had always been a corrupt

woman. "I made a mistake in linking my life to hers; but there

was nothing wrong in my mistake, and so I cannot be unhappy.

It's not I that am to blame," he told himself, "but she. But I

have nothing to do with her. She does not exist for me..."

Everything relating to her and her son, towards whom his

sentiments were as much changed as towards her, ceased to

interest him. The only thing that interested him now was the

question of in what way he could best, with most propriety and

comfort for himself, and thus with most justice, extricate

himself from the mud with which she had spattered him in her

fall, and then proceed along his path of active, honorable, and

useful existence.

"I cannot be made unhappy by the fact that a contemptible woman

has committed a crime. I have only to find the best way out of

the difficult position in which she has placed me. And I shall

find it," he said to himself, frowning more and more. "I'm not

the first nor the last." And to say nothing of historical

instances dating from the "Fair Helen" of Menelaus, recently

revived in the memory of all, a whole list of contemporary

examples of husbands with unfaithful wives in the highest society

rose before Alexey Alexandrovitch's imagination. "Daryalov,

Poltavsky, Prince Karibanov, Count Paskudin, Dram.... Yes, even

Dram, such an honest, capable fellow...Semyonov, Tchagin,

Sigonin," Alexey Alexandrovitch remembered. "Admitting that a

certain quite irrational _ridicule_ falls to the lot of these men,

yet I never saw anything but a misfortune in it, and always felt

sympathy for it," Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself, though

indeed this was not the fact, and he had never felt sympathy for

misfortunes of that kind, but the more frequently he had heard of

instances of unfaithful wives betraying their husbands, the more

highly he had thought of himself. "It is a misfortune which may

befall anyone. And this misfortune has befallen me. The only

thing to be done is to make the best of the position."

And he began passing in review the methods of proceeding of men

who had been in the same position that he was in.