Anna Karenina - Part 4
Page 8"But don't you all care for these animal pleasures?" she said,
and again he noticed a dark look in her eyes that avoided him.
"How is it you're defending him?" he said, smiling.
"I'm not defending him, it's nothing to me; but I imagine, if you
had not cared for those pleasures yourself, you might have got
out of them. But if it affords you satisfaction to gaze at
Thèrése in the attire of Eve..."
"Again, the devil again," Vronsky said, taking the hand she had
laid on the table and kissing it.
"Yes; but I can't help it. You don't know what I have suffered
waiting for you. I believe I'm not jealous. I'm not jealous: I
leading your life, so incomprehensible to me..."
She turned away from him, pulled the hook at last out of the
crochet work, and rapidly, with the help of her forefinger, began
working loop after loop of the wool that was dazzling white in
the lamplight, while the slender wrist moved swiftly, nervously
in the embroidered cuff.
"How was it, then? Where did you meet Alexey Alexandrovitch?"
Her voice sounded in an unnatural and jarring tone.
"We ran up against each other in the doorway."
"And he bowed to you like this?"
transformed her expression, folded her hands, and Vronsky
suddenly saw in her beautiful face the very expression with which
Alexey Alexandrovitch had bowed to him. He smiled, while she
laughed gaily, with that sweet, deep laugh, which was one of her
greatest charms.
"I don't understand him in the least," said Vronsky. "If after
your avowal to him at your country house he had broken with you,
if he had called me out--but this I can't understand. How can he
put up with such a position? He feels it, that's evident."
"He?" she said sneeringly. "He's perfectly satisfied."
happy?"
"Only not he. Don't I know him, the falsity in which he's
utterly steeped?... Could one, with any feeling, live as he is
living with me? He understands nothing, and feels nothing.
Could a man of any feeling live in the same house with his
unfaithful wife? Could he talk to her, call her 'my dear'?"
And again she could not help mimicking him: "'Anna, _ma chère_;
Anna, dear'!"