Anna Karenina - Part 5

From the moment when Alexey Alexandrovitch understood from his

interviews with Betsy and with Stepan Arkadyevitch that all that

was expected of him was to leave his wife in peace, without

burdening her with his presence, and that his wife herself

desired this, he felt so distraught that he could come to no

decision of himself; he did not know himself what he wanted now,

and putting himself in the hands of those who were so pleased to

interest themselves in his affairs, he met everything with

unqualified assent. It was only when Anna had left his house,

and the English governess sent to ask him whether she should dine

with him or separately, that for the first time he clearly

comprehended his position, and was appalled by it. Most

difficult of all in this position was the fact that he could not

in any way connect and reconcile his past with what was now. It

was not the past when he had lived happily with his wife that

troubled him. The transition from that past to a knowledge of

his wife's unfaithfulness he had lived through miserably already;

that state was painful, but he could understand it. If his wife

had then, on declaring to him her unfaithfulness, left him, he

would have been wounded, unhappy, but he would not have been in

the hopeless position--incomprehensible to himself--in which he

felt himself now. He could not now reconcile his immediate past,

his tenderness, his love for his sick wife, and for the other

man's child with what was now the case, that is with the fact

that, as it were, in return for all this he now found himself

alone, put to shame, a laughing-stock, needed by no one, and

despised by everyone.

For the first two days after his wife's departure Alexey

Alexandrovitch received applicants for assistance and his chief

secretary, drove to the committee, and went down to dinner in the

dining room as usual. Without giving himself a reason for what

he was doing, he strained every nerve of his being for those two

days, simply to preserve an appearance of composure, and even of

indifference. Answering inquiries about the disposition of Anna

Arkadyevna's rooms and belongings, he had exercised immense

self-control to appear like a man in whose eyes what had occurred

was not unforeseen nor out of the ordinary course of events, and

he attained his aim: no one could have detected in him signs of

despair. But on the second day after her departure, when Korney

gave him a bill from a fashionable draper's shop, which Anna had

forgotten to pay, and announced that the clerk from the shop was

waiting, Alexey Alexandrovitch told him to show the clerk up.