Anna Karenina - Part 5

The Countess Lidia Ivanovna had, as a very young and sentimental

girl, been married to a wealthy man of high rank, an extremely

good-natured, jovial, and extremely dissipated rake. Two months

after marriage her husband abandoned her, and her impassioned

protestations of affection he met with a sarcasm and even

hostility that people knowing the count's good heart, and seeing

no defects in the sentimental Lidia, were at a loss to explain.

Though they were divorced and lived apart, yet whenever the

husband met the wife, he invariably behaved to her with the same

malignant irony, the cause of which was incomprehensible.

Countess Lidia Ivanovna had long given up being in love with her

husband, but from that time she had never given up being in love

with someone. She was in love with several people at once, both

men and women; she had been in love with almost everyone who had

been particularly distinguished in any way. She was in love with

all the new princes and princesses who married into the imperial

family; she had been in love with a high dignitary of the Church,

a vicar, and a parish priest; she had been in love with a

journalist, three Slavophiles, with Komissarov, with a minister,

a doctor, an English missionary and Karenin. All these passions

constantly waning or growing more ardent, did not prevent her

from keeping up the most extended and complicated relations with

the court and fashionable society. But from the time that after

Karenin's trouble she took him under her special protection, from

the time that she set to work in Karenin's household looking

after his welfare, she felt that all her other attachments were

not the real thing, and that she was now genuinely in love, and

with no one but Karenin. The feeling she now experienced for him

seemed to her stronger than any of her former feelings.

Analyzing her feeling, and comparing it with former passions, she

distinctly perceived that she would not have been in love with

Komissarov if he had not saved the life of the Tsar, that she

would not have been in love with Ristitch-Kudzhitsky if there had

been no Slavonic question, but that she loved Karenin for

himself, for his lofty, uncomprehended soul, for the sweet--to

her--high notes of his voice, for his drawling intonation, his

weary eyes, his character, and his soft white hands with their

swollen veins. She was not simply overjoyed at meeting him, but

she sought in his face signs of the impression she was making on

him. She tried to please him, not by her words only, but in her

whole person. For his sake it was that she now lavished more

care on her dress than before. She caught herself in reveries on

what might have been, if she had not been married and he had been

free. She blushed with emotion when he came into the room, she

could not repress a smile of rapture when he said anything

amiable to her.