"And all this, what's it for? What is to come of it all? That
I'm wasting my life, never having a moment's peace, either with
child, or nursing a child, forever irritable, peevish, wretched
myself and worrying others, repulsive to my husband, while the
children are growing up unhappy, badly educated, and penniless.
Even now, if it weren't for spending the summer at the Levins',
I don't know how we should be managing to live. Of course Kostya
and Kitty have so much tact that we don't feel it; but it can't
go on. They'll have children, they won't be able to keep us;
it's a drag on them as it is. How is papa, who has hardly
anything left for himself, to help us? So that I can't even
bring the children up by myself, and may find it hard with the
help of other people, at the cost of humiliation. Why, even if
we suppose the greatest good luck, that the children don't die,
and I bring them up somehow. At the very best they'll simply be
decent people. That's all I can hope for. And to gain simply
that--what agonies, what toil!... One's whole life ruined!"
Again she recalled what the young peasant woman had said, and
again she was revolted at the thought; but she could not help
admitting that there was a grain of brutal truth in the words.
"Is it far now, Mihail?" Darya Alexandrovna asked the
counting house clerk, to turn her mind from thoughts that were
frightening her.
"From this village, they say, it's five miles." The carriage
drove along the village street and onto a bridge. On the bridge
was a crowd of peasant women with coils of ties for the sheaves
on their shoulders, gaily and noisily chattering. They stood
still on the bridge, staring inquisitively at the carriage. All
the faces turned to Darya Alexandrovna looked to her healthy and
happy, making her envious of their enjoyment of life. "They're
all living, they're all enjoying life," Darya Alexandrovna still
mused when she had passed the peasant women and was driving
uphill again at a trot, seated comfortably on the soft springs of
the old carriage, "while I, let out, as it were from prison, from
the world of worries that fret me to death, am only looking about
me now for an instant. They all live; those peasant women and my
sister Natalia and Varenka and Anna, whom I am going to see--all,
but not I.
"And they attack Anna. What for? am I any better? I have,
anyway, a husband I love--not as I should like to love him, still
I do love him, while Anna never loved hers. How is she to blame?
She wants to live. God has put that in our hearts. Very likely
I should have done the same. Even to this day I don't feel sure
I did right in listening to her at that terrible time when she
came to me in Moscow. I ought then to have cast off my husband
and have begun my life fresh. I might have loved and have been
loved in reality. And is it any better as it is? I don't
respect him. He's necessary to me," she thought about her
husband, "and I put up with him. Is that any better? At that
time I could still have been admired, I had beauty left me
still," Darya Alexandrovna pursued her thoughts, and she would
have liked to look at herself in the looking glass. She had a
traveling looking glass in her handbag, and she wanted to take
it out; but looking at the backs of the coachman and the swaying
counting house clerk, she felt that she would be ashamed if
either of them were to look round, and she did not take out the
glass.