Anna looked at Dolly's thin, care-worn face, with its wrinkles
filled with dust from the road, and she was on the point of
saying what she was thinking, that is, that Dolly had got
thinner. But, conscious that she herself had grown handsomer,
and that Dolly's eyes were telling her so, she sighed and began
to speak about herself.
"You are looking at me," she said, "and wondering how I can be
happy in my position? Well! it's shameful to confess, but I...
I'm inexcusably happy. Something magical has happened to me,
like a dream, when you're frightened, panic-stricken, and all of
a sudden you wake up and all the horrors are no more. I have
waked up. I have lived through the misery, the dread, and now
for a long while past, especially since we've been here, I've
been so happy!..." she said, with a timid smile of inquiry
looking at Dolly.
"How glad I am!" said Dolly smiling, involuntarily speaking more
coldly than she wanted to. "I'm very glad for you. Why haven't
you written to me?"
"Why?... Because I hadn't the courage.... You forget my
position..."
"To me? Hadn't the courage? If you knew how I...I look at..."
Darya Alexandrovna wanted to express her thoughts of the morning,
but for some reason it seemed to her now out of place to do so.
"But of that we'll talk later. What's this, what are all these
buildings?" she asked, wanting to change the conversation and
pointing to the red and green roofs that came into view behind
the green hedges of acacia and lilac. "Quite a little town."
But Anna did not answer.
"No, no! How do you look at my position, what do you think of
it?" she asked.
"I consider..." Darya Alexandrovna was beginning, but at that
instant Vassenka Veslovsky, having brought the cob to gallop with
the right leg foremost, galloped past them, bumping heavily up
and down in his short jacket on the chamois leather of the
side saddle. "He's doing it, Anna Arkadyevna!" he shouted.
Anna did not even glance at him; but again it seemed to Darya
Alexandrovna out of place to enter upon such a long conversation
in the carriage, and so she cut short her thought.
"I don't think anything," she said, "but I always loved you, and
if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they
are and not as one would like them to be...."
Anna, taking her eyes off her friend's face and dropping her
eyelids (this was a new habit Dolly had not seen in her before),
pondered, trying to penetrate the full significance of the words.
And obviously interpreting them as she would have wished, she
glanced at Dolly.