"But that is just why a divorce is necessary." But Anna did not
hear her. She longed to give utterance to all the arguments with
which she had so many times convinced herself.
"What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid
bringing unhappy beings into the world!" She looked at Dolly,
but without waiting for a reply she went on: "I should always feel I had wronged these unhappy children," she
said. "If they are not, at any rate they are not unhappy; while
if they are unhappy, I alone should be to blame for it."
These were the very arguments Darya Alexandrovna had used in her
own reflections; but she heard them without understanding them.
"How can one wrong creatures that don't exist?" she thought. And
all at once the idea struck her: could it possibly, under any
circumstances, have been better for her favorite Grisha if he had
never existed? And this seemed to her so wild, so strange, that
she shook her head to drive away this tangle of whirling, mad
ideas.
"No, I don't know; it's not right," was all she said, with an
expression of disgust on her face.
"Yes, but you mustn't forget that you and I.... And besides
that," added Anna, in spite of the wealth of her arguments and
the poverty of Dolly's objections, seeming still to admit that it
was not right, "don't forget the chief point, that I am not now
in the same position as you. For you the question is: do you
desire not to have any more children; while for me it is: do I
desire to have them? And that's a great difference. You must
see that I can't desire it in my position."
Darya Alexandrovna made no reply. She suddenly felt that she had
got far away from Anna; that there lay between them a barrier of
questions on which they could never agree, and about which it was
better not to speak.