"Then there is all the more reason for you to legalize your
position, if possible," said Dolly.
"Yes, if possible," said Anna, speaking all at once in an utterly
different tone, subdued and mournful.
"Surely you don't mean a divorce is impossible? I was told your
husband had consented to it."
"Dolly, I don't want to talk about that."
"Oh, we won't then," Darya Alexandrovna hastened to say, noticing
the expression of suffering on Anna's face. "All I see is that
you take too gloomy a view of things."
"I? Not at all! I'm always bright and happy. You see, _je fais
des passions._ Veslovsky..."
"Yes, to tell the truth, I don't like Veslovsky's tone," said
Darya Alexandrovna, anxious to change the subject.
"Oh, that's nonsense! It amuses Alexey, and that's all; but he's
a boy, and quite under my control. You know, I turn him as I
please. It's just as it might be with your Grisha.... Dolly!"--
she suddenly changed the subject--"you say I take too gloomy a
view of things. You can't understand. It's too awful! I try not
to take any view of it at all."
"But I think you ought to. You ought to do all you can."
"But what can I do? Nothing. You tell me to marry Alexey, and
say I don't think about it. I don't think about it!" she
repeated, and a flush rose into her face. She got up,
straightening her chest, and sighed heavily. With her light step
she began pacing up and down the room, stopping now and then. "I
don't think of it? Not a day, not an hour passes that I don't
think of it, and blame myself for thinking of it...because
thinking of that may drive me mad. Drive me mad!" she repeated.
"When I think of it, I can't sleep without morphine. But never
mind. Let us talk quietly. They tell me, divorce. In the first
place, he won't give me a divorce. He's under the influence of
Countess Lidia Ivanovna now."
Darya Alexandrovna, sitting erect on a chair, turned her head,
following Anna with a face of sympathetic suffering.
"You ought to make the attempt," she said softly.
"Suppose I make the attempt. What does it mean?" she said,
evidently giving utterance to a thought, a thousand times thought
over and learned by heart. "It means that I, hating him, but
still recognizing that I have wronged him--and I consider him
magnanimous--that I humiliate myself to write to him.... Well,
suppose I make the effort; I do it. Either I receive a
humiliating refusal or consent.... Well, I have received his
consent, say..." Anna was at that moment at the furthest end
of the room, and she stopped there, doing something to the
curtain at the window. "I receive his consent, but my...my
son? They won't give him up to me. He will grow up despising
me, with his father, whom I've abandoned. Do you see, I love...
equally, I think, but both more than myself--two creatures,
Seryozha and Alexey."