Anna Karenina - Part 7

In order to carry through any undertaking in family life, there

must necessarily be either complete division between the husband

and wife, or loving agreement. When the relations of a couple

are vacillating and neither one thing nor the other, no sort of

enterprise can be undertaken.

Many families remain for years in the same place, though both

husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither

complete division nor agreement between them.

Both Vronsky and Anna felt life in Moscow insupportable in the

heat and dust, when the spring sunshine was followed by the glare

of summer, and all the trees in the boulevards had long since

been in full leaf, and the leaves were covered with dust. But

they did not go back to Vozdvizhenskoe, as they had arranged to

do long before; they went on staying in Moscow, though they both

loathed it, because of late there had been no agreement between

them.

The irritability that kept them apart had no external cause, and

all efforts to come to an understanding intensified it, instead

of removing it. It was an inner irritation, grounded in her mind

on the conviction that his love had grown less; in his, on regret

that he had put himself for her sake in a difficult position,

which she, instead of lightening, made still more difficult.

Neither of them gave full utterance to their sense of grievance,

but they considered each other in the wrong, and tried on every

pretext to prove this to one another.

In her eyes the whole of him, with all his habits, ideas,

desires, with all his spiritual and physical temperament, was one

thing--love for women, and that love, she felt, ought to be

entirely concentrated on her alone. That love was less;

consequently, as she reasoned, he must have transferred part of

his love to other women or to another woman--and she was jealous.

She was jealous not of any particular woman but of the decrease

of his love. Not having got an object for her jealousy, she was

on the lookout for it. At the slightest hint she transferred her

jealousy from one object to another. At one time she was jealous

of those low women with whom he might so easily renew his old

bachelor ties; then she was jealous of the society women he might

meet; then she was jealous of the imaginary girl whom he might

want to marry, for whose sake he would break with her. And this

last form of jealousy tortured her most of all, especially as he

had unwarily told her, in a moment of frankness, that his mother

knew him so little that she had had the audacity to try and

persuade him to marry the young Princess Sorokina.