Anna Karenina - Part 7

"About the divorce?"

"Yes; but he says he has not been able to come at anything yet.

He has promised a decisive answer in a day or two. But here it

is; read it."

With trembling hands Anna took the telegram, and read what

Vronsky had told her. At the end was added: "Little hope; but

I will do everything possible and impossible."

"I said yesterday that it's absolutely nothing to me when I get,

or whether I never get, a divorce," she said, flushing crimson.

"There was not the slightest necessity to hide it from me." "So

he may hide and does hide his correspondence with women from me,"

she thought.

"Yashvin meant to come this morning with Voytov," said Vronsky;

"I believe he's won from Pyevtsov all and more than he can pay,

about sixty thousand."

"No," she said, irritated by his so obviously showing by this

change of subject that he was irritated, "why did you suppose

that this news would affect me so, that you must even try to

hide it? I said I don't want to consider it, and I should have

liked you to care as little about it as I do."

"I care about it because I like definiteness," he said.

"Definiteness is not in the form but the love," she said, more

and more irritated, not by his words, but by the tone of cool

composure in which he spoke. "What do you want it for?"

"My God! love again," he thought, frowning.

"Oh, you know what for; for your sake and your children's in the

future."

"There won't be children in the future."

"That's a great pity," he said.

"You want it for the children's sake, but you don't think of me?"

she said, quite forgetting or not having heard that he had said,

"_for your sake_ and the children's."

The question of the possibility of having children had long been

a subject of dispute and irritation to her. His desire to have

children she interpreted as a proof he did not prize her beauty.

"Oh, I said: for your sake. Above all for your sake," he

repeated, frowning as though in pain, "because I am certain that

the greater part of your irritability comes from the

indefiniteness of the position."

"Yes, now he has laid aside all pretense, and all his cold hatred

for me is apparent," she thought, not hearing his words, but

watching with terror the cold, cruel judge who looked mocking her

out of his eyes.