Anna Karenina - Part 7

"My love keeps growing more passionate and egoistic, while his is

waning and waning, and that's why we're drifting apart." She

went on musing. "And there's no help for it. He is everything

for me, and I want him more and more to give himself up to me

entirely. And he wants more and more to get away from me. We

walked to meet each other up to the time of our love, and then we

have been irresistibly drifting in different directions. And

there's no altering that. He tells me I'm insanely jealous, and

I have told myself that I am insanely jealous; but it's not true.

I'm not jealous, but I'm unsatisfied. But..." she opened her

lips, and shifted her place in the carriage in the excitement,

aroused by the thought that suddenly struck her. "If I could be

anything but a mistress, passionately caring for nothing but his

caresses; but I can't and I don't care to be anything else. And

by that desire I rouse aversion in him, and he rouses fury in me,

and it cannot be different. Don't I know that he wouldn't

deceive me, that he has no schemes about Princess Sorokina, that

he's not in love with Kitty, that he won't desert me! I know all

that, but it makes it no better for me. If without loving me,

from _duty_ he'll be good and kind to me, without what I want,

that's a thousand times worse than unkindness! That's--hell!

And that's just how it is. For a long while now he hasn't loved

me. And where love ends, hate begins. I don't know these

streets at all. Hills it seems, and still houses, and houses

.... And in the houses always people and people.... How many of

them, no end, and all hating each other! Come, let me try and

think what I want, to make me happy. Well? Suppose I am

divorced, and Alexey Alexandrovitch lets me have Seryozha, and I

marry Vronsky." Thinking of Alexey Alexandrovitch, she at once

pictured him with extraordinary vividness as though he were alive

before her, with his mild, lifeless, dull eyes, the blue veins in

his white hands, his intonations and the cracking of his fingers,

and remembering the feeling which had existed between them, and

which was also called love, she shuddered with loathing. "Well,

I'm divorced, and become Vronsky's wife. Well, will Kitty cease

looking at me as she looked at me today? No. And will Seryozha

leave off asking and wondering about my two husbands? And is

there any new feeling I can awaken between Vronsky and me? Is

there possible, if not happiness, some sort of ease from misery?

No, no!" she answered now without the slightest hesitation.

"Impossible! We are drawn apart by life, and I make his

unhappiness, and he mine, and there's no altering him or me.

Every attempt has been made, the screw has come unscrewed. Oh, a

beggar woman with a baby. She thinks I'm sorry for her. Aren't

we all flung into the world only to hate each other, and so to

torture ourselves and each other? Schoolboys coming--laughing

Seryozha?" she thought. "I thought, too, that I loved him, and

used to be touched by my own tenderness. But I have lived

without him, I gave him up for another love, and did not regret

the exchange till that love was satisfied." And with loathing

she thought of what she meant by that love. And the clearness

with which she saw life now, her own and all men's, was a

pleasure to her. "It's so with me and Pyotr, and the coachman,

Fyodor, and that merchant, and all the people living along the

Volga, where those placards invite one to go, and everywhere and

always," she thought when she had driven under the low-pitched

roof of the Nizhigorod station, and the porters ran to meet her.