He shrugged his shoulders with an air of perplexity and despair.
"But do you mean to say you don't know?..." he began.
"But I don't care to know!" she almost shrieked. "I don't care to.
Do I regret what I have done?
No, no, no!
If it were all to do again from the beginning, it would be the same.
For us, for you and for me, there is only one thing that matters, whether we love each other.
Other people we need not consider.
Why are we living here apart and not seeing each other?
Why can't I go?
I love you, and I don't care for anything," she said in Russian, glancing at him with a peculiar gleam in her eyes that he could not understand.
"If you have not changed to me, why don't you look at me?"
He looked at her.
He saw all the beauty of her face and full dress, always so becoming to her.
But now her beauty and elegance were just what irritated him.
"My feeling cannot change, you know, but I beg you, I entreat you," he said again in French, with a note of tender supplication in his voice, but with coldness in his eyes.
She did not hear his words, but she saw the coldness of his eyes, and answered with irritation:
"And I beg you to explain why I should not go."
"Because it might cause you..." he hesitated.
"I don't understand.
Yashvin _n'est pas compromettant_, and Princess Varvara is no worse than others.
Oh, here she is!"
Chapter 33.
Vronsky for the first time experienced a feeling of anger against Anna, almost a hatred for her willfully refusing to understand her own position.
This feeling was aggravated by his being unable to tell her plainly the cause of his anger.
If he had told her directly what he was thinking, he would have said:
"In that dress, with a princess only too well known to everyone, to show yourself at the theater is equivalent not merely to acknowledging your position as a fallen woman, but is flinging down a challenge to society, that is to say, cutting yourself off from it forever."
He could not say that to her.
"But how can she fail to see it, and what is going on in her?" he said to himself.
He felt at the same time that his respect for her was diminished while his sense of her beauty was intensified.
He went back scowling to his rooms, and sitting down beside Yashvin, who, with his long legs stretched out on a chair, was drinking brandy and seltzer water, he ordered a glass of the same for himself.
"You were talking of Lankovsky's Powerful.
That's a fine horse, and I would advise you to buy him," said Yashvin, glancing at his comrade's gloomy face. "His hind-quarters aren't quite first-rate, but the legs and head--one couldn't wish for anything better."
"I think I will take him," answered Vronsky.
Their conversation about horses interested him, but he did not for an instant forget Anna, and could not help listening to the sound of steps in the corridor and looking at the clock on the chimney piece.
"Anna Arkadyevna gave orders to announce that she has gone to the theater."
Yashvin, tipping another glass of brandy into the bubbling water, drank it and got up, buttoning his coat.
"Well, let's go," he said, faintly smiling under his mustache, and showing by this smile that he knew the cause of Vronsky's gloominess, and did not attach any significance to it.
"I'm not going," Vronsky answered gloomily.
"Well, I must, I promised to.
Good-bye, then.
If you do, come to the stalls; you can take Kruzin's stall," added Yashvin as he went out.
"No, I'm busy."
"A wife is a care, but it's worse when she's not a wife," thought Yashvin, as he walked out of the hotel.
Vronsky, left alone, got up from his chair and began pacing up and down the room.
"And what's today?
The fourth night....
Yegor and his wife are there, and my mother, most likely.
Of course all Petersburg's there.
Now she's gone in, taken off her cloak and come into the light.