"Why not talk about it?" she said.
"I only meant to say that matters of real importance may turn up.
Now, for instance, I shall have to go to Moscow to arrange about the house....
Oh, Anna, why are you so irritable?
Don't you know that I can't live without you?"
"If so," said Anna, her voice suddenly changing, "it means that you are sick of this life....
Yes, you will come for a day and go away, as men do..."
"Anna, that's cruel.
I am ready to give up my whole life."
But she did not hear him.
"If you go to Moscow, I will go too.
I will not stay here.
Either we must separate or else live together."
"Why, you know, that's my one desire.
But for that..."
"We must get a divorce.
I will write to him.
I see I cannot go on like this....
But I will come with you to Moscow."
"You talk as if you were threatening me.
But I desire nothing so much as never to be parted from you," said Vronsky, smiling.
But as he said these words there gleamed in his eyes not merely a cold look, but the vindictive look of a man persecuted and made cruel.
She saw the look and correctly divined its meaning.
"If so, it's a calamity!" that glance told her.
It was a moment's impression, but she never forgot it.
Anna wrote to her husband asking him about a divorce, and towards the end of November, taking leave of Princess Varvara, who wanted to go to Petersburg, she went with Vronsky to Moscow.
Expecting every day an answer from Alexey Alexandrovitch, and after that the divorce, they now established themselves together like married people.
PART 7.
Chapter 1.
The Levins had been three months in Moscow.
The date had long passed on which, according to the most trustworthy calculations of people learned in such matters, Kitty should have been confined. But she was still about, and there was nothing to show that her time was any nearer than two months ago.
The doctor, the monthly nurse, and Dolly and her mother, and most of all Levin, who could not think of the approaching event without terror, began to be impatient and uneasy. Kitty was the only person who felt perfectly calm and happy.
She was distinctly conscious now of the birth of a new feeling of love for the future child, for her to some extent actually existing already, and she brooded blissfully over this feeling.
He was not by now altogether a part of herself, but sometimes lived his own life independently of her.
Often this separate being gave her pain, but at the same time she wanted to laugh with a strange new joy.
All the people she loved were with her, and all were so good to her, so attentively caring for her, so entirely pleasant was everything presented to her, that if she had not known and felt that it must all soon be over, she could not have wished for a better and pleasanter life.
The only thing that spoiled the charm of this manner of life was that her husband was not here as she loved him to be, and as he was in the country.
She liked his serene, friendly, and hospitable manner in the country.
In the town he seemed continually uneasy and on his guard, as though he were afraid someone would be rude to him, and still more to her.
At home in the country, knowing himself distinctly to be in his right place, he was never in haste to be off elsewhere. He was never unoccupied.
Here in town he was in a continual hurry, as though afraid of missing something, and yet he had nothing to do.
And she felt sorry for him.
To others, she knew, he did not appear an object of pity. On the contrary, when Kitty looked at him in society, as one sometimes looks at those one loves, trying to see him as if he were a stranger, so as to catch the impression he must make on others, she saw with a panic even of jealous fear that he was far indeed from being a pitiable figure, that he was very attractive with his fine breeding, his rather old-fashioned, reserved courtesy with women, his powerful figure, and striking, as she thought, and expressive face.
But she saw him not from without, but from within; she saw that here he was not himself; that was the only way she could define his condition to herself.
Sometimes she inwardly reproached him for his inability to live in the town; sometimes she recognized that it was really hard for him to order his life here so that he could be satisfied with it.
What had he to do, indeed?
He did not care for cards; he did not go to a club.
Spending the time with jovial gentlemen of Oblonsky's type--she knew now what that meant...it meant drinking and going somewhere after drinking.
She could not think without horror of where men went on such occasions.
Was he to go into society?