Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part One/Chapter 32
CHAPTER XXXII
The first person to meet Anna when she reached home was her son. He darted downstairs, in spite of his governess's reproof, and with wild delight cried, "Mamma! mamma!" Rushing up to her he threw his arms around her neck.
"I told you it was mamma!" he souted to the governess. "I knew it was!"
But the son, no less than the husband, awakened in Anna a feeling like disillusion. She imagined him better than he was in reality. She was obliged to descend to the reality in order to look on him as he was. But in fact, he was lovely, with his fair curls, his blue eyes, and his pretty plump legs in their neatly fitting stockings. She felt an almost physical satisfaction in feeling him near her, and in his caresses, and a moral calm in looking into his tender, confiding, loving eyes, and in hearing his innocent questions. She unpacked the gifts sent him by Dolly's children, and told him now there was a little girl in Moscow, named Tanya, and how this Tanya knew how to read, and was teaching the other children to read.
"Am I not as good as she?" asked Serozha.
"For me, you are worth all the rest of the world"
"I know it", said Serorha, smiling.
Anna had not finished drinking her coffee, when the Countess Lidya Ivanovna was announced. The Countess Lidya Ivanorna was a tall, stout woman, with an unhealthy, sallow complexion, and handsome, dreamy black eyes. Anna liked her, but to day, as if for the first time, she saw her with all her faults. "Well? my dear, did you carry the olive-branch?" demanded the Countess Lidya Ivanorna, as she entered the room.
"Yes, it is all made up", replied Anna; "but it was not as bad as we thought. As a general thing, my sister in law is too peremptory."
But the Countess Lidya, who was interested in everything that did not specially concern herself, had the habit of sometimes not heeding what did interest her. She interrupted Anna:—
"Well! This world is full of woes and tribulations, and I am all worn out to-day."
"What is it?" asked Anna, striving to repress a smile.
"I am beginning to weary of the ineffectual attempts to get at the truth, and sometimes I am utterly discouraged. The work of the Little Sisters"—this was a philanthropic and religiously patriotic institution—"used to get along splendidly, but there is nothing to be done with these men," added the Countess Lidya Ivanovna, with an air of ironical resignation to fate. "They got hold of the idea, they mutilated it, and then they judge it so meanly, so wretchedly. Two or three men, your husband among them, understand all the significance of this work; but the others only discredit it. Yesterday I had a letter from Pravdin ...."
Pravdin was a famous Panslavist, who lived abroad, and the Countess Lidya Ivanovna related what he had said in his letter.
Then she went on to describe the troubles and snares that blocked the work of uniting the churches, and finally departed in haste, because it was the day for her to be present at the meeting of some society or other, and at the sitting of the Slavonic Committee.
"All this is just as it has been, but why did I never notice it before?" said Anna to herself. "Was she very irritable to-day? But at any rate, it is ridiculous: her aims are charitable, she is a Christian, and yet she is angry with every one, and every one is her enemy; and yet all her enemies are working for Christianity and charity."
After the departure of the Countess Lidya Ivanovna, came a friend, the wife of a director, who told her all the news of the city. At three o'clock she went out, promising to be back in time for dinner. Alekseï Aleksandrovitch was at the meeting of the ministry. The hour before dinner, which Anna spent alone, she employed sitting with her son,—who had his dinner by himself,—in arranging her things, and in reading and answering the letters and notes heaped up on her writing-table.
The sensation of causeless shame, and the agitation from which she had suffered so strangely during her journey, now completely disappeared. Under the conditions of her ordinary every-day life, she felt calm, and free from reproach, and she was filled with wonder as she recalled her condition of the night before.
"What was it? Nothing. Vronsky said a foolish thing; it is easy to put an end to such nonsense, and I answered him exactly right. To speak of it to my husband is unnecessary and impossible. To speak about it would seem to attach importance to what has none."
And she recalled how, when a young subordinate of her husband's in Petersburg had almost made her a declaration and she had told him about it, Alekseï Aleksandrovitch answered that as she went into society, she, like all society women, might expect such experiences, but that he had perfect confidence in her tact, and never would permit himself to humiliate her or him by jealousy. "Why tell, then? Besides, thank God, there is nothing to tell."