adultery and still less permitting his wife, whom he had once pardoned and still loved, to be disgraced and put to shame. Divorce seemed impossible from still other and even more important reasons.
What would become of their son? To leave him with his mother was impossible. The divorced mother would have her own illegitimate family, in which the child's position and training would be wretched. Should he keep the child for himself? But he knew that would be an act of vengeance, and vengeance he did not want.
But, above all, what made divorce impossible in his eyes was the thought that, in consenting to it, he himself would contribute to Anna's destruction. The words spoken by Darya Aleksandrovna, when he was in Moscow, remained graven in his heart, that in getting a divorce, he was thinking only of himself, and forgetting that it would be her irretrievable ruin. These words, now that he had forgiven her and had become attached to the children, had a very significant meaning to him. To consent to a divorce, to give Anna her liberty, was to cut away the last tie that bound himself to life, to her children whom he loved, and was to take away her last help in the way of salvation, and to push her over the precipice.
If she became a divorced woman, he knew very well that she would be united to Vronsky, and such a bond would be criminal and illegal; because a woman, according to the laws of the Church, cannot enter into a second marriage during the lifetime of her husband.
"And who knows but, after a year or two, either he might abandon her, or she might form a new liaison?" thought Alekseï Aleksandrovitch; "and I, having allowed an illegal divorce, should be responsible for her fall."
He had gone over all this a hundred times, and was convinced that divorce was not by any means so simple as his brother-in-law would make it out; that it was wholly impossible.
He did not admit a word of what Stepan Arkadyevitch said; he had a thousand arguments to refute such
