The thought of his wife who had been so guilty toward him, and toward whom he had acted so like a saint, as the Counters Lidia Ivanovna had so well expressed it, ought not to have disturbed him, and yet he was ill at ease. He could not understand a word of the book he was reading, he could not drive away from his mind the cruel recollections of his relations to her, of the mistakes which, as it now seemed to him, he himself had made in his treatment of her. He remembered with a feeling like remorse the way he had received Anna's confession that day as they were returning from the races. Why had he demanded merely an outward observance of the proprieties? Why had he not challenged Vronsky to a duel? He was likewise tormented by his recollection of the letter which he wrote her at that time; especially his forgiveness of her, which had proved useless to any one, and the pains which he had wasted on the baby that was not his, all came back to his memory and seared his heart with shame and regret. And exactly the same feeling of shame and regret she experienced now in reviewing all his past with her, and remembering the awkward way in which, after long vacillating, he had offered himself to her.
"But how am I at fault?" he asked himself; and this question immediately gave rise to another: "Do other men feel differently, fall in love differently, and marry differently,—these Vronskys, Oblonskys .... these chamberlains with their handsome calves?"
His imagination called up a whole line of these vigorous men, self-confident and strong, who had always and everywhere attracted his curiosity and his wonder.
He drove away these thoughts; he strove to persuade himself that the end and aim of his life was not this world, but eternity, that peace and charity alone ought to dwell in his soul. But the fact that in this temporal, insignificant life he had, as it seemed to him, made some humiliating blunders, tortured him as much as if that eternal salvation in which he put his trust did not exist.
