She felt that she had no right to go straight to her former home and risk coming face to face with Alekseï Aleksandrovitch. She might not be admitted; she might be insulted. To write to her husband and ask permission of him seemed to her painful even to think of. She could be calm only when she did not think of her husband. To see her son when he was out taking his walk, even if she could find where and when he went, was too little for her. She had counted so much on seeing him again! she had so much to say to him; she had such a desire to hug him, to kiss him.
Serozha's old nurse might have been an assistance to her, and shown her how to manage; but she was no longer living in Alekseï Aleksandrovitch's house.
On the third day, having learned of Alekseï Aleksandrovitch's intimate relations with the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, Anna decided to write her a letter, and this cost her the greatest pains to write. She told her frankly that permission to see her son depended on Alekseï Aleksandrovitch's magnanimity. She knew that if the letter were shown to her husband, he, in his part of magnanimous man, would not refuse her.
The messenger that carried the letter brought back the most cruel and unexpected reply, that there was no answer. She had never felt so wounded as at the moment when, summoning the messenger, she heard from him the circumstantial story of how he had waited, and how, after a time, he had been told that there would be no answer. Anna felt humiliated, insulted, but she saw that, from her point of view, the countess was right. Her grief was all the keener because she had to bear it alone. She could not and did not wish to confide it to Vronsky. She knew that though he was the chief cause of her unhappiness, he would regard her meeting with her son as of little account; she knew that he would never be able to sound all the depths of her anguish; she knew that she should hate him for the unsympathetic tone in which he would speak of it. And she feared this more than anything else in the world, and so hid from him her action in regard to her son.
