"They say it is seven versts from this village."
The calash was rolling through the village street and across a little bridge. On the bridge was passing a whole troop of peasant women talking, with loud and merry voices, and carrying their sheaves on their backs. The women paused on the bridge and gazed inquisitively at the calash. All the faces turned toward Darya Aleksandrovna seemed to her healthy and cheerful, mocking her with the very joy of life.
"All are full of life, all of them enjoy themselves," said Darya Aleksandrovna, continuing to commune with her own thoughts, as she passed by the peasant women and was carried swiftly up the little hill, pleasantly rocking on the easy springs of the old calash, "while I, like one let loose from a prison, am free for a moment from the life that is crushing me with its cares. All other women know what it is to live, these peasant women and my sister Natali and Varenka and Anna whom I am going to visit—every one but me.
"And they blame Anna. Why? Am I really any better than she? At least I have a husband whom I love; not, to be sure, as I wish I loved him, but I love him in a way, and Anna did not love hers. In what respect is she to blame? She desired to live. And God put that desire into our hearts. Very possibly I might have done the same thing. And to this day I am not certain whether I did well in taking her advice at that horrible time when she came to visit me in Moscow. Then I ought to have left my husband and begun my life all over again. If I had I might have loved and been loved. And now are things any better? I cannot respect him, but I need him," she said to herself, referring to her husband, "and so I endure him. Is that any better? At that time I still had the power of pleasing, I had some beauty then," said Darya Aleksandrovna, still pursuing her thoughts; and the desire to look at herself in a mirror came over her. She had a small traveling mirror in her bag, and she wanted to take it out; but, as she looked at the backs of the coachman and the swaying bookkeeper, she felt that she should be
