with her. This form of jealousy especially tormented her, for the reason that he himself had carelessly, in a moment of confidence one day, spoken of his mother's lack of tact in having ventured to propose to him to marry the young Princess Sorokin.
And being thus jealous, Anna felt indignant with him and kept finding reasons for her indignation. For all the painfulness of her position she blamed him. She considered him responsible for her painful state of expectancy which she was enduring in Moscow, as it were suspended between heaven and earth, for the uncertainty in which she lived, for Alekseï Aleksandrovitch's delay and indecision, and for her loneliness. If he loved her, he would understand the difficulty of her position, and save her from it. He was to blame because she was living in Moscow and not in the country. He could not live in the country, as she wanted to do. He wanted society, and so condemned her to this horrible position, the trials of which he could not comprehend, And, again, he was responsible for depriving her forever of her son. Even those rare moments of tenderness which they occasionally enjoyed did not appease her; she now detected in his tenderness a shade of calmness, of assurance, which he had never before shown, and which exasperated her.
It was getting dark. Vronsky was at a gentlemen's dinner; and Anna, while waiting for him, had taken refuge in his library, where the noise of the street was less oppressive than in the rest of the house. She walked up and down, going over in memory their last altercation.
As she recalled in memory the insulting words that had been spoken, and tried to think what had led to it, she at last remembered how the quarrel had begun. For some time she found it impossible to believe that any dissension could have arisen from such an inoffensive conversation, from a subject which was so unimportant to any one. But such was the fact. It all began from his having made sport of women's gymnasia, declaring them unnecessary, and she had taken up the cudgels in
