"Happiness!" she said with horror and loathing and her horror

unconsciously infected him. "For pity's sake, not a word, not a

word more."

She rose quickly and moved away from him.

"Not a word more," she repeated, and with a look of chill

despair, incomprehensible to him, she parted from him. She felt

that at that moment she could not put into words the sense of

shame, of rapture, and of horror at this stepping into a new

life, and she did not want to speak of it, to vulgarize this

feeling by inappropriate words. But later too, and the next day

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and the third day, she still found no words in which she could

express the complexity of her feelings; indeed, she could not

even find thoughts in which she could clearly think out all that

was in her soul.

She said to herself: "No, just now I can't think of it, later on,

when I am calmer." But this calm for thought never came; every

time the thought rose of what she had done and what would happen

to her, and what she ought to do, a horror came over her and she

drove those thoughts away.

"Later, later," she said--"when I am calmer."

But in dreams, when she had no control over her thoughts, her

position presented itself to her in all its hideous nakedness.

One dream haunted her almost every night. She dreamed that both

were her husbands at once, that both were lavishing caresses on

her. Alexey Alexandrovitch was weeping, kissing her hands, and

saying, "How happy we are now!" And Alexey Vronsky was there

too, and he too was her husband. And she was marveling that it

had once seemed impossible to her, was explaining to them,

laughing, that this was ever so much simpler, and that now both

of them were happy and contented. But this dream weighed on her

like a nightmare, and she awoke from it in terror.




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