Alexey Alexandrovitch, after meeting Vronsky on his own steps,

drove, as he had intended, to the Italian opera. He sat

through two acts there, and saw everyone he had wanted to see.

On returning home, he carefully scrutinized the hat stand, and

noticing that there was not a military overcoat there, he went,

as usual, to his own room. But, contrary to his usual habit, he

did not go to bed, he walked up and down his study till three

o'clock in the morning. The feeling of furious anger with his

wife, who would not observe the proprieties and keep to the one

stipulation he had laid on her, not to receive her lover in her

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own home, gave him no peace. She had not complied with his

request, and he was bound to punish her and carry out his

threat--obtain a divorce and take away his son. He knew all the

difficulties connected with this course, but he had said he would

do it, and now he must carry out his threat. Countess Lidia

Ivanovna had hinted that this was the best way out of his

position, and of late the obtaining of divorces had been brought

to such perfection that Alexey Alexandrovitch saw a possibility

of overcoming the formal difficulties. Misfortunes never come

singly, and the affairs of the reorganization of the native

tribes, and of the irrigation of the lands of the Zaraisky

province, had brought such official worries upon Alexey

Alexandrovitch that he had been of late in a continual condition

of extreme irritability.

He did not sleep the whole night, and his fury, growing in a sort

of vast, arithmetical progression, reached its highest limits in

the morning. He dressed in haste, and as though carrying his cup

full of wrath, and fearing to spill any over, fearing to lose

with his wrath the energy necessary for the interview with his

wife, he went into her room directly he heard she was up.

Anna, who had thought she knew her husband so well, was amazed at

his appearance when he went in to her. His brow was lowering,

and his eyes stared darkly before him, avoiding her eyes; his

mouth was tightly and contemptuously shut. In his walk, in his

gestures, in the sound of his voice there was a determination and

firmness such as his wife had never seen in him. He went into

her room, and without greeting her, walked straight up to her

writing-table, and taking her keys, opened a drawer.

"What do you want?" she cried.

"Your lover's letters," he said.

"They're not here," she said, shutting the drawer; but from that

action he saw he had guessed right, and roughly pushing away her

hand, he quickly snatched a portfolio in which he knew she used

to put her most important papers. She tried to pull the

portfolio away, but he pushed her back.




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