After the conversation with Alexey Alexandrovitch, Vronsky went

out onto the steps of the Karenins' house and stood still, with

difficulty remembering where he was, and where he ought to walk

or drive. He felt disgraced, humiliated, guilty, and deprived of

all possibility of washing away his humiliation. He felt thrust

out of the beaten track along which he had so proudly and lightly

walked till then. All the habits and rules of his life that had

seemed so firm, had turned out suddenly false and inapplicable.

The betrayed husband, who had figured till that time as a

pitiful creature, an incidental and somewhat ludicrous obstacle

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to his happiness, had suddenly been summoned by her herself,

elevated to an awe-inspiring pinnacle, and on the pinnacle that

husband had shown himself, not malignant, not false, not

ludicrous, but kind and straightforward and large. Vronsky could

not but feel this, and the parts were suddenly reversed. Vronsky

felt his elevation and his own abasement, his truth and his own

falsehood. He felt that the husband was magnanimous even in his

sorrow, while he had been base and petty in his deceit. But this

sense of his own humiliation before the man he had unjustly

despised made up only a small part of his misery. He felt

unutterably wretched now, for his passion for Anna, which had

seemed to him of late to be growing cooler, now that he knew he

had lost her forever, was stronger than ever it had been. He had

seen all of her in her illness, had come to know her very soul,

and it seemed to him that he had never loved her till then. And

now when he had learned to know her, to love her as she should be

loved, he had been humiliated before her, and had lost her

forever, leaving with her nothing of himself but a shameful

memory. Most terrible of all had been his ludicrous, shameful

position when Alexey Alexandrovitch had pulled his hands away

from his humiliated face. He stood on the steps of the Karenins'

house like one distraught, and did not know what to do.

"A sledge, sir?" asked the porter.

"Yes, a sledge."

On getting home, after three sleepless nights, Vronsky, without

undressing, lay down flat on the sofa, clasping his hands and

laying his head on them. His head was heavy. Images, memories,

and ideas of the strangest description followed one another with

extraordinary rapidity and vividness. First it was the medicine

he had poured out for the patient and spilt over the spoon, then

the midwife's white hands, then the queer posture of Alexey

Alexandrovitch on the floor beside the bed.




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