The Countess Lidia Ivanovna had, as a very young and sentimental
girl, been married to a wealthy man of high rank, an extremely
good-natured, jovial, and extremely dissipated rake. Two months
after marriage her husband abandoned her, and her impassioned
protestations of affection he met with a sarcasm and even
hostility that people knowing the count's good heart, and seeing
no defects in the sentimental Lidia, were at a loss to explain.
Though they were divorced and lived apart, yet whenever the
husband met the wife, he invariably behaved to her with the same
malignant irony, the cause of which was incomprehensible.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna had long given up being in love with her
husband, but from that time she had never given up being in love
with someone. She was in love with several people at once, both
men and women; she had been in love with almost everyone who had
been particularly distinguished in any way. She was in love with
all the new princes and princesses who married into the imperial
family; she had been in love with a high dignitary of the Church,
a vicar, and a parish priest; she had been in love with a
journalist, three Slavophiles, with Komissarov, with a minister,
a doctor, an English missionary and Karenin. All these passions
constantly waning or growing more ardent, did not prevent her
from keeping up the most extended and complicated relations with
the court and fashionable society. But from the time that after
Karenin's trouble she took him under her special protection, from
the time that she set to work in Karenin's household looking
after his welfare, she felt that all her other attachments were
not the real thing, and that she was now genuinely in love, and
with no one but Karenin. The feeling she now experienced for him
seemed to her stronger than any of her former feelings.
Analyzing her feeling, and comparing it with former passions, she
distinctly perceived that she would not have been in love with
Komissarov if he had not saved the life of the Tsar, that she
would not have been in love with Ristitch-Kudzhitsky if there had
been no Slavonic question, but that she loved Karenin for
himself, for his lofty, uncomprehended soul, for the sweet--to
her--high notes of his voice, for his drawling intonation, his
weary eyes, his character, and his soft white hands with their
swollen veins. She was not simply overjoyed at meeting him, but
she sought in his face signs of the impression she was making on
him. She tried to please him, not by her words only, but in her
whole person. For his sake it was that she now lavished more
care on her dress than before. She caught herself in reveries on
what might have been, if she had not been married and he had been
free. She blushed with emotion when he came into the room, she
could not repress a smile of rapture when he said anything
amiable to her.