"And all this, what's it for? What is to come of it all? That

I'm wasting my life, never having a moment's peace, either with

child, or nursing a child, forever irritable, peevish, wretched

myself and worrying others, repulsive to my husband, while the

children are growing up unhappy, badly educated, and penniless.

Even now, if it weren't for spending the summer at the Levins',

I don't know how we should be managing to live. Of course Kostya

and Kitty have so much tact that we don't feel it; but it can't

go on. They'll have children, they won't be able to keep us;

it's a drag on them as it is. How is papa, who has hardly

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anything left for himself, to help us? So that I can't even

bring the children up by myself, and may find it hard with the

help of other people, at the cost of humiliation. Why, even if

we suppose the greatest good luck, that the children don't die,

and I bring them up somehow. At the very best they'll simply be

decent people. That's all I can hope for. And to gain simply

that--what agonies, what toil!... One's whole life ruined!"

Again she recalled what the young peasant woman had said, and

again she was revolted at the thought; but she could not help

admitting that there was a grain of brutal truth in the words.

"Is it far now, Mihail?" Darya Alexandrovna asked the

counting house clerk, to turn her mind from thoughts that were

frightening her.

"From this village, they say, it's five miles." The carriage

drove along the village street and onto a bridge. On the bridge

was a crowd of peasant women with coils of ties for the sheaves

on their shoulders, gaily and noisily chattering. They stood

still on the bridge, staring inquisitively at the carriage. All

the faces turned to Darya Alexandrovna looked to her healthy and

happy, making her envious of their enjoyment of life. "They're

all living, they're all enjoying life," Darya Alexandrovna still

mused when she had passed the peasant women and was driving

uphill again at a trot, seated comfortably on the soft springs of

the old carriage, "while I, let out, as it were from prison, from

the world of worries that fret me to death, am only looking about

me now for an instant. They all live; those peasant women and my

sister Natalia and Varenka and Anna, whom I am going to see--all,

but not I.

"And they attack Anna. What for? am I any better? I have,

anyway, a husband I love--not as I should like to love him, still

I do love him, while Anna never loved hers. How is she to blame?

She wants to live. God has put that in our hearts. Very likely

I should have done the same. Even to this day I don't feel sure

I did right in listening to her at that terrible time when she

came to me in Moscow. I ought then to have cast off my husband

and have begun my life fresh. I might have loved and have been

loved in reality. And is it any better as it is? I don't

respect him. He's necessary to me," she thought about her

husband, "and I put up with him. Is that any better? At that

time I could still have been admired, I had beauty left me

still," Darya Alexandrovna pursued her thoughts, and she would

have liked to look at herself in the looking glass. She had a

traveling looking glass in her handbag, and she wanted to take

it out; but looking at the backs of the coachman and the swaying

counting house clerk, she felt that she would be ashamed if

either of them were to look round, and she did not take out the

glass.




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