Anna Karenina

Chapter 31
Vronsky had not even tried to sleep all that night. He sat in his armchair,
looking straight before him or scanning the people who got in and out. If he
had indeed on previous occasions struck and impressed people who did not
know him by his air of unhesitating composure, he seemed now more
haughty and self-possessed than ever. He looked at people as if they were
things. A nervous young man, a clerk in a law court, sitting opposite him,
hated him for that look. The young man asked him for a light, and entered
into conversation with him, and even pushed against him, to make him feel
that he was not a thing, but a person. But Vronsky gazed at him exactly as
he did at the lamp, and the young man made a wry face, feeling that he was
losing his self-possession under the oppression of this refusal to recognize
him as a person.
Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself a king, not because he
believed that he had made an impression on Anna--he did not yet believe
that,--but because the impression she had made on him gave him happiness
and pride.
What would come if it all he did not know, he did not even think. He felt
that all his forces, hitherto dissipated, wasted, were centered on one thing,
and bent with fearful energy on one blissful goal. And he was happy at it.
He knew only that he had told her the truth, that he had come where she
was, that all the happiness of his life, the only meaning in life for him, now
lay in seeing and hearing her. And when he got out of the carriage at
Bologova to get some seltzer water, and caught sight of Anna, involuntarily
his first word had told her just what he thought. And he was glad he had
told her it, that she knew it now and was thinking of it. He did not sleep all
night. When he was back in the carriage, he kept unceasingly going over
every position in which he had seen her, every word she had uttered, and
before his fancy, making his heart faint with emotion, floated pictures of a
possible future.
When he got out of the train at Petersburg, he felt after his sleepless night
as keen and fresh as after a cold bath. He paused near his compartment,
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waiting for her to get out. "Once more," he said to himself, smiling
unconsciously, "once more I shall see her walk, her face; she will say
something, turn her head, glance, smile, maybe." But before he caught sight
of her, he saw her husband, whom the station-master was deferentially
escorting through the crowd. "Ah, yes! The husband." Only now for the
first time did Vronsky realize clearly the fact that there was a person
attached to her, a husband. He knew that she had a husband, but had hardly
believed in his existence, and only now fully believed in him, with his head
and shoulders, and his legs clad in black trousers; especially when he saw
this husband calmly take her arm with a sense of property.
Seeing Alexey Alexandrovitch with his Petersburg face and severely
self-confident figure, in his round hat, with his rather prominent spine, he
believed in him, and was aware of a disagreeable sensation, such as a man
might feel tortured by thirst, who, on reaching a spring, should find a dog, a
sheep, or a pig, who has drunk of it and muddied the water. Alexey
Alexandrovitch's manner of walking, with a swing of the hips and flat feet,