Anna Karenina

Chapter 23
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 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
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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.
For several days now Countess Lidia Ivanovna had been in a state of
intense excitement. She had learned that Anna and Vronsky were in
Petersburg. Alexey Alexandrovitch must be saved from seeing her, he must
be saved even from the torturing knowledge that that awful woman was in
the same town with him, and that he might meet her any minute.
Lidia Ivanovna made inquiries through her friends as to what those
infamous people, as she called Anna and Vronsky, intended doing, and she
endeavored so to guide every movement of her friend during those days
that he could not come across them. The young adjutant, an acquaintance of
Vronsky, through whom she obtained her information, and who hoped
through Countess Lidia Ivanovna to obtain a concession, told her that they
had finished their business and were going away next day. Lidia Ivanovna
had already begun to calm down, when the next morning a note was
brought her, the handwriting of which she recognized with horror. It was
the handwriting of Anna Karenina. The envelope was of paper as thick as
bark; on the oblong yellow paper there was a huge monogram, and the
letter smelt of agreeable scent.
"Who brought it?"
"A commissionaire from the hotel."
It was some time before Countess Lidia Ivanovna could sit down to read
the letter. Her excitement brought on an attack of asthma, to which she was
subject. When she had recovered her composure, she read the following
letter in French:
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"Madame la Comtesse,
"The Christian feelings with which your heart is filled give me the, I feel,
unpardonable boldness to write to you. I am miserable at being separated
from my son. I entreat permission to see him once before my departure.
Forgive me for recalling myself to your memory. I apply to you and not to
Alexey Alexandrovitch, simply because I do not wish to cause that
generous man to suffer in remembering me. Knowing your friendship for
him, I know you will understand me. Could you send Seryozha to me, or
should I come to the house at some fixed hour, or will you let me know
when and where I could see him away from home? I do not anticipate a
refusal, knowing the magnanimity of him with whom it rests. You cannot
conceive the craving I have to see him, and so cannot conceive the gratitude
your help will arouse in me.
Anna"
Everything in this letter exasperated Countess Lidia Ivanovna: its contents
and the allusion to magnanimity, and especially its free and easy--as she
considered--tone.
"Say that there is no answer," said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, and
immediately opening her blotting-book, she wrote to Alexey
Alexandrovitch that she hoped to see him at one o'clock at the levee.
"I must talk with you of a grave and painful subject. There we will arrange
where to meet. Best of all at my house, where I will order tea as you like it.
Urgent. He lays the cross, but He gives the strength to bear it," she added,
so as to give him some slight preparation. Countess Lidia Ivanovna usually
wrote some two or three letters a day to Alexey Alexandrovitch. She
enjoyed that form of communication, which gave opportunity for a
refinement and air of mystery not afforded by their personal interviews.
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