Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/279

 face always looked stern and haughty whenever any one asked how his wife was. Alekseï Aleksandrovitch did not wish to think about his wife's conduct and feelings, and therefore he did not think about them.

The Karenins' summer datcha was at Peterhof; and the Countess Lidya Ivanovna generally spent her summers in the same neighborhood, keeping up friendly relations with Anna. This year the countess had not cared to go to Peterhof, nor had she once called on Anna Arkadyevna; and as she was talking with Karenin one day, she made some allusion to the impropriety of Anna's intimacy with Betsy and Vronsky. Alekseï Aleksandrovitch stopped her harshly, and declared that for him his wife was above suspicion, and from that day he avoided the countess. He did not wish to see and he did not see that many people in society were beginning to give his wife the cold shoulder; he did not wish to comprehend and he did not comprehend why his wife especially insisted on going to Tsarskoye, where Betsy lived and from which it was not far to Vronsky's camp.

He did not allow himself to think about this, and he did not think; but at the same time, without any proof to support him, without actually acknowledging it to himself, in the depths of his soul he felt that he was a deceived husband; he had no doubt about it, and he suffered deeply.

How many times in the course of his eight years of happy married life, as he had seen other men's wives playing them false and other husbands deceived, had he not asked himself, "How did it come to this? Why don't they free themselves at any cost from such an absurd situation?" But now, when the evil had fallen on his own head, he not only did not dream of extricating himself from his own trouble, but he would not even admit it, would not admit it for the very reason that it was too horrible and too unnatural.

Since his return from abroad, Alekseï Aleksandrovitch had gone twice to his wife's datcha,—once to dine with her, the other time to pass the evening with some