Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/28

 "Well, show her in quick!" said Oblonsky, frowning with annoyance.

The petitioner, the wife of Captain Kalanin, asked some impossible and nonsensical favor; but Stepan Arkadyevitch, according to his custom, gave her a comfortable seat, listened to her story without interrupting, and then gave her careful advice to whom and how to make her application, and in lively and eloquent style wrote, in his big, scrawling, but handsome and legible hand, a note to the person who might aid her. Having dismissed the captain's wife, Stepan Arkadyevitch took his hat and stood for a moment trying to remember whether he had forgotten anything. He seemed to have forgotten nothing except what he wanted to forget—his wife.

"Ah, yes!"

He dropped his head, and a gloomy expression came over his handsome face.

"To go or not to go," he said to himself; and an inner voice told him that it was not advisable to go, that there was no way out of it except through deception, that to straighten, to smooth out, their relations was impossible, because it was impossible to make her attractive and lovable again, or to make him an old man insensible to passion. Nothing but deception and lying could come of it, and deception and lying were opposed to his nature.

"But it must be done sometime; it can't remain so always," he said, striving to gain courage. He straightened himself, took out a cigarette, lighted it, puffed at it two or three times, threw it into a mother-of-pearl-lined ash-tray, went with quick steps through the sitting-room, and opened the door into his wife's sleeping-room.