Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/29

 CHAPTER IV

, surrounded by all sorts of things thrown in confusion about the room, was standing before an open chiffonnier from which she was removing the contents. She had on a dressing-sack, and the thin braids of her once luxuriant and beautiful hair were pinned back. Her face was thin and sunken, and her big eyes, protruding from her pale, worn face, had an expression of terror. When she heard her husband's steps she stopped in her work and, gazing at the door, vainly tried to give her face a stern and forbidding expression. She was conscious that she feared him and that she dreaded the coming interview. She was in the act of doing what she had attempted to do a dozen times during those three days: gathering up her own effects and those of her children to carry to her mother's house; and again she could not bring herself to do it, yet now, as before, she said to herself that things could not remain as they were, that she must take some measures to punish him, to put him to shame, to have some revenge on him, if only for a small part of the anguish that he had caused her. She still kept saying that she should leave him, but she felt that it was impossible; it was impossible because she could not cease to consider him her husband and to love him. Moreover, she confessed that if here in her own home she had barely succeeded in looking after her five children, it would be far worse where she was going with them. In the course of these three days the youngest child had been made ill by eating some poor soup, and the rest had been obliged to go almost dinnerless the night before. She felt that it was impossible to leave, yet for the sake of deceiving herself she was collecting her things and pretending that she was going.

When she saw her husband, she thrust her hands into a drawer of the chiffonnier, as if trying to find something, and looked at him only when he came close up to her. But her face, to which she had intended to give