Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/388

 be exposed to danger? What would happen? This would happen, that I, knowing in advance that the matter would never result in any danger, should seem to people to be anxious to win notoriety by a challenge. It would be dishonorable, it would be false, it would be an act of deception to others and to myself. A duel is not to be thought of, and no one expects it of me. My sole aim should be to preserve my reputation, and not to suffer any unnecessary interruption of my activity."

The service of the State, always important in the eyes of Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, now appeared to him of extraordinary importance.

Having decided against the duel, Alekseï Aleksandrovitch began to discuss the question of divorce—a second expedient which had been employed by several of the men whom he had in mind. Calling to mind all the well-known examples of divorce—and there had been many in the very highest circles of society, as he well knew—he could not name a single case where the aim of the divorce had been such as he proposed. The husband in each case had sold or given up the faithless wife; and the guilty party, who had no right to a second marriage, had entered into relations, imagined to be sanctioned, with a new husband.

Alekseï Aleksandrovitch saw that, in his case at least, legal divorce, whereby the faithless wife would be repudiated, was impossible. He saw that the complicated conditions of his life precluded the possibility of those coarse proofs which the law demanded for the establishment of a wife's guilt; he saw that the distinguished refinement of his life precluded the public use of such proofs, even if they existed, and that the public use of these proofs would cause him to fall lower in public opinion than the guilty wife.

Divorce could only end in a scandalous lawsuit, which would be a godsend to his enemies and to lovers of gossip, and would degrade him from his high position in society. His principal object, the determination of his position with the least possible confusion, would not be attained by a divorce.