Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/403

 "Very well," she replied; and as soon as he left the room she opened the packet with trembling fingers. A roll of fresh, new bank-notes, in a wrapper, fell out first. She unfolded the letter and began to read it at the end. "All the necessary measures for your return hither will be taken I attach a very particular importance to your attention to my request," she read.

She ran it through hastily backwards, a second time, read it all through, and then she read it again from beginning to end. When she had finished it, she felt chilled, and had the consciousness that some terrible and unexpected misfortune was crushing her.

That very morning she had regretted her confession to her husband, and desired nothing so much as that she had not spoken those words. And this letter treated her words as if they had not been spoken, gave her what she desired. And yet it seemed to her more cruel than anything that she could have imagined.

"Right, he is right!" she murmured. "Of course he is always right; he is a Christian, he is magnanimous! Yes, the low, vile man! No one understands, no one knows him but me; and I cannot explain it. People say, 'He is a religious, moral, honorable, intellectual man.' But they have not seen what I have seen; they do not know how for eight years he has crushed my life, crushed everything that was vital in me; how he has never once thought of me as a living woman who needed love. They don't know how at every step he has insulted me, and yet remained self-satisfied. Have I not striven, striven with all my powers, to find a justification of my life? Have I not done my best to love him, to love his son when I could not love my husband? But the time came when I found I could no longer deceive myself, that I am a living being, that I am not to blame, that God has made me so, that I must love and live. And now what? He might kill me, he might kill him, and I could endure it, I could forgive it. But no, he....

"Why should I not have foreseen what he would do? He does exactly in accordance with his despicable char-