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 not changed toward me," she said in Russian, looking at him with a peculiar gleam in her eyes which he could not understand; "why don't you look at me?"

He looked at her, he saw all her beauty, of her face, of the toilet, which was so becoming to her; but now this beauty and this elegance were precisely what irritated him.

"You know very well that my feelings cannot change; but I beg you not to go out, I beseech you," he said again in French, with a prayer in his voice, but with a cold look in his eyes.

She did not hear his words, but noticed only the coldness of his look, and replied with an injured air:—

"And I for my part beg you to explain why I should not go."

"Because it may cause you ...."

He grew confused.

"I don't understand at all: Yashvin n'est pas compromettant, and the Princess Varvara is no worse than anybody else. Ah! here she is!"

CHAPTER XXXIII

For the first time in his life Vronsky felt toward Anna a sensation of vexation bordering on anger, on account of her intentional misunderstanding of her position. This feeling was intensified by the fact that he could not explain the reason of his vexation. If he had frankly said what was in his mind, he would have said:—

"To appear at the opera in such a toilet, with a notorious person like the princess, is equivalent to throwing down the gauntlet to public opinion; to confessing yourself a lost woman, and, consequently, renouncing all hope of ever going into society again."

He could not say that to her.

"Why did she not understand it? What has happened to her." he asked himself.

He felt at one and the same time a lessened es-