Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/980

 Many families remain for years in places of which the husband and wife both are tired and disgusted, simply because there is neither full discord nor full concord.

Unendurable to Vronsky and Anna was their life in Moscow, in the heat and dust, when the sun shone, not now with its springtime beauty, but with summer fervor, and all the trees along the boulevards had been long in leaf, and the leaves were already thick with dust. Though they had long before decided to remove to Vozdvizhenskoye, still they continued to live in Moscow, which was detestable to them both, and the reason for this was that of late there had been no harmony between them.

The exasperation which tended to keep them apart had no tangible cause, and all attempts at an explanation, instead of closing the chasm, only widened it. It was an internal irritation which, as far as she was concerned, had for its source the diminution of his love for her, and on his part his annoyance because, thanks to her, he found himself placed in an embarrassing position, which she, instead of trying to relieve, made still more difficult. Neither he nor she formulated any definite complaints, but each considered the other in the wrong, and at every opportunity tried to make this evident.

She considered that he, with ail his habits, ideas, desires, with all his spiritual and physical tendencies, had one distinguishing quality,—the power of loving women; and this love, she felt, ought by good rights to be wholly concentrated on her. This love had diminished; consequently, in her opinion, a part of this love must necessarily be transferred to others or to some other woman, and—she was jealous. She was jealous, not of any definite woman, but of his diminished love for her.

Having as yet no definite object for her jealousy to rest on, she was on the watch for one. On the slightest pretext she would transfer her jealousy from one person to another. Sometimes she suspected him of low amours, which he might enter into as an unmarried man about town; sometimes she distrusted ladies whom he might meet in society; then again, with the imaginary young lady whom he would be likely to marry in case he broke