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By Root 1434 0

for her. His nearness was always pleasing to her. All the traits of his character, which she was coming to know more and more, were inexpressibly dear to her. His appearance, changed by civilian clothes, was as attractive to her as to a young girl in love. In everything he said, thought and did, she saw something especially noble and lofty. Her admiration for him often frightened her: she sought and failed to find anything not beautiful in him. She did not dare show him her awareness of her own nullity before him. It seemed to her that if he knew it, he would stop loving her sooner; and she feared nothing so much now, though she had no reason for it, as losing his love. But she could not help being grateful to him for his attitude towards her and showing him how much she appreciated it. He, who in her opinion had such a clear vocation for statesmanship, in which he ought to have played a prominent role, had sacrificed his ambition for her and never showed the slightest regret. He was more lovingly respectful of her than ever, and the thought that she must never be made to feel her awkward position did not leave him for a moment. He, manly as he was, not only never contradicted her, but had no will of his own, and seemed to be concerned only with anticipating her wishes. And she could not help appreciating it, though the very strain of his attentiveness towards her, the atmosphere of solicitude he surrounded her with, was sometimes burdensome to her.

Vronsky meanwhile, despite the full realization of what he had desired for so long, was not fully happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires. At first, after he had united with her and put on civilian clothes, he felt all the enchantment of freedom in general, which he had not known before, and of the freedom of love, and he was content, but not for long. He soon felt arise in his soul a desire for desires, an anguish. Independently of his will, he began to grasp at every fleeting caprice, taking it for a desire and a goal. Sixteen hours of the day had to be occupied by something, since they lived abroad in complete freedom, outside the sphere of conventional social life that had occupied their time in Petersburg. Of the pleasures of bachelor life that had diverted him during his previous trips abroad he could not even think, because one attempt of that sort, a late supper with acquaintances, had produced in Anna a dejection both unexpected and exaggerated. Contacts with local or Russian society, given the uncertainty of their position, were also impossible. Looking at places of interest, not to mention that they had already seen everything, did not have for him, a Russian and an intelligent man, the inexplicable importance that Englishmen are able to ascribe to it.

And as a hungry animal seizes upon every object it comes across, hoping to find food in it, so Vronsky quite unconsciously seized now upon politics, now upon new books, now upon painting.

Since he had had an ability for painting from an early age and, not knowing how to spend his money, had begun to collect engravings, he now chose painting, began studying it, and put into it that idle store of desires which called for satisfaction.

He had an ability to understand art and to imitate it faithfully, tastefully, and thought he had precisely what was needed for an artist. After some hesitation over what kind of painting he would choose - religious, historical, genre or realistic - he started to paint. He understood all kinds and could be inspired by one or another; but he could not imagine that one could be utterly ignorant of all the kinds of painting and be inspired directly by what was in one’s soul, unconcerned whether what one painted belonged to any particular kind. Since he did not know that, and was inspired not directly by life but indirectly by life already embodied in art, he became inspired very quickly and easily, and