• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1447 0

for women. And that love, which, as she felt, should have been concentrated on her alone, had diminished. Therefore, she reasoned, he must have transferred part of it to other women, or to another woman - and she was jealous. She was jealous not of any one woman, but of the diminishing of his love. Having as yet no object for her jealousy, she was looking for one. Following the slightest hint, she transferred her jealousy from one object to another. Now she was jealous of those coarse women with whom he could so easily associate himself thanks to his bachelor connections; then she was jealous of the society women he might meet, or again of some imaginary girl he wanted to marry after breaking the liaison with her. And this last jealousy tormented her most of all, especially as he himself, in a moment of candour, had imprudently told her that his mother understood him so little that she allowed herself to insist that he should marry Princess Sorokin.

And, being jealous, Anna was indignant with him and sought pretexts for indignation in everything. She blamed him for everything that was difficult in her situation. The painful state of expectation, between heaven and earth, in which she lived in Moscow, Alexei Alexandrovich’s slowness and indecision, her seclusion - she ascribed it all to him. If he loved her, he would understand the full difficulty of her situation and would take her out of it. The fact that she was living in Moscow and not in the country was also his fault. He could not live buried in the country, as she wanted to. Society was necessary for him, and he put her into that terrible position, the difficulty of which he did not wish to understand. And it was he again who was to blame for her being for ever separated from her son.

Even the rare moments of tenderness that occurred between them did not bring her peace: in his tenderness she now saw a tinge of tranquillity, of assurance, which had not been there before and which irritated her.

It was already dark. Alone, waiting for him to come back from a bachelors’ dinner he had gone to, Anna paced up and down his study (the room where the noise of the street was heard least) and mentally went through the nuances of yesterday’s quarrel in all their detail. Going further back from the memorably insulting words of the argument to what had caused them, she finally came to the beginning of their conversation. For a long time she could not believe that the quarrel had begun from such a harmless conversation, not close to either of their hearts. Yet it was really so. It had all begun with him laughing at women’s high schools, which he considered unnecessary, and her defending them. He referred disrespectfully to women’s education in general and said that Hannah, Anna’s English protégée, did not need any knowledge of physics.

That irritated Anna. She saw it as a contemptuous allusion to her concerns. And she devised and spoke a phrase that would pay him back for the pain he had caused her.

‘I don’t expect you to be mindful of me or my feelings as a loving man would be, but I do expect simple tactfulness,’ she said.

And indeed he turned red with vexation and said something unpleasant. She did not remember what reply she made to him, but only that he, obviously also wishing to cause her pain, responded by saying:

‘It’s true I’m not interested in your concern for this girl, because I can see it’s unnatural.’

The cruelty with which he destroyed the world she had so laboriously built up for herself in order to endure her difficult life, the unfairness with which he accused her of being false and unnatural, made her explode.

‘I am very sorry that only coarse and material things seem understandable and natural to you,’ she said and walked out of the room.

When he came to her that evening, they did not mention the quarrel that had taken place, but they both felt that, though it had been smoothed over, it was still there.

Today he had not been home all day, and she felt so lonely and so pained to have quarrelled with him that she wanted forget it all, to forgive and