'But you've rather a feverish-looking color,' he said, laying stress on the word 'feverish.'
'We've been talking too much,' said Betsy. 'I feel it's selfishness on my part, and I am going away.'
She got up, but Anna, suddenly flushing, quickly caught at her hand.
'No, wait a minute, please. I must tell you...no, you.' she turned to Alexey Alexandrovitch, and her neck and brow were suffused with crimson. 'I won't and can't keep anything secret from you,' she said.
Alexey Alexandrovitch cracked his fingers and bowed his head.
'Betsy's been telling me that Count Vronsky wants to come here to say good-bye before his departure for Tashkend.' She did not look at her husband, and was evidently in haste to have everything out, however hard it might be for her. 'I told her I could not receive him.'
'You said, my dear, that it would depend on Alexey Alexandrovitch,' Betsy corrected her.
'Oh, no, I can't receive him; and what object would there....' She stopped suddenly, and glanced inquiringly at her husband (he did not look at her). 'In short, I don't wish it....'
Alexey Alexandrovitch advanced and would have taken her hand.
Her first impulse was to jerk back her hand from the damp hand with big swollen veins that sought hers, but with an obvious effort to control herself she pressed his hand.
'I am very grateful to you for your confidence, but...' he said, feeling with confusion and annoyance that what he could decide easily and clearly by himself, he could not discuss before Princess Tverskaya, who to him stood for the incarnation of that brute force which would inevitably control him in the life he led in the eyes of the world, and hinder him from giving way to his feeling of love and forgiveness. He stopped short, looking at Princess Tverskaya.
'Well, good-bye, my darling,' said Betsy, getting up. She kissed Anna, and went out. Alexey Alexandrovitch escorted her out.
'Alexey Alexandrovitch! I know you are a truly magnanimous man,' said Betsy, stopping in the little drawing- room, and with special warmth shaking hands with him once more. 'I am an outsider, but I so love her and respect you that I venture to advise. Receive him. Alexey Vronsky is the soul of honor, and he is going away to Tashkend.'
'Thank you, princess, for your sympathy and advice. But the question of whether my wife can or cannot see anyone she must decide herself.'
He said this from habit, lifting his brows with dignity, and reflected immediately that whatever his words might be, there could be no dignity in his position. And he saw this by the suppressed, malicious, and ironical smile with which Betsy glanced at him after this phrase.
Chapter 20
Alexey Alexandrovitch took leave of Betsy in the drawing room, and went to his wife. She was lying down, but hearing his steps she sat up hastily in her former attitude, and looked in a scared way at him. He saw she had been crying.
'I am very grateful for your confidence in me.' He repeated gently in Russian the phrase he had said in Betsy's presence in French, and sat down beside her. When he spoke to her in Russian, using the Russian 'thou' of intimacy and affection, it was insufferably irritating to Anna. 'And I am very grateful for your decision. I, too, imagine that since he is going away, there is no sort of necessity for Count Vronsky to come here. However, if...'
'But I've said so already, so why repeat it?' Anna suddenly interrupted him with an irritation she could not succeed in repressing. 'No sort of necessity,' she thought, 'for a man to come and say good-bye to the woman he loves, for whom he was ready to ruin himself, and has ruined himself, and who cannot live without him. No sort of necessity!' she compressed her lips, and dropped her burning eyes to his hands with their swollen veins. They were rubbing each other.
'Let us never speak of it,' she added more calmly.
'I have left this question to you to decide, and I am very glad to see...' Alexey Alexandrovitch was beginning.
'That my wish coincides with your own,' she finished quickly, exasperated at his talking so slowly while she knew beforehand all he would say.
'Yes,' he assented; 'and Princess Tverskaya's interference in the most difficult private affairs is utterly uncalled for. She especially...'
'I don't believe a word of what's said about her,' said Anna quickly. 'I know she really cares for me.'
Alexey Alexandrovitch sighed and said nothing. She played nervously with the tassel of her dressing-gown, glancing at him with that torturing sensation of physical repulsion for which she blamed herself, though she could not control it. Her only desire now was to be rid of his oppressive presence.
'I have just sent for the doctor,' said Alexey Alexandrovitch.
'I am very well; what do I want the doctor for?'
'No, the little one cries, and they say the nurse hasn't enough milk.'
'Why didn't you let me nurse her, when I begged to? Anyway' (Alexey Alexandrovitch knew what was meant by that 'anyway'), 'she's a baby, and they're killing her.' She rang the bell and ordered the baby to be brought her. 'I begged to nurse her, I wasn't allowed to, and now I'm blamed for it.'
'I don't blame...'
'Yes, you do blame me! My God! why didn't I die!' And she broke into sobs. 'Forgive me, I'm nervous, I'm unjust,' she said, controlling herself, 'but do go away...'
'No, it can't go on like this,' Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself decidedly as he left his wife's room.
Never had the impossibility of his position in the world's eyes, and his wife's hatred of him, and altogether the might of that mysterious brutal force that guided his life against his spiritual inclinations, and exacted conformity
