Anna Karenina - Part 1 - Page 112/119

Pravdin was a well-known Panslavist abroad, and Countess Lidia

Ivanovna described the purport of his letter.

Then the countess told her of more disagreements and intrigues

against the work of the unification of the churches, and departed

in haste, as she had that day to be at the meeting of some

society and also at the Slavonic committee.

"It was all the same before, of course; but why was it I didn't

notice it before?" Anna asked herself. "Or has she been very

much irritated today? It's really ludicrous; her object is doing

good; she a Christian, yet she's always angry; and she always has

enemies, and always enemies in the name of Christianity and doing

good."

After Countess Lidia Ivanovna another friend came, the wife of a

chief secretary, who told her all the news of the town. At three

o'clock she too went away, promising to come to dinner. Alexey

Alexandrovitch was at the ministry. Anna, left alone, spent the

time till dinner in assisting at her son's dinner (he dined apart

from his parents) and in putting her things in order, and in

reading and answering the notes and letters which had accumulated

on her table.

The feeling of causeless shame, which she had felt on the

journey, and her excitement, too, had completely vanished. In

the habitual conditions of her life she felt again resolute and

irreproachable.

She recalled with wonder her state of mind on the previous day.

"What was it? Nothing. Vronsky said something silly, which it

was easy to put a stop to, and I answered as I ought to have

done. To speak of it to my husband would be unnecessary and out

of the question. To speak of it would be to attach importance to

what has no importance." She remembered how she had told her

husband of what was almost a declaration made her at Petersburg

by a young man, one of her husband's subordinates, and how Alexey

Alexandrovitch had answered that every woman living in the world

was exposed to such incidents, but that he had the fullest

confidence in her tact, and could never lower her and himself by

jealousy. "So then there's no reason to speak of it? And

indeed, thank God, there's nothing to speak of," she told

herself.