"Happiness!" she said with horror and loathing and her horror
unconsciously infected him. "For pity's sake, not a word, not a
word more."
She rose quickly and moved away from him.
"Not a word more," she repeated, and with a look of chill
despair, incomprehensible to him, she parted from him. She felt
that at that moment she could not put into words the sense of
shame, of rapture, and of horror at this stepping into a new
life, and she did not want to speak of it, to vulgarize this
feeling by inappropriate words. But later too, and the next day
and the third day, she still found no words in which she could
express the complexity of her feelings; indeed, she could not
even find thoughts in which she could clearly think out all that
was in her soul.
She said to herself: "No, just now I can't think of it, later on,
when I am calmer." But this calm for thought never came; every
time the thought rose of what she had done and what would happen
to her, and what she ought to do, a horror came over her and she
drove those thoughts away.
"Later, later," she said--"when I am calmer."
But in dreams, when she had no control over her thoughts, her
position presented itself to her in all its hideous nakedness.
One dream haunted her almost every night. She dreamed that both
were her husbands at once, that both were lavishing caresses on
her. Alexey Alexandrovitch was weeping, kissing her hands, and
saying, "How happy we are now!" And Alexey Vronsky was there
too, and he too was her husband. And she was marveling that it
had once seemed impossible to her, was explaining to them,
laughing, that this was ever so much simpler, and that now both
of them were happy and contented. But this dream weighed on her
like a nightmare, and she awoke from it in terror.