ently delighted with her sentence, and putting out her tongue.
The words fitted in with Anna's thought.
"To avoid what annoys him," she repeated, and a glance at the red-faced man, and his thin companion, showed her that the woman looked on herself as a misunderstood creature, and that her stout husband did not contradict this opinion, and took advantage of it to deceive her. Anna, as it were, read their history, and looked into the most secret depths of their hearts; but it was not interesting, and she went on with her reflections.
"Yes, it annoys me very much, and reason was given to avoid it; therefore it must be done. Why not extinguish the light when it shines on things disgusting to see? But how? Why does the conductor keep hurrying through the car? Why do the young people in this carriage scream so loud? Why do they speak? What are they laughing at? It is all false, all a lie, all deception, all vanity and vexation."
When the train reached the station, Anna went out with the other passengers, and, with the idea of avoiding too rude a contact with the bustling crowd, she hesitated on the platform, trying to recollect why she had come, and what she meant to do. All that seemed to her possible before to do, now seemed to her difficult to execute, especially amid this noisy crowd, which would not leave her in peace. Now the porters came to her, to offer her their services; now some young men, clattering with their heels up and down the platform, and talking loud, observed her curiously; now hurrying passengers pushed her aside.
Finally, remembering that she was proposing to go farther if there was no answer from Vronsky, she stopped an official, and asked him if a coachman had not been there with a letter for Count Vronsky.
"Count Vronsky? Just now some one was here. Princess Sorokin and her daughter met him. What kind of a looking man is this coachman?"
Even while she was talking with the official, the coach-
