"But what is necessary? You say I must marry Alekseï, and that I don't think about that. I not think about that!" she exclaimed, and the color flew over her face. She got up, straightened herself, and began walking up and down the room with her graceful gait, stopping now and then. "Not think about that! There is not a day or an hour when I do not think of it, and blame myself for thinking of it;—because the thought of it will make me mad—will make me mad," she repeated. "When I think of it, I cannot go to sleep without morphine. But very good! let us speak calmly. You talk about divorce, but in the first place he would not consent; he is now under the Countess Lidya's influence."
Darya Aleksandrovna, reclining in her easy-chair with a sympathetic and sorrowful face, watched Anna as she walked up and down. She shook her head.
"We must try," said she.
"Suppose I should try. What does it mean?" she asked, evidently expressing a thought which she had gone over in her own mind a thousand times and had learned by heart. "It means that I, who hate him, and who have nevertheless confessed my guilt to him—I believe in his magnanimity—that I humiliate myself to write him. .... Well! suppose I make the effort; suppose I do it. I shall receive either an insulting answer or his consent. Good, I get his consent ...." Anna at this time was in the farthest end of the room and stopped there to arrange a window-curtain. "I get his consent .... but my s-son? You see he will not give him to me. .... I No, he will grow up despising me, living with his father, whom I have left. Just think, I love these two almost equally, both more than myself; these two, Serozha and Alekseï."
She advanced to the middle of the room and stood in front of Dolly, pressing her hands to her breast. In her white peignoir she seemed wonderfully tall and large. She bent her head, and, looking out of her moist, shining eyes on the little, homely, lean Dolly, sitting there in her darned nightgown and nightcap, all a-tremble with emotion, went on: -
