Page 1100 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

he would have been wounded, unhappy, but he would
not have been in the hopeless position—incomprehensible
to himself—in which he felt himself now. He could not
now reconcile his immediate past, his tenderness, his love

for his sick wife, and for the other man’s child with what
was now the case, that is with the fact that, as it were, in
return for all this he now found himself alone, put to
shame, a laughing-stock, needed by no one, and despised
by everyone.
For the first two days after his wife’s departure Alexey
Alexandrovitch received applicants for assistance and his
chief secretary, drove to the committee, and went down
to dinner in the dining room as usual. Without giving
himself a reason for what he was doing, he strained every
nerve of his being for those two days, simply to preserve
an appearance of composure, and even of indifference.
Answering inquiries about the disposition of Anna
Arkadyevna’s rooms and belongings, he had exercised
immense self-control to appear like a man in whose eyes
what had occurred was not unforeseen nor out of the
ordinary course of events, and he attained his aim: no one
could have detected in him signs of despair. But on the
second day after her departure, when Korney gave him a
bill from a fashionable draper’s shop, which Anna had

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