Page 1108 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

‘Dear friend,’ repeated Lidia Ivanovna.
‘It’s not the loss of what I have not now, it’s not that!’
pursued Alexey Alexandrovitch. ‘I do not grieve for that.
But I cannot help feeling humiliated before other people

for the position I am placed in. It is wrong, but I can’t
help it, I can’t help it.’
‘Not you it was performed that noble act of
forgiveness, at which I was moved to ecstasy, and
everyone else too, but He, working within your heart,’
said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, raising her eyes rapturously,
‘and so you cannot be ashamed of your act.’
Alexey Alexandrovitch knitted his brows, and crooking
his hands, he cracked his fingers.
‘One must know all the facts,’ he said in his thin voice.
‘A man’s strength has its limits, countess, and I have
reached my limits. The whole day I have had to be
making arrangements, arrangements about household
matters arising’ (he emphasized the word arising) ‘from my
new, solitary position. The servants, the governess, the
accounts.... These pinpricks have stabbed me to the heart,
and I have not the strength to bear it. At dinner...
yesterday, I was almost getting up from the dinner table. I
could not bear the way my son looked at me. He did not
ask me the meaning of it all, but he wanted to ask, and I

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