Page 1114 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

Chapter 23

The Countess Lidia Ivanovna had, as a very young and
sentimental girl, been married to a wealthy man of high
rank, an extremely good-natured, jovial, and extremely
dissipated rake. Two months after marriage her husband
abandoned her, and her impassioned protestations of
affection he met with a sarcasm and even hostility that
people knowing the count’s good heart, and seeing no
defects in the sentimental Lidia, were at loss to explain.
Though they were divorced and lived apart, yet whenever
the husband met the wife, he invariably behaved to her
with the same malignant irony, the cause of which was
incomprehensible.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna had long given up being in
love with her husband, but from that time she had never
given up being in love with someone. She was in love
with several people at once, both men and women; she
had been in love with almost everyone who had been
particularly distinguished in any way. She was in love with
all the new princes and princesses who married into the
imperial family; she had been in love with a high dignitary
of the Church, a vicar, and a parish priest; she had been in

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