Page 1115 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

love with a journalist, three Slavophiles, with Komissarov,
with a minister, a doctor, an English missionary and
Karenin. All these passions constantly waning or growing
more ardent, did not prevent her from keeping up the

most extended and complicated relations with the court
and fashionable society. But from the time that after
Karenin’s trouble she took him under her special
protection, from the time that she set to work in Karenin’s
household looking after his welfare, she felt that all her
other attachments were not the real thing, and that she
was now genuinely in love, and with no one but Karenin.
The feeling she now experienced for him seemed to her
stronger than any of her former feelings. Analyzing her
feeling, and comparing it with former passions, she
distinctly perceived that she would not have been in love
with Komissarov if he had not saved the life of the Tsar,
that she would not have been in love with Ristitch-
Kudzhitsky if there had been no Slavonic question, but
that she loved Karenin for himself, for his lofty,
uncomprehended soul, for the sweet—to her—high notes
of his voice, for his drawling intonation, his weary eyes,
his character, and his soft white hands with their swollen
veins. She was not simply overjoyed at meeting him, but
she sought in his face signs of the impression she was

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