Page 1131 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

Countess Lidia.’
This letter attained the secret object which Countess
Lidia Ivanovna had concealed from herself. It wounded
Anna to the quick.

For his part, Alexey Alexandrovitch, on returning
home from Lidia Ivanovna’s, could not all that day
concentrate himself on his usual pursuits, and find that
spiritual peace of one saved and believing which he had
felt of late.
The thought of his wife, who had so greatly sinned
against him, and towards whom he had been so saintly, as
Countess Lidia Ivanovna had so justly told him, ought not
to have troubled him; but he was not easy; he could not
understand the book he was reading; he could not drive
away harassing recollections of his relations with her, of
the mistake which, as it now seemed, he had made in
regard to her. The memory of how he had received her
confession of infidelity on their way home from the races
(especially that he had insisted only on the observance of
external decorum, and had not sent a challenge) tortured
him like a remorse. He was tortured too by the thought of
the letter he had written her; and most of all, his
forgiveness, which nobody wanted, and his care of the

1130 of 1759