Page 1172 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

She gave the baby back to the nurse, let her go, and
opened the locket in which there was Seryozha’s portrait
when he was almost of the same age as the girl. She got
up, and, taking off her hat, took up from a little table an

album in which there were photographs of her son at
different ages. She wanted to compare them, and began
taking them out of the album. She took them all out
except one, the latest and best photograph. In it he was in
a white smock, sitting astride a chair, with frowning eyes
and smiling lips. It was his best, most characteristic
expression. With her little supple hands, her white,
delicate fingers, that moved with a peculiar intensity
today, she pulled at a corner of the photograph, but the
photograph had caught somewhere, and she could not get
it out. There was no paper knife on the table, and so,
pulling out the photograph that was next to her son’s (it
was a photograph of Vronsky taken at Rome in a round
hat and with long hair), she used it to push out her son’s
photograph. ‘Oh, here is he!’ she said, glancing at the
portrait of Vronsky, and she suddenly recalled that he was
the cause of her present misery. She had not once thought
of him all the morning. But now, coming all at once upon
that manly, noble face, so familiar and so dear to her, she
felt a sudden rush of love for him.

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