Page 1314 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

indifference to everything, and most of all—hideousness.
Kitty, young and pretty as she is, even Kitty has lost her
looks; and I when I’m with child become hideous, I know
it. The birth, the agony, the hideous agonies, that last

moment...then the nursing, the sleepless nights, the fearful
pains...’
Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection
of the pain from sore breasts which she had suffered with
almost every child. ‘Then the children’s illnesses, that
everlasting apprehension; then bringing them up; evil
propensities’ (she thought of little Masha’s crime among
the raspberries), ‘education, Latin—it’s all so
incomprehensible and difficult. And on the top of it all,
the death of these children.’ And there rose again before
her imagination the cruel memory, that always tore her
mother’s heart, of the death of her last little baby, who had
died of croup; his funeral, the callous indifference of all at
the little pink coffin, and her own torn heart, and her
lonely anguish at the sight of the pale little brow with its
projecting temples, and the open, wondering little mouth
seen in the coffin at the moment when it was being
covered with the little pink lid with a cross braided on it.
‘And all this, what’s it for? What is to come of it all?
That I’m wasting my life, never having a moment’s peace,

1313 of 1759