Page 1315 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

either with child, or nursing a child, forever irritable,
peevish, wretched myself and worrying others, repulsive to
my husband, while the children are growing up unhappy,
badly educated, and penniless. Even now, if it weren’t for

spending the summer at the Levins’, I don’t know how we
should be managing to live. Of course Kostya and Kitty
have so much tact that we don’t feel it; but it can’t go on.
They’ll have children, they won’t be able to keep us; it’s a
drag on them as it is. How is papa, who has hardly
anything left for himself, to help us? So that I can’t even
bring the children up by myself, and may find it hard with
the help of other people, at the cost of humiliation. Why,
even if we suppose the greatest good luck, that the
children don’t die, and I bring them up somehow. At the
very best they’ll simply be decent people. That’s all I can
hope for. And to gain simply that—what agonies, what
toil!... One’s whole life ruined!’ Again she recalled what
the young peasant woman had said, and again she was
revolted at the thought; but she could not help admitting
that there was a grain of brutal truth in the words.
‘Is it far now, Mihail?’ Darya Alexandrovna asked the
counting house clerk, to turn her mind from thoughts that
were frightening her.

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