Page 315 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

There, looking at her table, with the malachite blotting
case lying at the top and an unfinished letter, his thoughts
suddenly changed. He began to think of her, of what she
was thinking and feeling. For the first time he pictured

vividly to himself her personal life, her ideas, her desires,
and the idea that she could and should have a separate life
of her own seemed to him so alarming that he made haste
to dispel it. It was the chasm which he was afraid to peep
into. To put himself in thought and feeling in another
person’s place was a spiritual exercise not natural to Alexey
Alexandrovitch. He looked on this spiritual exercise as a
harmful and dangerous abuse of the fancy.
‘And the worst of it all,’ thought he, ‘is that just now,
at the very moment when my great work is approaching
completion’ (he was thinking of the project he was
bringing forward at the time), ‘when I stand in need of all
my mental peace and all my energies, just now this stupid
worry should fall foul of me. But what’s to be done? I’m
not one of those men who submit to uneasiness and worry
without having the force of character to face them.’
‘I must think it over, come to a decision, and put it out
of my mind,’ he said aloud.
‘The question of her feelings, of what has passed and
may be passing in her soul, that’s not my affair; that’s the

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