Page 449 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

Chapter 27

Anna was upstairs, standing before the looking glass,
and, with Annushka’s assistance, pinning the last ribbon on
her gown when she heard carriage wheels crunching the
gravel at the entrance.
‘It’s too early for Betsy,’ she thought, and glancing out
of the window she caught sight of the carriage and the
black hat of Alexey Alexandrovitch, and the ears that she
knew so well sticking up each side of it. ‘How unlucky!
Can he be going to stay the night?’ she wondered, and the
thought of all that might come of such a chance struck her
as so awful and terrible that, without dwelling on it for a
moment, she went down to meet him with a bright and
radiant face; and conscious of the presence of that spirit of
falsehood and deceit in herself that she had come to know
of late, she abandoned herself to that spirit and began
talking, hardly knowing what she was saying.
‘Ah, how nice of you!’ she said, giving her husband her
hand, and greeting Sludin, who was like one of the family,
with a smile. ‘You’re staying the night, I hope?’ was the
first word the spirit of falsehood prompted her to utter;

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