Page 456 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

tones, not losing one word, and every word struck her as
false, and stabbed her ears with pain.
When the three-mile steeplechase was beginning, she
bent forward and gazed with fixed eyes at Vronsky as he

went up to his horse and mounted, and at the same time
she heard that loathsome, never-ceasing voice of her
husband. She was in an agony of terror for Vronsky, but a
still greater agony was the never-ceasing, as it seemed to
her, stream of her husband’s shrill voice with its familiar
intonations.
‘I’m a wicked woman, a lost woman,’ she thought; ‘but
I don’t like lying, I can’t endure falsehood, while as for
HIM (her husband) it’s the breath of his life—falsehood.
He knows all about it, he sees it all; what does he care if
he can talk so calmly? If he were to kill me, if he were to
kill Vronsky, I might respect him. No, all he wants is
falsehood and propriety,’ Anna said to herself, not
considering exactly what it was she wanted of her
husband, and how she would have liked to see him
behave. She did not understand either that Alexey
Alexandrovitch’s peculiar loquacity that day, so
exasperating to her, was merely the expression of his
inward distress and uneasiness. As a child that has been
hurt skips about, putting all his muscles into movement to

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