Page 611 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

hardly able to believe in his own good luck, feels all at
once that what has so long poisoned his existence and
enchained his attention, exists no longer, and that he can
live and think again, and take interest in other things

besides his tooth. This feeling Alexey Alexandrovitch was
experiencing. The agony had been strange and terrible,
but now it was over; he felt that he could live again and
think of something other than his wife.
‘No honor, no heart, no religion; a corrupt woman. I
always knew it and always saw it, though I tried to deceive
myself to spare her,’ he said to himself. And it actually
seemed to him that he always had seen it: he recalled
incidents of their past life, in which he had never seen
anything wrong before—now these incidents proved
clearly that she had always been a corrupt woman. ‘I made
a mistake in linking my life to hers; but there was nothing
wrong in my mistake, and so I cannot be unhappy. It’s not
I that am to blame,’ he told himself, ‘but she. But I have
nothing to do with her. She does not exist for me..’
Everything relating to her and her son, towards whom
his sentiments were as much changed as towards her,
ceased to interest him. The only thing that interested him
now was the question of in what way he could best, with
most propriety and comfort for himself, and thus with

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