Page 612 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

most justice, extricate himself from the mud with which
she had spattered him in her fall, and then proceed along
his path of active, honorable, and useful existence.
‘I cannot be made unhappy by the fact that a

contemptible woman has committed a crime. I have only
to find the best way out of the difficult position in which
she has placed me. And I shall find it,’ he said to himself,
frowning more and more. ‘I’m not the first nor the last.’
And to say nothing of historical instances dating from the
‘Fair Helen’ of Menelaus, recently revived in the memory
of all, a whole list of contemporary examples of husbands
with unfaithful wives in the highest society rose before
Alexey Alexandrovitch’s imagination. ‘Daryalov,
Poltavsky, Prince Karibanov, Count Paskudin, Dram....
Yes, even Dram, such an honest, capable
fellow...Semyonov, Tchagin, Sigonin,’ Alexey
Alexandrovitch remembered. ‘Admitting that a certain
quite irrational ridicule falls to the lot of these men, yet I
never saw anything but a misfortune in it, and always felt
sympathy for it,’ Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself,
though indeed this was not the fact, and he had never felt
sympathy for misfortunes of that kind, but the more
frequently he had heard of instances of unfaithful wives
betraying their husbands, the more highly he had thought

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