Page 616 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

the guilty wife would be repudiated, was impossible of
attainment. He saw that the complex conditions of the life
they led made the coarse proofs of his wife’s guilt,
required by the law, out of the question; he saw that a

certain refinement in that life would not admit of such
proofs being brought forward, even if he had them, and
that to bring forward such proofs would damage him in
the public estimation more than it would her.
An attempt at divorce could lead to nothing but a
public scandal, which would be a perfect godsend to his
enemies for calumny and attacks on his high position in
society. His chief object, to define the position with the
least amount of disturbance possible, would not be
attained by divorce either. Moreover, in the event of
divorce, or even of an attempt to obtain a divorce, it was
obvious that the wife broke off all relations with the
husband and threw in her lot with the lover. And in spite
of the complete, as he supposed, contempt and
indifference he now felt for his wife, at the bottom of his
heart, Alexey Alexandrovitch still had one feeling left in
regard to her—a disinclination to see her free to throw in
her lot with Vronsky, so that her crime would be to her
advantage. The mere notion of this so exasperated Alexey
Alexandrovitch, that directly it rose to his mind he

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