Page 617 - ANNA KARENINA
P. 617
Anna Karenina
groaned with inward agony, and got up and changed his
place in the carriage, and for a long while after, he sat with
scowling brows, wrapping his numbed and bony legs in
the fleecy rug.
‘Apart from formal divorce, One might still do like
Karibanov, Paskudin, and that good fellow Dram—that is,
separate from one’s wife,’ he went on thinking, when he
had regained his composure. But this step too presented
the same drawback of public scandal as a divorce, and
what was more, a separation, quite as much as a regular
divorce, flung his wife into the arms of Vronsky. ‘No, it’s
out of the question, out of the question!’ he said again,
twisting his rug about him again. ‘I cannot be unhappy,
but neither she nor he ought to be happy.’
The feeling of jealousy, which had tortured him during
the period of uncertainty, had passed away at the instant
when the tooth had been with agony extracted by his
wife’s words. But that feeling had been replaced by
another, the desire, not merely that she should not be
triumphant, but that she should get due punishment for
her crime. He did not acknowledge this feeling, but at the
bottom of his heart he longed for her to suffer for having
destroyed his peace of mind—his honor. And going once
again over the conditions inseparable from a duel, a
616 of 1759