Page 631 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

table. ‘You can go. I’ll dress at once and come down. I
need nothing.’
Annushka went out, but Anna did not begin dressing,
and sat in the same position, her head and hands hanging

listlessly, and every now and then she shivered all over,
seemed as though she would make some gesture, utter
some word, and sank back into lifelessness again. She
repeated continually, ‘My God! my God!’ But neither
‘God’ nor ‘my’ had any meaning to her. The idea of
seeking help in her difficulty in religion was as remote
from her as seeking help from Alexey Alexandrovitch
himself, although she had never had doubts of the faith in
which she had been brought up. She knew that the
support of religion was possible only upon condition of
renouncing what made up for her the whole meaning of
life. She was not simply miserable, she began to feel alarm
at the new spiritual condition, never experienced before,
in which she found herself. She felt as though everything
were beginning to be double in her soul, just as objects
sometimes appear double to over-tired eyes. She hardly
knew at times what it was she feared, and what she hoped
for. Whether she feared or desired what had happened, or
what was going to happen, and exactly what she longed
for, she could not have said.

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