Page 639 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

roll of unfolded notes done up in a wrapper fell out of it.
She disengaged the letter and began reading it at the end.
‘Preparations shall be made for your arrival here...I attach
particular significance to compliance...’ she read. She ran

on, then back, read it all through, and once more read the
letter all through again from the beginning. When she had
finished, she felt that she was cold all over, and that a
fearful calamity, such as she had not expected, had burst
upon her.
In the morning she had regretted that she had spoken
to her husband, and wished for nothing so much as that
those words could be unspoken. And here this letter
regarded them as unspoken, and gave her what she had
wanted. But now this letter seemed to her more awful
than anything she had been able to conceive.
‘He’s right!’ she said; ‘of course, he’s always right; he’s a
Christian, he’s generous! Yes, vile, base creature! And no
one understands it except me, and no one ever will; and I
can’t explain it. They say he’s so religious, so high-
principled, so upright, so clever; but they don’t see what
I’ve seen. They don’t know how he has crushed my life
for eight years, crushed everything that was living in me—
he has not once even thought that I’m a live woman who
must have love. They don’t know how at every step he’s

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