Page 707 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

Darya Alexandrovna told me, go to see them? Can I help
showing that I know what she told me? And me to go
magnanimously to forgive her, and have pity on her! Me
go through a performance before her of forgiving, and

deigning to bestow my love on her!... What induced
Darya Alexandrovna to tell me that? By chance I might
have seen her, then everything would have happened of
itself; but, as it is, it’s out of the question, out of the
question!’
Darya Alexandrovna sent him a letter, asking him for a
side-saddle for Kitty’s use. ‘I’m told you have a side-
saddle,’ she wrote to him; ‘I hope you will bring it over
yourself.’
This was more than he could stand. How could a
woman of any intelligence, of any delicacy, put her sister
in such a humiliating position! He wrote ten notes, and
tore them all up, and sent the saddle without any reply.
To write that he would go was impossible, because he
could not go; to write that he could not come because
something prevented him, or that he would be away, that
was still worse. He sent the saddle without an answer, and
with a sense of having done something shameful; he
handed over all the now revolting business of the estate to
the bailiff, and set off next day to a remote district to see

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