Page 907 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

Chapter 18

After the conversation with Alexey Alexandrovitch,
Vronsky went out onto the steps of the Karenins’ house
and stood still, with difficulty remembering where he was,
and where he ought to walk or drive. He felt disgraced,
humiliated, guilty, and deprived of all possibility of
washing away his humiliation. He felt thrust out of the
beaten track along which he had so proudly and lightly
walked till then. All the habits and rules of his life that had
seemed so firm, had turned out suddenly false and
inapplicable. The betrayed husband, who had figured till
that time as a pitiful creature, an incidental and somewhat
ludicrous obstacle to his happiness, had suddenly been
summoned by her herself, elevated to an awe-inspiring
pinnacle, and on the pinnacle that husband had shown
himself, not malignant, not false, not ludicrous, but kind
and straightforward and large. Vronsky could not but feel
this, and the parts were suddenly reversed. Vronsky felt his
elevation and his own abasement, his truth and his own
falsehood. He felt that the husband was magnanimous
even in his sorrow, while he had been base and petty in
his deceit. But this sense of his own humiliation before the

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