Page 908 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

man he had unjustly despised made up only a small part of
his misery. He felt unutterably wretched now, for his
passion for Anna, which had seemed to him of late to be
growing cooler, now that he knew he had lost her forever,

was stronger than ever it had been. He had seen all of her
in her illness, had come to know her very soul, and it
seemed to him that he had never loved her till then. And
now when he had learned to know her, to love her as she
should be loved, he had been humiliated before her, and
had lost her forever, leaving with her nothing of himself
but a shameful memory. Most terrible of all had been his
ludicrous, shameful position when Alexey Alexandrovitch
had pulled his hands away from his humiliated face. He
stood on the steps of the Karenins’ house like one
distraught, and did not know what to do.
‘A sledge, sir?’ asked the porter.
‘Yes, a sledge.’
On getting home, after three sleepless nights, Vronsky,
without undressing, lay down fiat on the sofa, clasping his
hands and laying his head on them. His head was heavy.
Images, memories, and ideas of the strangest description
followed one another with extraordinary rapidity and
vividness. First it was the medicine he had poured out for
the patient and spilt over the spoon, then the midwife’s

907 of 1759