Page 914 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

Chapter 19

The mistake made by Alexey Alexandrovitch in that,
when preparing for seeing his wife, he had overlooked the
possibility that her repentance might be sincere, and he
might forgive her, and she might not die—this mistake
was two months after his return from Moscow brought
home to him in all its significance. But the mistake made
by him had arisen not simply from his having overlooked
that contingency, but also from the fact that until that day
of his interview with his dying wife, he had not known his
own heart. At his sick wife’s bedside he had for the first
time in his life given way to that feeling of sympathetic
suffering always roused in him by the sufferings of others,
and hitherto looked on by him with shame as a harmful
weakness. And pity for her, and remorse for having
desired her death, and most of all, the joy of forgiveness,
made him at once conscious, not simply of the relief of his
own sufferings, but of a spiritual peace he had never
experienced before. He suddenly felt that the very thing
that was the source of his sufferings had become the
source of his spiritual joy; that what had seemed insoluble

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