Page 940 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

Alexey Alexandrovitch, scowling with emotion,
muttered something to himself, and made no answer. All
that seemed so simple to Stepan Arkadyevitch, Alexey
Alexandrovitch had thought over thousands of times. And,

so far from being simple, it all seemed to him utterly
impossible. Divorce, the details of which he knew by this
time, seemed to him now out of the question, because the
sense of his own dignity and respect for religion forbade
his taking upon himself a fictitious charge of adultery, and
still more suffering his wife, pardoned and beloved by
him, to be caught in the fact and put to public shame.
Divorce appeared to him impossible also on other still
more weighty grounds.
What would become of his son in case of a divorce? To
leave him with his mother was out of the question. The
divorced mother would have her own illegitimate family,
in which his position as a stepson and his education would
not be good. Keep him with him? He knew that would be
an act of vengeance on his part, and that he did not want.
But apart from this, what more than all made divorce seem
impossible to Alexey Alexandrovitch was, that by
consenting to a divorce he would be completely ruining
Anna. The saying of Darya Alexandrovna at Moscow, that
in deciding on a divorce he was thinking of himself, and

939 of 1759