The conversation, interrupted by her coming in, flickered up again like the light of a lamp being blown out.
"Sir John! Yes, Sir John; I’ve seen him. He speaks well. The Vlassieva girl’s quite in love with him."
"And is it true the younger Vlassieva girl’s to marry Topov?"
"Yes, they say it’s quite a settled thing."
"I wonder at the parents! They say it’s a marriage for love."
"For love? What antediluvian notions you have! Can one talk of love in these days?" said the ambassador’s wife.
"What’s to be done? It’s a foolish old fashion that’s kept up still," said Vronsky.
"So much the worse for those who keep up the fashion. The only happy marriages I know are marriages of prudence."
"Yes, but then how often the happiness of these prudent marriages flies away like dust just because that passion turns up that they have refused to recognize," said Vronsky.
"But by marriages of prudence we mean those in which both parties have sown their wild oats already. That’s like scarlatina – one has to go through it and get it over."
"Then they ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox."
"I was in love in my young days with a deacon," said the Princess Myakaya. "I don’t know that it did me any good."
"No; I imagine, joking apart, that to know love, one must make mistakes and then correct them," said Princess Betsy.
"Even after marriage?" said the ambassador’s wife playfully.
"‘It’s never too late to mend.’" The attaché repeated the English proverb.
"Just so," Betsy agreed; "one must make mistakes and correct them. What do you think about it?" she turned to Anna, who, with a faintly perceptible resolute smile on her lips, was listening in silence to the conversation.
"I think," said Anna, playing with the glove she had taken off, "I think … of so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love."
Vronsky was gazing at Anna, and with a fainting heart waiting for what she would say. He sighed as after a danger escaped when she uttered these words.
Anna suddenly turned to him.
"Oh, I have had a letter from Moscow. They write me that Kitty Shtcherbatskaya’s very ill."
"Really?" said Vronsky, knitting his brows.
Anna looked sternly at him.
"That doesn’t interest you?"
"On the contrary, it does, very much. What was it exactly they told you, if I may know?" he questioned.
Anna got up and went to Betsy.
"Give me a cup of tea," she said, standing at her table.
While Betsy was pouring out the tea, Vronsky went up to Anna.
"What is it they write to you?" he repeated.
"I often think men have no understanding of what’s not honorable though they’re always talking of it," said Anna, without answering him. "I’ve wanted to tell you so a long while," she added, and moving a few steps away, she sat down at a table in a corner covered with albums.
"I don’t quite understand the meaning of your words," he said, handing her the cup.
She glanced towards the sofa beside her, and he instantly sat down.
"Yes, I have been wanting to tell you," she said, not looking at him. "You behaved wrongly, very wrongly."
"Do you suppose I don’t know that I’ve acted wrongly? But who was the cause of my doing so?"
"What do you say that to me for?" she said, glancing severely at him.
"You know what for," he answered boldly and joyfully, meeting her glance and not dropping his eyes.
Not he, but she, was confused.
"That only shows you have no heart," she said. But her eyes said that she knew he had a heart, and that was why she was afraid of him.
"What you spoke of just now was a mistake, and not love."
"Remember that I have forbidden you to utter that word, that hateful word," said Anna, with a shudder. But at once she felt that by that very word "forbidden" she had shown that she acknowledged certain rights over him, and by that very fact was encouraging him to speak of love. "I have long meant to tell you this," she went on, looking resolutely into his eyes, and hot all over from the burning flush on her cheeks. "I’ve come on purpose this evening, knowing I should meet you. I have come to tell you that this must end. I have never blushed before anyone, and you force me to feel to blame for something."
He looked at her and was struck by a new spiritual beauty in her face.
"What do you wish of me?" he said simply and seriously.
"I want you to go to Moscow and ask for Kitty’s forgiveness," she said.
"You don’t wish that?" he said.
He saw she was saying what she forced herself to say, not what she wanted to say.
"If you love me, as you say," she whispered, "do so that I may be at peace."
His face grew radiant.
"Don’t you know that you’re all my life to me? But I know no peace, and I can’t give it to you; all myself – and love … yes. I can’t think of you and myself apart. You and I are one to me. And I see no chance before us of peace for me or for you. I see a chance of despair, of wretchedness … or I see a chance of bliss, what bliss!.. Can it be there’s no chance of it?" he murmured with his lips; but she heard.
She strained every effort of her mind to say what ought to be said. But instead of that she let her eyes rest on him, full of love, and made no answer.
"It’s come!" he thought in ecstasy. "When I was beginning to despair, and it seemed there would be no end – it’s come! She loves me! She owns it!"
"Then do this for me: never say such things to me, and let us be friends," she said in words; but her eyes spoke quite differently.
"Friends we shall never be, you know that yourself. Whether we shall be the happiest or the wretchedest of people – that’s in your hands."
She would have said something, but he interrupted her.
"I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you."
"I don’t want to drive you away."
"Only don’t change anything, leave everything as it is," he said in a shaky voice. "Here’s your husband."
At that instant Alexey Alexandrovitch did in fact walk into the room with his calm, awkward gait.
Glancing at his wife and Vronsky, he went up to the lady of the house, and sitting down for a cup of tea, began talking in his deliberate, always audible voice, in his habitual tone of banter, ridiculing someone.
"Your Rambouillet is in full conclave," he said, looking round at all the party; "the graces and the muses."
But Princess Betsy could not endure that tone of his – "sneering," as she called it, using the English word, and like a skillful hostess she at once brought him into a serious conversation on the subject of universal conscription. Alexey Alexandrovitch was immediately interested in the subject, and began seriously defending the new imperial decree against Princess Betsy, who had attacked it.
Vronsky and Anna still sat at the little table.
"This is getting indecorous," whispered one lady, with an expressive glance at Madame Karenina, Vronsky, and her husband.
"What did I tell you?" said Anna’s friend.
But not only