Chapter 25

Feeling that the reconciliation was complete, Anna set eagerly to work in the morning preparing for their departure. Though it was not settled whether they should go on Monday or Tuesday, as they had each given way to the other, Anna packed busily, feeling absolutely indifferent whether they went a day earlier or later.

She was standing in her room over an open box, taking things out of it, when he came in to see her earlier than usual, dressed to go out.

"I'm going off at once to see maman; she can send me the money by

Yegorov. And I shall be ready to go tomorrow," he said.

Though she was in such a good mood, the thought of his visit to his mother's gave her a pang.

"No, I shan't be ready by then myself," she said; and at once reflected, "so then it was possible to arrange to do as I wished." "No, do as you meant to do. Go into the dining room,

I'm coming directly. It's only to turn out those things that aren't wanted," she said, putting something more on the heap of frippery that lay in Annushka's arms.

Vronsky was eating his beefsteak when she came into the dining- room.

"You wouldn't believe how distasteful these rooms have become to me," she said, sitting down beside him to her coffee. "There's nothing more awful than these _chambres garnies_. There's no individuality in them, no soul. These clocks, and curtains, and, worst of all, the wallpapers--they're a nightmare. I think of

Vozdvizhenskoe as the promised land. You're not sending the horses off yet?"

"No, they will come after us. Where are you going to?"

"I wanted to go to Wilson's to take some dresses to her. So it's really to be tomorrow?" she said in a cheerful voice; but suddenly her face changed.

Vronsky's valet came in to ask him to sign a receipt for a telegram from Petersburg. There was nothing out of the way in

Vronsky's getting a telegram, but he said, as though anxious to conceal something from her, that the receipt was in his study, and he turned hurriedly to her.

"By tomorrow, without fail, I will finish it all."

"From whom is the telegram?" she asked, not hearing him.

"From Stiva," he answered reluctantly.

"Why didn't you show it to me? What secret can there be between

Stiva and me?"

Vronsky called the valet back, and told him to bring the telegram.

"I didn't want to show it to you, because Stiva has such a passion for telegraphing: why telegraph when nothing is settled?"

"About the divorce?"

"Yes; but he says he has not been able to come at anything yet.

He has promised a decisive answer in a day or two. But here it is; read it."

With trembling hands Anna took the telegram, and read what

Vronsky had told her. At the end was added: "Little hope; but

I will do everything possible and impossible."

"I said yesterday that it's absolutely nothing to me when I get, or whether I never get, a divorce," she said, flushing crimson.

"There was not the slightest necessity to hide it from me." "So he may hide and does hide his correspondence with women from me," she thought.

"Yashvin meant to come this morning with Voytov," said Vronsky;

"I believe he's won from Pyevtsov all and more than he can pay, about sixty thousand."

"No," she said, irritated by his so obviously showing by this change of subject that he was irritated, "why did you suppose that this news would affect me so, that you must even try to hide it? I said I don't want to consider it, and I should have liked you to care as little about it as I do."

"I care about it because I like definiteness," he said.

"Definiteness is not in the form but the love," she said, more and more irritated, not by his words, but by the tone of cool composure in which he spoke. "What do you want it for?"

"My God! love again," he thought, frowning.

"Oh, you know what for; for your sake and your children's in the future."

"There won't be children in the future."

"That's a great pity," he said.

"You want it for the children's sake, but you don't think of me?" she said, quite forgetting or not having heard that he had said,

"_for your sake_ and the children's."

The question of the possibility of having children had long been a subject of dispute and irritation to her. His desire to have children she interpreted as a proof he did not prize her beauty.

"Oh, I said: for your sake. Above all for your sake," he repeated, frowning as though in pain, "because I am certain that the greater part of your irritability comes from the indefiniteness of the position."

"Yes, now he has laid aside all pretense, and all his cold hatred for me is apparent," she thought, not hearing his words, but watching with terror the cold, cruel judge who looked mocking her out of his eyes.

"The cause is not that," she said, "and, indeed, I don't see how the cause of my irritability, as you call it, can be that I am completely in your power. What indefiniteness is there in the position? on the contrary..."

"I am very sorry that you don't care to understand," he interrupted, obstinately anxious to give utterance to his thought. "The indefiniteness consists in your imagining that I am free."

"On that score you can set your mind quite at rest," she said, and turning away from him, she began drinking her coffee.