`If you ask my advice,' she said, having finished her prayer and uncovered her face, `I do not advise you to do this. Do you suppose I don't see how you are suffering, how this has torn open your wounds? But supposing that, as always, you don't think of yourself - what can it lead to? - To fresh suffering for you, to torture for the child. If there were a trace of humanity left in her, she ought not to wish it herself. No, I have no hesitation in saying I advise against it, and if you will intrust it to me, I will write to her.'
And Alexei Alexandrovich consented, and Countess Lidia Ivanovna sent the following letter in French:
` DEAR MADAME - To be reminded of you might result in your son's asking questions, which could not be answered without implanting in the child's soul a spirit of censure toward what should be for him sacred, and therefore I beg you to interpret your husband's refusal in the spirit of Christian love. I pray to Almighty God to have mercy on you.
COUNTESS LIDIA ' This letter attained the secret object which Countess Lidia Ivanovna had concealed from herself. It wounded Anna to the quick.
For his part, Alexei Alexandrovich, on returning home from Lidia Ivanovna's, could not all that day concentrate himself on his usual pursuits, and find that spiritual peace of one saved and believing which he had felt of late.
The thought of his wife, who had so greatly sinned against him, and toward whom he had been so saintly, as Countess Lidia Ivanovna had so justly told him, ought not to have troubled him; but he was not easy;he could not understand the book he was reading; he could not drive away harassing recollections of his relations with her, of the mistake which, as it now seemed, he had made in regard to her. The memory of how he had received her confession of infidelity on their way home from the races (especially his having insisted only on the observance of external decorum, and not having sent a challenge) tortured him like a remorse. He was tortured, too, by the thought of the letter he had written her; and, most of all, his forgiveness, which nobody wanted, and his care of the other man's child, seared his heart with shame and remorse.
And just the same feeling of shame and remorse he felt now, as he reviewed all his past with her, recalling the awkward words in which, after long wavering, he proposed to her.
`But how have I been to blame?' he said to himself. And this question always excited another question in him - whether they felt differently, did their loving and marrying differently, these Vronskys and Oblonskys...
these gentlemen of the bedchamber, with their fine calves. And there passed before his mind a whole series of these succulent, vigorous, self-confident men, who always and everywhere drew his inquisitive attention in spite of himself. He tried to dispel these thoughts, he tried to persuade himself that he was not living for this transient life, but for the life of eternity, and that there was peace and love in his heart. But the fact that he had in this transient, trivial life made, as it seemed to him, a few trivial mistakes, tortured him as though the eternal salvation in which he believed had no existence. But this temptation did not last long, and soon there was reestablished once more in Alexei Alexandrovich's soul the peace and the loftiness by virtue of which he could forget what he did not want to remember.
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TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 5, Chapter 26[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] Chapter 26 `Well, Kapitonich?' said Seriozha, coming back rosy and good-humored from his walk the day before his birthday, and giving his Russian plaited overcoat to the tall old hall porter, who smiled down at the little person from the height of his long figure. `Well, has the bandaged official been here today? Did papa see him?'
`He saw him. The minute the head clerk came out, I announced him,'
said the hall porter with a good-humored wink. `Here, I'll take it off.'
`Seriozha!' said his Slavonic tutor, stopping in the doorway leading to the inner rooms. `Take it off yourself.' But Seriozha, though he heard the tutor's feeble voice, did not pay attention to it. He stood keeping hold of the hall porter's shoulder knot and gazing into his face.
`Well, and did papa do what he wanted for him?'
The hall porter nodded his head affirmatively.
The bandaged official, who had already been seven times to ask some favor of Alexei Alexandrovich, interested both Seriozha and the hall porter. Seriozha had come upon him in the hall, and had heard him plaintively beg the hall porter to announce him, saying that he and his children had death staring them in the face.
Since then Seriozha, having met him a second time in the hall, took great interest in him.
`Well, was he very glad?' he asked.
`Glad? I should think so! Almost dancing as he walked away.'
`And has anything been left for me?' asked Seriozha, after a pause.
`Come, sir,' said the hall porter; then with a shake of his head he whispered: `Something from the Countess.'
Seriozha understood at once that what the hall porter was speaking of was a present from Countess Lidia Ivanovna for his birthday.
`You don't say? Where?'
`Kornei took it to your papa. A fine plaything it must be, too!'
`How big? Like this?'
`Rather small, but a fine thing.'
`A book?'
`No-something else. Run along, run along, Vassilii Lukich is calling you,' said the porter, hearing the tutor's steps approaching, and, carefully taking away from his shoulder knot the little hand in the glove half-pulled off, he indicated with his head Lukich, the tutor.
`Vassilii Lukich, I'm coming in one tiny minute!' answered Seriozha with gay and loving smile which always won over the careful Vassilii Lukich.