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And in the houses always people and people.... How many of them - no end, and all hating each other! Come, let me try and think what I want to make me happy. Well? Suppose I am divorced, and Alexei Alexandrovich lets me have Seriozha, and I marry Vronsky.' Thinking of Alexei Alexandrovich, she at once pictured him with extraordinary vividness as though he were alive before her, with his mild, lifeless, dull eyes, the blue veins on his white hands, his intonations, and the cracking of his fingers, and remembering the feeling which had existed between them, and which was also called love, she shuddered with loathing. `Well, I'm divorced, and become Vronsky's wife. Well, will Kitty cease looking at me as she looked at me today? No. And will Seriozha leave off asking and wondering about my two husbands? And is there any new feeling I can awaken between Vronsky and me? Is there possible, if not happiness, some sort of ease from misery?

No, no!' she answered now without the slightest hesitation. `Impossible!

We are drawn apart by life, and I make his unhappiness, and he mine, and there's no altering him or me. Every attempt has been made, the screw has come unscrewed. Oh, a beggar woman with a baby. She thinks I'm sorry for her. Aren't we all flung into the world only to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and each other? Schoolboys coming - laughing - Seriozha?'

she thought. `I thought, too, that I loved him, and used to be touched by my own tenderness. But I have lived without him, I gave him up for another love, and did not regret the exchange till that love was satisfied.' And with loathing she thought of what she meant by that love. And the clearness with which she saw life now, her own and all men's was a pleasure to her.

`It's so with me and Piotr, and Fiodor the coachman, and that merchant, and all the people living along the Volga, where those placards invite one to go, and everywhere and always,' she thought when she had driven under the low-pitched roof of the Nizhny-Novgorod station and the porters ran to meet her.

`A ticket to Obiralovka?' said Piotr.

She had utterly forgotten where and why she was going, and only by a great effort she understood the question.

`Yes,' she said, handing him her purse, and, taking a little red bag in her hand, she got out of the carriage.

Making her way through the crowd to the first-class waiting room, she gradually recollected all the details of her position, and the plans between which she was hesitating. And again at the old sore places, hope and then despair scraped the wounds of her tortured, fearfully throbbing heart. As she sat on the star-shaped sofa waiting for the train, she gazed with aversion at the people coming and going (they were all hateful to her), and thought how she would arrive at the station, would write him a note, and what she would write to him, and how he was at this moment complaining to his mother of his position, not understanding her sufferings, and how she would go into the room, and what she would say to him. Then she thought that life might still be happy, and how miserably she loved and hated him, and how fearfully her heart was beating.

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TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 7, Chapter 31[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] Chapter 31 A bell rang, some young men, ugly and impudent, and at the same time careful of the impression they were making, hurried by. Piotr, too, crossed the room in his livery and spatterdashes with his dull, brutish face, and came up to her to take her to the train. The noisy young men were quiet as she passed them on the platform, and one whispered something about her to another - something vile, no doubt. She stepped up on the high step, and sat down in a carriage by herself on a dirty spring seat that had once been white.

Her bag lay beside her, shaken up and down by the springiness of the seat.

With a foolish smile Piotr raised his hat, with its gallooned band, at the window, in token of farewell; an impudent conductor slammed the door and the latch. A grotesque-looking lady wearing a bustle (Anna mentally undressed the woman, and was appalled at her hideousness), and a little girl laughing affectedly, ran down the platform.

`Katerina Andreevna, she's got them all, ma tante !' cried the girl.

`Even the child's hideous and affected,' thought Anna. To avoid seeing anyone, she got up quickly and seated herself at the opposite window of the empty carriage. A misshapen-looking peasant covered with dirt, in a cap from which his tangled hair stuck out all around, passed by that window, stooping down to the carriage wheels. `There's something familiar about that hideous peasant,' thought Anna. And remembering her dream, she moved away to the opposite door, shaking with terror. The conductor opened the door and let in a man and his wife.

`Do you wish to get out?'

Anna made no answer. The conductor and her two fellow passengers did not notice under her veil her panic-stricken face. She went back to her corner and sat down. The couple seated themselves on the opposite side, and intently but surreptitiously scrutinized her clothes. Both husband and wife seemed repulsive to Anna. The husband asked if she would allow him to smoke, obviously not with a view to smoking, but to getting into conversation with her. Receiving her assent, he said to his wife in French something about caring less to smoke than to talk. They made inane and affected remarks to one another, entirely for her benefit. Anna saw clearly that they were sick of each other, and hated each other. And no one could have helped hating such miserable monstrosities.