Anna Karenina
By Leo Tolstoy
Translated by Constance Garnett Published by Planet eBook. Visit the site to download free
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Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
Part One Anna Karenina
Chapter
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is un-
happy in its own way.
Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house.
The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on
an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in
their family, and she had announced to her husband that
she could not go on living in the same house with him. This
position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only
the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of
their family and household, were painfully conscious of it.
Every person in the house felt that there was no sense in
their living together, and that the stray people brought to-
gether by chance in any inn had more in common with one
another than they, the members of the family and house-
hold of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room,
the husband had not been at home for three days. The chil-
dren ran wild all over the house; the English governess
quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend ask-
ing her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook
had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitch-
en-maid, and the coachman had given warning.
Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch
Oblonsky—Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable
world— woke up at his usual hour, that is, at eight o’clock Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
in the morning, not in his wife’s bedroom, but on the
leather-covered sofa in his study. He turned over his stout,
well-cared-for person on the springy sofa, as though he
would sink into a long sleep again; he vigorously embraced
the pillow on the other side and buried his face in it; but all
at once he jumped up, sat up on the sofa, and opened his
eyes.
‘Yes, yes, how was it now?’ he thought, going over his
dream. ‘Now, how was it? To be sure! Alabin was giving a
dinner at Darmstadt; no, not Darmstadt, but something
American. Yes, but then, Darmstadt was in America. Yes,
Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, and the tables
sang, Il mio tesoro—not Il mio tesoro though, but some-
thing better, and there were some sort of little decanters on
the table, and they were women, too,’ he remembered.
Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes twinkled gaily, and he pon-
dered with a smile. ‘Yes, it was nice, very nice. There was
a great deal more that was delightful, only there’s no put-
ting it into words, or even expressing it in one’s thoughts
awake.’ And noticing a gleam of light peeping in beside one
of the serge curtains, he cheerfully dropped his feet over the
edge of the sofa, and felt about with them for his slippers, a
present on his last birthday, worked for him by his wife on
gold-colored morocco. And, as he had done every day for
the last nine years, he stretched out his hand, without get-
ting up, towards the place where his dressing-gown always
hung in his bedroom. And thereupon he suddenly remem-
bered that he was not sleeping in his wife’s room, but in his
study, and why: the smile vanished from his face, he knitted Anna Karenina
his brows.
‘Ah, ah, ah! Oo!...’ he muttered, recalling everything that
had happened. And again every detail of his quarrel with
his wife was present to his imagination, all the hopelessness
of his position, and worst of all, his own fault.
‘Yes, she won’t forgive me, and she can’t forgive me. And
the most awful thing about it is that it’s all my fault—all
my fault, though I’m not to blame. That’s the point of the
whole situation,’ he reflected. ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ he kept repeating
in despair, as he remembered the acutely painful sensations
caused him by this quarrel.
Most unpleasant of all was the first minute when, on
coming, happy and good-humored, from the theater, with a
huge pear in his hand for his wife, he had not found his wife
in the drawing-room, to his surprise had not found her in
the study either, and saw her at last in her bedroom with the
unlucky letter that revealed everything in her hand.
She, his Dolly, forever fussing and worrying over house-
hold details, and limited in her ideas, as he considered, was
sitting perfectly still with the letter in her hand, looking
at him with an expression of horror, despair, and indigna-
tion.
‘What’s this? this?’ she asked, pointing to the letter.
And at this recollection, Stepan Arkadyevitch, as is so of-
ten the case, was not so much annoyed at the fact itself as at
the way in which he had met his wife’s words.
There happened to him at that instant what does happen
to people when they are unexpectedly caught in something
very disgraceful. He did not succeed in adapting his face to Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
the position in which he was placed towards his wife by the
discovery of his fault. Instead of being hurt, denying, de-
fending himself, begging forgiveness, instead of remaining
indifferent even—anything would have been better than
what he did do—his face utterly involuntarily (reflex spi-
nal action, reflected Stepan Arkadyevitch, who was fond
of physiology)—utterly involuntarily assumed its habitual,
good-humored, and therefore idiotic smile.
This idiotic smile he could not forgive himself. Catching
sight of that smile, Dolly shuddered as though at physical
pain, broke out with her characteristic heat into a flood of
cruel words, and rushed out of the room. Since then she had
refused to see her husband.
‘It’s that idiotic smile that’s to blame for it all,’ thought
Stepan Arkadyevitch.
‘But what’s to be done? What’s to be done?’ he said to
himself in despair, and found no answer. Anna Karenina
Chapter
Stepan Arkadyevitch was a truthful man in his rela-
tions with himself. He was incapable of deceiving himself
and persuading himself that he repented of his conduct.
He could not at this date repent of the fact that he, a hand-
some, susceptible man of thirty-four, was not in love with
his wife, the mother of five living and two dead children,
and only a year younger than himself. All he repented of
was that he had not succeeded better in hiding it from his
wife. But he felt all the difficulty of his position and was sor-
ry for his wife, his children, and himself. Possibly he might
have managed to conceal his sins better from his wife if he
had anticipated that the knowledge of them would have had
such an effect on her. He had never clearly thought out the
subject, but he had vaguely conceived that his wife must
long ago have suspected him of being unfaithful to her, and
shut her eyes to the fact. He had even supposed that she, a
worn-out woman no longer young or good-looking, and in
no way remarkable or interesting, merely a good mother,
ought from a sense of fairness to take an indulgent view. It
had turned out quite the other way.
‘Oh, it’s awful! oh dear, oh dear! awful!’ Stepan
Arkadyevitch kept repeating to himself, and he could think
of nothing to be done. ‘And how well things were going up
till now! how well we got on! She was contented and happy Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
in her children; I never interfered with her in anything; I
let her manage the children and the house just as she liked.
It’s true it’s bad her having been a governess in our house.
That’s bad! There’s something common, vulgar, in flirting
with one’s governess. But what a governess!’ (He vividly re-
called the roguish black eyes of Mlle. Roland and her smile.)
‘But after all, while she was in the house, I kept myself in
hand. And the worst of it all is that she’s already...it seems
as if ill-luck would have it so! Oh, oh! But what, what is to
be done?’
There was no solution, but that universal solution which
life gives to all questions, even the most complex and in-
soluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the
day—that is, forget oneself. To forget himself in sleep was
impossible now, at least till nighttime; he could not go back
now to the music sung by the decanter-women; so he must
forget himself in the dream of daily life.
‘Then we shall see,’ Stepan Arkadyevitch said to him-
self, and getting up he put on a gray dressing-gown lined
with blue silk, tied the tassels in a knot, and, drawing a deep
breath of air into his broad, bare chest, he walked to the
window with his usual confident step, turning out his feet
that carried his full frame so easily. He pulled up the blind
and rang the bell loudly. It was at once answered by the ap-
pearance of an old friend, his valet, Matvey, carrying his
clothes, his boots, and a telegram. Matvey was followed by
the barber with all the necessaries for shaving.
‘Are there any papers from the office?’ asked Stepan
Arkadyevitch, taking the telegram and seating himself at Anna Karenina
the looking-glass.
‘On the table,’ replied Matvey, glancing with inquiring
sympathy at his master; and, after a short pause, he added
with a sly smile, ‘They’ve sent from the carriage-jobbers.’
Stepan Arkadyevitch made no reply, he merely glanced
at Matvey in the looking-glass. In the glance, in which their
eyes met in the looking-glass, it was clear that they under-
stood one another. Stepan Arkadyevitch’s eyes asked: ‘Why
do you tell me that? don’t you know?’
Matvey put his hands in his jacket pockets, thrust out
one leg, and gazed silently, good-humoredly, with a faint
smile, at his master.
‘I told them to come on Sunday, and till then not to trou-
ble you or themselves for nothing,’ he said. He had obviously
prepared the sentence beforehand.
Stepan Arkadyevitch saw Matvey wanted to make a joke
and attract attention to himself. Tearing open the telegram,
he read it through, guessing at the words, misspelt as they
always are in telegrams, and his face brightened.
‘Matvey, my sister Anna Arkadyevna will be here tomor-
row,’ he said, checking for a minute the sleek, plump hand
of the barber, cutting a pink path through his long, curly
whiskers.
‘Thank God!’ said Matvey, showing by this response that
he, like his master, realized the significance of this arrival—
that is, that Anna Arkadyevna, the sister he was so fond of,
might bring about a reconciliation between husband and
wife.
‘Alone, or with her husband?’ inquired Matvey. Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
Stepan Arkadyevitch could not answer, as the barber was
at work on his upper lip, and he raised one finger. Matvey
nodded at the looking-glass.
‘Alone. Is the room to be got ready upstairs?’
‘Inform Darya Alexandrovna: where she orders.’
‘Darya Alexandrovna?’ Matvey repeated, as though in
doubt.
‘Yes, inform her. Here, take the telegram; give it to her,
and then do what she tells you.’
‘You want to try it on,’ Matvey understood, but he only
said, ‘Yes sir.’
Stepan Arkadyevitch was already washed and combed
and ready to be dressed, when Matvey, stepping deliberately
in his creaky boots, came back into the room with the tele-
gram in his hand. The barber had gone.
‘Darya Alexandrovna told me to inform you that she
is going away. Let him do—that is you—do as he likes,’ he
said, laughing only with his eyes, and putting his hands in
his pockets, he watched his master with his head on one
side. Stepan Arkadyevitch was silent a minute. Then a
good-humored and rather pitiful smile showed itself on his
handsome face.
‘Eh, Matvey?’ he said, shaking his head.
‘It’s all right, sir; she will come round,’ said Matvey.
‘Come round?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Do you think so? Who’s there?’ asked Stepan
Arkadyevitch, hearing the rustle of a woman’s dress at the
door. Anna Karenina
‘It’s I,’ said a firm, pleasant, woman’s voice, and the stern,
pockmarked face of Matrona Philimonovna, the nurse, was
thrust in at the doorway.
‘Well, what is it, Matrona?’ queried Stepan Arkadyevitch,
going up to her at the door.
Although Stepan Arkadyevitch was completely in the
wrong as regards his wife, and was conscious of this him-
self, almost every one in the house (even the nurse, Darya
Alexandrovna’s chief ally) was on his side.
‘Well, what now?’ he asked disconsolately.
‘Go to her, sir; own your fault again. Maybe God will aid
you. She is suffering so, it’s sad to hee her; and besides, ev-
erything in the house is topsy-turvy. You must have pity, sir,
on the children. Beg her forgiveness, sir. There’s no help for
it! One must take the consequences...’
‘But she won’t see me.’
‘You do your part. God is merciful; pray to God, sir, pray
to God.’
‘Come, that’ll do, you can go,’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
blushing suddenly. ‘Well now, do dress me.’ He turned to
Matvey and threw off his dressing-gown decisively.
Matvey was already holding up the shirt like a horse’s
collar, and, blowing off some invisible speck, he slipped it
with obvious pleasure over the well-groomed body of his
master. Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
Chapter
When he was dressed, Stepan Arkadyevitch sprinkled
some scent on himself, pulled down his shirt-cuffs, distrib-
uted into his pockets his cigarettes, pocketbook, matches,
and watch with its double chain and seals, and shaking out
his handkerchief, feeling himself clean, fragrant, healthy,
and physically at ease, in spite of his unhappiness, he walked
with a slight swing on each leg into the dining-room, where
coffee was already waiting for him, and beside the coffee,
letters and papers from the office.
He read the letters. One was very unpleasant, from a
merchant who was buying a forest on his wife’s property.
To sell this forest was absolutely essential; but at present,
until he was reconciled with his wife, the subject could not
be discussed. The most unpleasant thing of all was that his
pecuniary interests should in this way enter into the ques-
tion of his reconciliation with his wife. And the idea that
he might be led on by his interests, that he might seek a
reconciliation with his wife on account of the sale of the
forest—that idea hurt him.
When he had finished his letters, Stepan Arkadyevitch
moved the office-papers close to him, rapidly looked
through two pieces of business, made a few notes with a big
pencil, and pushing away the papers, turned to his coffee.
As he sipped his coffee, he opened a still damp morning pa- Anna Karenina
per, and began reading it.
Stepan Arkadyevitch took in and read a liberal paper,
not an extreme one, but one advocating the views held by
the majority. And in spite of the fact that science, art, and
politics had no special interest for him, he firmly held those
views on all these subjects which were held by the majority
and by his paper, and he only changed them when the ma-
jority changed them—or, more strictly speaking, he did not
change them, but they imperceptibly changed of themselves
within him.
Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opin-
ions or his views; these political opinions and views had
come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the
shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were
being worn. And for him, living in a certain society—ow-
ing to the need, ordinarily developed at years of discretion,
for some degree of mental activity—to have views was
just as indispensable as to have a hat. If there was a rea-
son for his preferring liberal to conservative views, which
were held also by many of his circle, it arose not from his
considering liberalism more rational, but from its being in
closer accordance with his manner of life. The liberal party
said that in Russia everything is wrong, and certainly Ste-
pan Arkadyevitch had many debts and was decidedly short
of money. The liberal party said that marriage is an insti-
tution quite out of date, and that it needs reconstruction;
and family life certainly afforded Stepan Arkadyevitch lit-
tle gratification, and forced him into lying and hypocrisy,
which was so repulsive to his nature. The liberal party said, Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
or rather allowed it to be understood, that religion is only
a curb to keep in check the barbarous classes of the peo-
ple; and Stepan Arkadyevitch could not get through even
a short service without his legs aching from standing up,
and could never make out what was the object of all the ter-
rible and high-flown language about another world when
life might be so very amusing in this world. And with all
this, Stepan Arkadyevitch, who liked a joke, was fond of
puzzling a plain man by saying that if he prided himself on
his origin, he ought not to stop at Rurik and disown the first
founder of his family—the monkey. And so Liberalism had
become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s, and he liked his
newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog
it diffused in his brain. He read the leading article, in which
it was maintained that it was quite senseless in our day to
raise an outcry that radicalism was threatening to swal-
low up all conservative elements, and that the government
ought to take measures to crush the revolutionary hydra;
that, on the contrary, ‘in our opinion the danger lies not in
that fantastic revolutionary hydra, but in the obstinacy of
traditionalism clogging progress,’ etc., etc. He read another
article, too, a financial one, which alluded to Bentham and
Mill, and dropped some innuendoes reflecting on the min-
istry. With his characteristic quickwittedness he caught the
drift of each innuendo, divined whence it came, at whom
and on what ground it was aimed, and that afforded him,
as it always did, a certain satisfaction. But today that satis-
faction was embittered by Matrona Philimonovna’s advice
and the unsatisfactory state of the household. He read, too, Anna Karenina
that Count Beist was rumored to have left for Wiesbaden,
and that one need have no more gray hair, and of the sale of
a light carriage, and of a young person seeking a situation;
but these items of information did not give him, as usual,
a quiet, ironical gratification. Having finished the paper, a
second cup of coffee and a roll and butter, he got up, shaking
the crumbs of the roll off his waistcoat; and, squaring his
broad chest, he smiled joyously: not because there was any-
thing particularly agreeable in his mind—the joyous smile
was evoked by a good digestion.
But this joyous smile at once recalled everything to him,
and he grew thoughtful.
Two childish voices (Stepan Arkadyevitch recognized
the voices of Grisha, his youngest boy, and Tanya, his eldest
girl) were heard outside the door. They were carrying some-
thing, and dropped it.
‘I told you not to sit passengers on the roof,’ said the little
girl in English; ‘there, pick them up!’
‘Everything’s in confusion,’ thought Stepan Arkadyevitch;
‘there are the children running about by themselves.’ And
going to the door, he called them. They threw down the box,
that represented a train, and came in to their father.
The little girl, her father’s favorite, ran up boldly, em-
braced him, and hung laughingly on his neck, enjoying as
she always did the smell of scent that came from his whis-
kers. At last the little girl kissed his face, which was flushed
from his stooping posture and beaming with tenderness,
loosed her hands, and was about to run away again; but her
father held her back. Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
‘How is mamma?’ he asked, passing his hand over his
daughter’s smooth, soft little neck. ‘Good morning,’ he said,
smiling to the boy, who had come up to greet him. He was
conscious that he loved the boy less, and always tried to be
fair; but the boy felt it, and did not respond with a smile to
his father’s chilly smile.
‘Mamma? She is up,’ answered the girl.
Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed. ‘That means that she’s not
slept again all night,’ he thought.
‘Well, is she cheerful?’
The little girl knew that there was a quarrel between her
father and mother, and that her mother could not be cheer-
ful, and that her father must be aware of this, and that he
was pretending when he asked about it so lightly. And she
blushed for her father. He at once perceived it, and blushed
too.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘She did not say we must do our
lessons, but she said we were to go for a walk with Miss
Hoole to grandmamma’s.’
‘Well, go, Tanya, my darling. Oh, wait a minute, though,’
he said, still holding her and stroking her soft little hand.
He took off the mantelpiece, where he had put it yester-
day, a little box of sweets, and gave her two, picking out her
favorites, a chocolate and a fondant.
‘For Grisha?’ said the little girl, pointing to the choco-
late.
‘Yes, yes.’ And still stroking her little shoulder, he kissed
her on the roots of her hair and neck, and let her go.
‘The carriage is ready,’ said Matvey; ‘but there’s some one Anna Karenina
to see you with a petition.’
‘Been here long?’ asked Stepan Arkadyevitch.
‘Half an hour.’
‘How many times have I told you to tell me at once?’
‘One must let you drink your coffee in peace, at least,’
said Matvey, in the affectionately gruff tone with which it
was impossible to be angry.
‘Well, show the person up at once,’ said Oblonsky, frown-
ing with vexation.
The petitioner, the widow of a staff captain Kalinin,
came with a request impossible and unreasonable; but Ste-
pan Arkadyevitch, as he generally did, made her sit down,
heard her to the end attentively without interrupting her,
and gave her detailed advice as to how and to whom to ap-
ply, and even wrote her, in his large, sprawling, good and
legible hand, a confident and fluent little note to a personage
who might be of use to her. Having got rid of the staff cap-
tain’s widow, Stepan Arkadyevitch took his hat and stopped
to recollect whether he had forgotten anything. It appeared
that he had forgotten nothing except what he wanted to for-
get—his wife.
‘Ah, yes!’ He bowed his head, and his handsome face as-
sumed a harassed expression. ‘To go, or not to go!’ he said
to himself; and an inner voice told him he must not go, that
nothing could come of it but falsity; that to amend, to set
right their relations was impossible, because it was impos-
sible to make her attractive again and able to inspire love, or
to make him an old man, not susceptible to love. Except de-
ceit and lying nothing could come of it now; and deceit and Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
lying were opposed to his nature.
‘It must be some time, though: it can’t go on like this,’
he said, trying to give himself courage. He squared his
chest, took out a cigarette, took two whiffs at it, flung it
into a mother-of-pearl ashtray, and with rapid steps walked
through the drawing room, and opened the other door into
his wife’s bedroom. Anna Karenina
Chapter
Darya Alexandrovna, in a dressing jacket, and with her
now scanty, once luxuriant and beautiful hair fastened up
with hairpins on the nape of her neck, with a sunken, thin
face and large, startled eyes, which looked prominent from
the thinness of her face, was standing among a litter of all
sorts of things scattered all over the room, before an open
bureau, from which she was taking something. Hearing her
husband’s steps, she stopped, looking towards the door, and
trying assiduously to give her features a severe and con-
temptuous expression. She felt she was afraid of him, and
afraid of the coming interview. She was just attempting
to do what she had attempted to do ten times already in
these last three days—to sort out the children’s things and
her own, so as to take them to her mother’s—and again she
could not bring herself to do this; but now again, as each
time before, she kept saying to herself, ‘that things cannot
go on like this, that she must take some step’ to punish him,
put him to shame, avenge on him some little part at least of
the suffering he had caused her. She still continued to tell
herself that she should leave him, but she was conscious that
this was impossible; it was impossible because she could not
get out of the habit of regarding him as her husband and
loving him. Besides this, she realized that if even here in
her own house she could hardly manage to look after her Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
five children properly, they would be still worse off where
she was going with them all. As it was, even in the course of
these three days, the youngest was unwell from being given
unwholesome soup, and the others had almost gone with-
out their dinner the day before. She was conscious that it
was impossible to go away; but, cheating herself, she went
on all the same sorting out her things and pretending she
was going.
Seeing her husband, she dropped her hands into the
drawer of the bureau as though looking for something, and
only looked round at him when he had come quite up to her.
But her face, to which she tried to give a severe and resolute
expression, betrayed bewilderment and suffering.
‘Dolly!’ he said in a subdued and timid voice. He bent
his head towards his shoulder and tried to look pitiful and
humble, but for all that he was radiant with freshness and
health. In a rapid glance she scanned his figure that beamed
with health and freshness. ‘Yes, he is happy and content!’
she thought; ‘while I.... And that disgusting good nature,
which every one likes him for and praises—I hate that good
nature of his,’ she thought. Her mouth stiffened, the mus-
cles of the cheek contracted on the right side of her pale,
nervous face.
‘What do you want?’ she said in a rapid, deep, unnatu-
ral voice.
‘Dolly!’ he repeated, with a quiver in his voice. ‘Anna is
coming today.’
‘Well, what is that to me? I can’t see her!’ she cried.
‘But you must, really, Dolly...’ Anna Karenina
‘Go away, go away, go away!’ she shrieked, not looking at
him, as though this shriek were called up by physical pain.
Stepan Arkadyevitch could be calm when he thought of
his wife, he could hope that she would come round, as Mat-
vey expressed it, and could quietly go on reading his paper
and drinking his coffee; but when he saw her tortured, suf-
fering face, heard the tone of her voice, submissive to fate
and full of despair, there was a catch in his breath and a
lump in his throat, and his eyes began to shine with tears.
‘My God! what have I done? Dolly! For God’s sake!.... You
know....’ He could not go on; there was a sob in his throat.
She shut the bureau with a slam, and glanced at him.
‘Dolly, what can I say?.... One thing: forgive...Remember,
cannot nine years of my life atone for an instant....’
She dropped her eyes and listened, expecting what he
would say, as it were beseeching him in some way or other
to make her believe differently.
‘—instant of passion?’ he said, and would have gone
on, but at that word, as at a pang of physical pain, her lips
stiffened again, and again the muscles of her right cheek
worked.
‘Go away, go out of the room!’ she shrieked still more
shrilly, ‘and don’t talk to me of your passion and your loath-
someness.’
She tried to go out, but tottered, and clung to the back of
a chair to support herself. His face relaxed, his lips swelled,
his eyes were swimming with tears.
‘Dolly!’ he said, sobbing now; ‘for mercy’s sake, think of
the children; they are not to blame! I am to blame, and pun- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
ish me, make me expiate my fault. Anything I can do, I am
ready to do anything! I am to blame, no words can express
how much I am to blame! But, Dolly, forgive me!’
She sat down. He listened to her hard, heavy breathing,
and he was unutterably sorry for her. She tried several times
to begin to speak, but could not. He waited.
‘You remember the children, Stiva, to play with them;
but I remember them, and know that this means their ruin,’
she said—obviously one of the phrases she had more than
once repeated to herself in the course of the last few days.
She had called him ‘Stiva,’ and he glanced at her with
gratitude, and moved to take her hand, but she drew back
from him with aversion.
‘I think of the children, and for that reason I would do
anything in the world to save them, but I don’t myself know
how to save them. By taking them away from their father, or
by leaving them with a vicious father—yes, a vicious father....
Tell me, after what...has happened, can we live together? Is
that possible? Tell me, eh, is it possible?’ she repeated, rais-
ing her voice, ‘after my husband, the father of my children,
enters into a love affair with his own children’s governess?’
‘But what could I do? what could I do?’ he kept saying in
a pitiful voice, not knowing what he was saying, as his head
sank lower and lower.
‘You are loathsome to me, repulsive!’ she shrieked, get-
ting more and more heated. ‘Your tears mean nothing! You
have never loved me; you have neither heart nor honorable
feeling! You are hateful to me, disgusting, a stranger—yes,
a complete stranger!’ With pain and wrath she uttered the
