Anna Karenina

"The Countess Lidia Ivanovna had, as a very young and sentimental girl, been married to a wealthy man of high rank, an extremely good-natured, jovial, and extremely dissipated rake." Two months after marriage, he abandoned her, and her "impassioned protestations of affection he met with a sarcasm and even hostility that people knowing the count's good heart, and seeing no defects in the sentimental Lidia, were at a loss to explain." Though divorced and living apart, "whenever the husband met the wife, he invariably behaved to her with the same malignant irony, the cause of which was incomprehensible." "Countess Lidia Ivanovna had long given up being in love with her husband, but from that time she had never given up being in love with someone. She was in love with several people at once, both men and women." She'd been "in love with all the new princes and princesses who married into the imperial family; she had been in love with a high dignitary of the Church, a vicar, and a parish priest; she had been in love with a journalist, three Slavophiles, with Komissarov, with a minister, a doctor, an English missionary and Karenin." But after taking Karenin "under her special protection," she "felt that all her other attachments were not the real thing, and that she was now genuinely in love, and with no one but Karenin." She loved him "for himself, for his lofty, uncomprehended soul, for the sweet—to her—high notes of his voice, for his drawling intonation, his weary eyes, his character, and his soft white hands with their swollen veins." She sought "in his face signs of the impression she was making on him." "She caught herself in reveries on what might have been, if she had not been married and he had been free." "For several days now Countess Lidia Ivanovna had been in a state of intense excitement. She had learned that Anna and Vronsky were in Petersburg. Alexey Alexandrovitch must be saved from seeing her, he must be saved even from the torturing knowledge that that awful woman was in the same town with him, and that he might meet her any minute." She made inquiries through friends about "what those infamous people, as she called Anna and Vronsky, intended doing," trying "to guide every movement of her friend during those days that he could not come across them." An adjutant told her "they had finished their business and were going away next day." But the next morning "a note was brought her, the handwriting of which she recognized with horror. It was the handwriting of Anna Karenina." Anna's letter (in French) reads: "I am miserable at being separated from my son. I entreat permission to see him once before my departure. Forgive me for recalling myself to your memory. I apply to you and not to Alexey Alexandrovitch, simply because I do not wish to cause that generous man to suffer in remembering me. Knowing your friendship for him, I know you will understand me. Could you send Seryozha to me, or should I come to the house at some fixed hour, or will you let me know when and where I could see him away from home? I do not anticipate a refusal, knowing the magnanimity of him with whom it rests. You cannot conceive the craving I have to see him, and so cannot conceive the gratitude your help will arouse in me." "Everything in this letter exasperated Countess Lidia Ivanovna: its contents and the allusion to magnanimity, and especially its free and easy—as she considered—tone." "Say that there is no answer," said Countess Lidia. She immediately writes to Karenin: "I must talk with you of a grave and painful subject. There we will arrange where to meet. Best of all at my house, where I will order tea as you like it. Urgent. He lays the cross, but He gives the strength to bear it." The narrator notes: "Countess Lidia Ivanovna usually wrote some two or three letters a day to Alexey Alexandrovitch. She enjoyed that form of communication, which gave opportunity for a refinement and air of mystery not afforded by their personal interviews."