lifeless, dull eyes,

`My love keeps growing more passionate and egoistic, while his is waning and waning, and that's why we're drifting apart.' She went on musing. `And there's no help for it. He is everything for me, and I want him more and more to give himself up to me entirely. And he wants more and more to get away from me. Precisely: we went to meet one another up to the time of our liaison, and since then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions. And there's no altering that. He tells me I'm insanely jealous, and I have told myself that I am insanely jealous; but it's not true. I'm not jealous, but I'm unsatisfied. But...' she opened her lips, and shifted her place in the carriage in the excitement, aroused by the thought that suddenly struck her. `If I could be anything but a mistress, passionately caring for nothing but his caresses; but I can't, and I don't care to be anything else. And by that desire I rouse aversion in him, and he rouses fury in me, and it cannot be different. Don't I know that he wouldn't deceive me, that he has no schemes about Princess Sorokina, that he's not in love with Kitty, that he won't desert me! I know all that, but it makes it no better for me. If without loving me, from duty, he'll be good and kind to me, without what I want - that's a thousand times worse than unkindness! That's hell! And that's just how it is. For a long while now he hasn't loved me. And where love ends, hate begins. I don't know these streets at all. Hills, apparently, and still houses, and houses.... 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.