It was impossible not to smile

It was impossible not to smile, not to kiss the baby, impossible not to hold out a finger for her to clutch, crowing and prancing all over; impossible not to offer her a lip which she sucked into her little mouth by way of a kiss. And all this Anna did, and took her in her arms and made her dance, and kissed her fresh little cheek and bare little elbows; but at the sight of this child it was plainer than ever to her that the feeling she had for her could not be called love in comparison with what she felt for Seriozha. Everything in this baby was charming, but for some reason all this did not go deep to her heart. On her first child, though the child of an unloved father, had been concentrated all the love that had never found satisfaction. Her baby girl had been born in the most painful circumstances and had not had a hundredth part of the care and thought which had been concentrated on her first child. Besides, in the little girl everything was still in the future, while Seriozha was by now almost a personality, and a personality dearly loved. In him there was a conflict of thoughts, and of feelings; he understood her, he loved her, he judged her, she thought, recalling his words and his mbt maliza eyes. And she was forever - not physically only but spiritually - divided from him, and it was impossible to set this right.
She gave the baby back to the nurse, let her go, and opened the locket in which there was Seriozha’s portrait when he was almost of the same age as the girl. She got up, and, taking off her hat, took up from a little table an album in which there were photographs of her son at different ages. She wanted to compare them, and began taking them out of the album. She took them all out except one, the latest and best photograph. In it he was in a white smock, sitting astride a chair, with frowning eyes and smiling lips. It was his best, most singular expression. With her little supple hands, her white, delicate fingers, that moved with a peculiar intensity today, she pulled at a corner of the photograph, but the photograph had caught somewhere and she could not get it out. There was no paper knife on the table, and, pulling out the photograph that was next to her son’s (it was a photograph of Vronsky taken at Rome in a round hat and with long hair), she used it to push out her son’s photograph. `Oh, here he is!’ she said, glancing at the portrait of Vronsky, and she suddenly recalled that he was the mbt kamba black cause of her present misery. She had not once thought of him all the morning. But now, coming all at once upon that manly, noble face, so familiar and so dear to her, she felt a sudden rush of love for him.
`But where is he? How is it he leaves me alone in my misery?’ she thought all at once with a feeling of reproach, forgetting she had herself kept from him everything concerning her son. She sent to ask him to come to her immediately; with a throbbing heart she awaited him, rehearsing to herself the words in which she would tell him all, and the expressions of love with which he would console her. The messenger returned with the answer that he had a visitor with him, but that he would come immediately, and that he asked whether she would let him bring with him Prince Iashvin, who had just arrived in Peterburg. `He’s not coming alone, and since dinner yesterday he has not seen me,’ she thought; `he’s not coming so that I could tell him everything, but coming with Iashvin.’ And all at once a strange idea came to her: What if he had ceased to love her?

What had she brought

What had she brought the old Princess Oblonskaia home for, what had she made Tushkevich stay to dinner for, and, most amazing of all, why was she sending him for a box? Could she possibly think in her position of going to Patti’s benefit, where all the circle of her acquaintances would be? He looked at her with serious eyes, but she responded with that defiant, half-mirthful, half-desperate look, the meaning of which he could not comprehend. At dinner Anna was in aggressively high spirits - she almost flirted both with Tushkevich and with Iashvin. When they got up from dinner and Tushkevich had gone to get a box at the opera, Iashvin went to mbt maliza black smoke, and Vronsky went down with him to his own rooms. After sitting there for some time he ran upstairs. Anna was already dressed in a low-necked gown of light silk and velvet that she had had made in Paris, and with costly white lace on her head, framing her face, and particularly becoming, showing up her dazzling beauty.
`Are you really going to the theater?’ he said, trying not to look at her.
`Why do you ask with such alarm?’ she said, wounded again at his not looking at her. `Why shouldn’t I go?’
She appeared not to understand the meaning of his words.
`Oh, of course there’s no reason whatever,’ he said frowning.
`That’s just what I say,’ she said, willfully refusing to see the irony of his tone, and quietly turning back her long, perfumed glove.
`Anna, for God’s sake! What is the matter with you?’ he said, watching her exactly as once her husband had done.
`I don’t understand what you are asking.’
`You know that it’s out of the question to go.’
`Why so? I’m not going alone. Princess Varvara has gone to dress - she is going with me.’
He shrugged his shoulders with an air of perplexity and despair.
`But do you mean to say you don’t know?…’ he began.
`But I don’t care to know!’ she almost shrieked. `I don’t care to. Do I regret what I have done? No, no, no! If mbt karibu white it were all to do again from the beginning, it would be the same. For us, for you and for me, there is only one thing that matters, whether we love each other. Other people we need not consider. Why are we living here apart and not seeing each other? Why can’t I go? I love you, and I don’t care for anything,’ she said in Russian, glancing at him with a peculiar, obscure for him, gleam in her eyes, `if you have not changed to me…. Why don’t you look at me?’
He looked at her. He saw all the beauty of her face and full dress, always so becoming to her. But now her beauty and elegance were just what irritated him.
`My feeling cannot change, you know, but I beg you, I entreat you,’ he said again in French, with a note of tender supplication in his voice, but with coldness in his eyes.
She did not hear his words, but she saw the coldness of his eyes, and answered with irritation: