`I don't quite understand the significance of your words,' he said, handing her the cup.
She glanced towards the sofa beside her, and he instantly sat down.
`Yes, I've wanted to tell you,' she said, without looking at him.
`Your action was wrong - wrong, very wrong.'
`Do you suppose I don't know that I've acted wrongly? But who was the cause of my doing so?'
`Why do you say that to me?' she said looking at him sternly.
`You know why,' he answered, boldly and joyously, meeting her glance and without dropping his eyes.
It was not he, but she, who became confused.
`That merely proves you have no heart,' she said. But her eyes said that she knew he had a heart, and that was why she was afraid of him.
`What you spoke of just now was a mistake, and not love.'
`Remember that I have forbidden you to utter that word, that detestable word,' said Anna, with a shudder. But at once she felt that by that very word `forbidden' she had shown that she acknowledged certain rights over him, and by that very fact was encouraging him to speak of love. `I have long meant to tell you this,' she went on, looking resolutely into his eyes, and all aflame from the burning flush on her cheeks. `I've come here purposely this evening, knowing I should meet you. I have come to tell you that this must end. I have never blushed before anyone, and you force me to feel guilty of something.'
He looked at her and was struck by a new spiritual beauty in her face.
`What do you wish of me?' he said, simply and gravely.
`I want you to go to Moscow and ask for Kitty's forgiveness,'
she said.
`That is not your wish,' he said.
He saw she was saying what she was forcing herself to say, not what she wanted to say.
`If you love me, as you say,' she whispered, `you will do this, so that I may be at peace.'
His face grew radiant.
`Don't you know that you're all my life to me? But I know no peace, and I can't give it to you; all of myself, and love - yes. I can't think of you and myself apart. You and I are one to me. And I see no possibility before us of peace - either for me or for you. I see a possibility of despair, of wretchedness.... Or else I see a possibility of happiness - and what a happiness!... Can it be impossible?' he added, his lips barely moving - yet she heard.
She strained every effort of her mind to say what ought to be said. But instead of that she let her eyes rest on him, full of love, and made no answer.
`It's come!' he thought in ecstasy. `When I was beginning to despair, and it seemed there would be no end - it's come! She loves me! She owns it!'
`Then do this for me: never say such things to me, and let us be friends,' she said in words; but her eyes spoke quite differently.
`Friends we shall never be - that you know yourself. Whether we shall be the happiest or the most wretched of people - that lies within your power.'
She would have said something, but he interrupted her.
`For I ask but one thing: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer - even as I am doing now. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is painful to you.'
`I don't want to drive you away.'
`Only don't change anything - leave everything as it is,' said he, in a shaky voice. `Here's your husband.'
At that instant Alexei Alexandrovich did in fact walk into the room with his calm, ungainly gait.
Glancing at his wife and Vronsky, he went up to the lady of the house, and, sitting down for a cup of tea, began talking in his unhasty, always audible voice, in his habitual tone of banter, as if he were teasing someone.
`Your Rambouillet is in full conclave,' he said looking round at all the party; `the graces and the muses.'
But Princess Betsy could not endure that tone of his - sneering, as she called it, using the English word, and like a clever hostess she at once brought him around to a serious conversation on the subject of universal conscription. Alexei Alexandrovich was immediately carried away by the subject, and began seriously defending the new imperial decree before Princess Betsy, who had attacked it.
Vronsky and Anna still sat at the little table.
`This is getting indecorous,' whispered one lady, with an expressive glance at Madame Karenina, her husband and Vronsky.
`What did I tell you?' said Anna's friend.
But it was not only these ladies who watched them - almost everyone in the room, even the Princess Miaghkaia and Betsy herself, looked several times in the direction of the two who had withdrawn from the general circle, as though they found it a hindrance. Alexei Alexandrovich was the only person who did not once look in their direction, and was not diverted from the interesting discussion he had entered upon.
Noticing the disagreeable impression that was being made on everyone, Princess Betsy slipped someone else into her place to listen to Alexei Alexandrovich, and walked over to Anna.
`I'm always amazed at the clearness and precision of your husband's language,' she said. `The most transcendent ideas seem to be within my grasp when he's speaking.'
`Oh, yes!' said Anna, radiant with a smile of happiness, and not understanding a word of what Betsy had said. She crossed over to the big table and took part in the general conversation.
Alexei Alexandrovich, after staying half an hour, walked up to his wife and suggested that they go home together. But she answered, without looking at him, that she was staying to supper. Alexei Alexandrovich bowed himself out.
The fat old Tatar, Madame Karenina's coachman, in a glistening leather coat, was with difficulty bridling the left of her pair of grays, chilled with the cold and rearing at the entrance. A footman stood by the carriage door he had opened. The hall porter stood holding open the great door of the house. Anna Arkadyevna, with her quick little hand, was unfastening the lace of her sleeve, caught in the hook of her fur cloak, and with bent head was listening rapturously to the words Vronsky murmured as he saw her down to her carriage.