Chapter 29

`Where to? Home?' asked Piotr.

`Yes, home,' she said, not even thinking now where she was going.

`How they looked at me as something dreadful, incomprehensible, and curious! What can he be telling the other with such warmth?' she thought, staring at two men who walked by. `Can one ever tell anyone what one is feeling? I meant to tell Dolly, and it's a good thing I didn't tell her. How pleased she would have been at my misery! She would have concealed it, but her chief feeling would have been delight at my being punished for the happiness she envied me for. Kitty - she would have been even more pleased. How I can see through her! She knows I was more than usually kind to her husband. And she's jealous and hates me. And she despises me. In her eyes I'm an immoral woman. If I were an immoral woman I could have made her husband fall in love with me.... If I'd cared to. And, indeed, I did care to. There's someone who's pleased with himself,' she thought, as she saw a fat, rubicund gentleman coming toward her. He took her for an acquaintance, and lifted his glossy hat above his bald, glossy head, and then perceived his mistake. `He thought he knew me. Well, he knows me as well as anyone in the world knows me. I don't know myself. I know my appetites, as the French say. They want that hokey-pokey, that they do know for certain,' she thought, looking at two boys stopping an ice-cream seller, who took a barrel off his head and began wiping his perspiring face with a towel. `We all want what is sweet and tastes good. If there are no sweetmeats, then a hokey-pokey will do. And Kitty's the same - if not Vronsky, then Levin. And she envies me. And hates me. And we all hate each other. I Kitty - Kitty me. Yes, that's the truth. Tiutkin, coiffeur.... Je me fais coiffer par Tiutkin.... I'll tell him that when he comes,' she thought and smiled. But the same instant she remembered that she had no one now to tell anything amusing to. `And there's nothing amusing, nothing mirthful, really. It's all hateful. Vesper bells - and how carefully that merchant crosses himself! As if he were afraid of missing something. Why these churches, and these bells, and this humbug? Simply to conceal that we all hate each other like these cabdrivers, who are abusing each other so angrily. Iashvin says, ``He wants to strip me of my shirt, and I wish him the same.' Yes, that's the truth!'

She was plunged in these thoughts, which so engrossed her that she left off thinking of her own position, when the carriage drew up at the steps of her house. It was only when she saw the porter running out to meet her that she remembered she had sent the note and the telegram.

`Is there any answer?' she inquired.

`I'll see this minute,' answered the porter, and, glancing into his room, he took out and gave her the thin square envelope of a telegram. `I can't come before ten o'clock. - Vronsky,' she read.

`And hasn't the messenger come back?'

`No,' answered the porter.

`Then, since it's so, I know what I must do,' she said, and feeling a vague fury and craving for revenge rising up within her, she ran upstairs. `I'll go to him myself. Before going away forever, I'll tell him all. Never have I hated anyone as I hate that man!' she thought. Seeing his hat on the rack, she shuddered with aversion. She did not consider that this telegram was an answer to her telegram and that he had not yet received her note. She pictured him to herself as talking calmly to his mother and Princess Sorokina, and rejoicing at her sufferings. `Yes, I must go quickly,' she said, not knowing yet where she was going. She longed to get away as quickly as possible from the feelings she had gone through in that awful house. The servants, the walls, the things in that house - all aroused repulsion and hatred in her and lay like a weight upon her.