go or not, I
suppose . . . ."

"No, I only ask in case the doctor should be vexed."

"Well, ask the doctor, then; I'm not a doctor."

On this occasion what displeased Laevsky most in Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
was her white open neck and the little curls at the back of her
head. And he remembered that when Anna Karenin got tired of her
husband, what she disliked most of all was his ears, and thought:
"How true it is, how true!"

Feeling weak and as though his head were perfectly empty, he went
into his study, lay down on his sofa, and covered his face with a
handkerchief that he might not be bothered by the flies. Despondent
and oppressive thoughts always about the same thing trailed slowly
across his brain like a long string of waggons on a gloomy autumn
evening, and he sank into a state of drowsy oppression. It seemed
to him that he had wronged Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and her husband,
and that it was through his fault that her husband had died. It
seemed to him that he had sinned against his own life, which he had
ruined, against the world of lofty ideas, of learning, and of work,
and he conceived that wonderful world as real and possible, not on
this sea-front with hungry Turks and lazy mountaineers sauntering
upon it, but there in the North, where there were operas, theatres,
newspapers, and all kinds of intellectual activity. One could only
there--not here--be honest, intelligent, lofty, and pure. He
accused himself of having no ideal, no guiding principle in life,
though he had a dim understanding now what it meant. Two years
before, when he fell in love with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, it seemed
to him that he had only to go with her as his wife to the Caucasus,
and he would be saved from vulgarity and emptiness; in the same way
now, he was convinced that he had only to part from Nadyezhda
Fyodorovna and to go to Petersburg, and he would get everything he
wanted.

"Run away," he muttered to himself, sitting up and biting his nails.
"Run away!"

He pictured in his imagination how he would go aboard the steamer
and then would have some lunch, would drink some cold beer, would
talk on deck with ladies, then would get into the train at Sevastopol
and set off. Hurrah for freedom! One station after another would
flash by, the air would keep growing colder and keener, then the
birches and the fir-trees, then Kursk, Moscow. . . . In the restaurants
cabbage soup, mutton with kasha, sturgeon, beer, no more Asiaticism,
but Russi