a, for God's sake! what is the matter with you?" he said,
appealing to 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 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 gleam in her eyes that he could
not understand. "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:

"And I beg you to explain why I should not go."

"Because it might cause you..." he hesitated.

"I don't understand. Yashvin _n'est pas compromettant_, and
Princess Varvara is no worse than others. Oh, here she is!"

Chapter 33

Vronsky for the first time experienced a feeling of anger against
Anna, almost a hatred for her willfully refusing to understand
her own position. This feeling was aggravated by his being
unable to tell her plainly the cause of his anger. If he had
told her directly what he was thinking, he would have said:

"In that dress, with a princess only too well known to everyone,
to show yourself at the theater is equivalent not merely to
acknowledging your position as a fallen woman, but is flinging
down a challenge to society, that is to say, cutting yourself off
from it forever."

He could not say that to her. "But how can she fail to see it,
and what is going on in her?" he said to himself. He felt at the
same time that his respect for her was diminis