ly, Darya Alexandrovna,
at ten o'clock, went on again. At home, looking after her
children, she had no time to think. So now, after this journey
of four hours, all the thoughts she had suppressed before rushed
swarming into her brain, and she thought over all her life as she
never had before, and from the most different points of view.
Her thoughts seemed strange even to herself. At first she
thought about the children, about whom she was uneasy, although
the princess and Kitty (she reckoned more upon her) had promised
to look after them. "If only Masha does not begin her naughty
tricks, if Grisha isn't kicked by a horse, and Lily's stomach
isn't upset again!" she thought. But these questions of the
present were succeeded by questions of the immediate future. She
began thinking how she had to get a new flat in Moscow for the
coming winter, to renew the drawing room furniture, and to make
her elder girl a cloak. Then questions of the more remote future
occurred to her: how she was to place her children in the world.
"The girls are all right," she thought; "but the boys?"

"It's very well that I'm teaching Grisha, but of course that's
only because I am free myself now, I'm not with child. Stiva,
of course, there's no counting on. And with the help of
good-natured friends I can bring them up; but if there's another
baby coming?..." And the thought struck her how untruly it was
said that the curse laid on woman was that in sorrow she should
bring forth children.

"The birth itself, that's nothing; but the months of carrying the
child--that's what's so intolerable," she thought, picturing to
herself her last pregnancy, and the death of the last baby. And
she recalled the conversation she had just had with the young
woman at the inn. On being asked whether she had any children,
the handsome young woman had answered cheerfully:

"I had a girl baby, but God set me free; I buried her last Lent."

"Well, did you grieve very much for her?" asked Darya
Alexandrovna.

"Why grieve? The old man has grandchildren enough as it is. It
was only a trouble. No working, nor nothing. Only a tie."

This answer had struck Darya Alexandrovna as revolting in spite
of the good-natured and pleasing face of the young woman; but now
she could not help recalling these words. In those cynical words
there was indeed a grain of truth.

"Yes, altogether," thought Darya Alexandrovna, looking back over
her whole existence during