those fifteen years of her married
life, "pregnancy, sickness, mental incapacity, indifference to
everything, and most of all--hideousness. Kitty, young and
pretty as she is, even Kitty has lost her looks; and I when I'm
with child become hideous, I know it. The birth, the agony, the
hideous agonies, that last moment...then the nursing, the
sleepless nights, the fearful pains...."

Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain
from sore breasts which she had suffered with almost every child.
"Then the children's illnesses, that everlasting apprehension;
then bringing them up; evil propensities" (she thought of little
Masha's crime among the raspberries), "education, Latin--it's all
so incomprehensible and difficult. And on the top of it all, the
death of these children." And there rose again before her
imagination the cruel memory, that always tore her mother's
heart, of the death of her last little baby, who had died of
croup; his funeral, the callous indifference of all at the little
pink coffin, and her own torn heart, and her lonely anguish at
the sight of the pale little brow with its projecting temples,
and the open, wondering little mouth seen in the coffin at the
moment when it was being covered with the little pink lid with a
cross braided on it.

"And all this, what's it for? What is to come of it all? That
I'm wasting my life, never having a moment's peace, either with
child, or nursing a child, forever irritable, peevish, wretched
myself and worrying others, repulsive to my husband, while the
children are growing up unhappy, badly educated, and penniless.
Even now, if it weren't for spending the summer at the Levins',
I don't know how we should be managing to live. Of course Kostya
and Kitty have so much tact that we don't feel it; but it can't
go on. They'll have children, they won't be able to keep us;
it's a drag on them as it is. How is papa, who has hardly
anything left for himself, to help us? So that I can't even
bring the children up by myself, and may find it hard with the
help of other people, at the cost of humiliation. Why, even if
we suppose the greatest good luck, that the children don't die,
and I bring them up somehow. At the very best they'll simply be
decent people. That's all I can hope for. And to gain simply
that--what agonies, what toil!... One's whole life ruined!"
Again she recalled what the young peasant woman had said, and
again she was revol