hat he looks for, he will find dresses and
manners still more attractive and charming. And however white
and beautiful her bare arms are, however beautiful her full
figure and her eager face under her black curls, he will find
something better still, just as my disgusting, pitiful, and
charming husband does."

Dolly made no answer, she merely sighed. Anna noticed this sigh,
indicating dissent, and she went on. In her armory she had other
arguments so strong that no answer could be made to them.

"Do you say that it's not right? But you must consider," she
went on; "you forget my position. How can I desire children?
I'm not speaking of the suffering, I'm not afraid of that. Think
only, what are my children to be? Ill-fated children, who will
have to bear a stranger's name. For the very fact of their birth
they will be forced to be ashamed of their mother, their father,
their birth."

"But that is just why a divorce is necessary." But Anna did not
hear her. She longed to give utterance to all the arguments with
which she had so many times convinced herself.

"What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid
bringing unhappy beings into the world!" She looked at Dolly,
but without waiting for a reply she went on:

"I should always feel I had wronged these unhappy children," she
said. "If they are not, at any rate they are not unhappy; while
if they are unhappy, I alone should be to blame for it."

These were the very arguments Darya Alexandrovna had used in her
own reflections; but she heard them without understanding them.
"How can one wrong creatures that don't exist?" she thought. And
all at once the idea struck her: could it possibly, under any
circumstances, have been better for her favorite Grisha if he had
never existed? And this seemed to her so wild, so strange, that
she shook her head to drive away this tangle of whirling, mad
ideas.

"No, I don't know; it's not right," was all she said, with an
expression of disgust on her face.

"Yes, but you mustn't forget that you and I.... And besides
that," added Anna, in spite of the wealth of her arguments and
the poverty of Dolly's objections, seeming still to admit that it
was not right, "don't forget the chief point, that I am not now
in the same position as you. For you the question is: do you
desire not to have any more children; while for me it is: do I
desire to have them? And that's a great difference. You must
see that I