by heart. "It means that I, hating him, but
still recognizing that I have wronged him--and I consider him
magnanimous--that I humiliate myself to write to him.... Well,
suppose I make the effort; I do it. Either I receive a
humiliating refusal or consent.... Well, I have received his
consent, say..." Anna was at that moment at the furthest end
of the room, and she stopped there, doing something to the
curtain at the window. "I receive his consent, but my...my
son? They won't give him up to me. He will grow up despising
me, with his father, whom I've abandoned. Do you see, I love...
equally, I think, but both more than myself--two creatures,
Seryozha and Alexey."

She came out into the middle of the room and stood facing Dolly,
with her arms pressed tightly across her chest. In her white
dressing gown her figure seemed more than usually grand and
broad. She bent her head, and with shining, wet eyes looked from
under her brows at Dolly, a thin little pitiful figure in her
patched dressing jacket and nightcap, shaking all over with
emotion.

"It is only those two creatures that I love, and one excludes the
other. I can't have them together, and that's the only thing I
want. And since I can't have that, I don't care about the rest.
I don't care about anything, anything. And it will end one way
or another, and so I can't, I don't like to talk of it. So don't
blame me, don't judge me for anything. You can't with your pure
heart understand all that I'm suffering." She went up, sat down
beside Dolly, and with a guilty look, peeped into her face and
took her hand.

"What are you thinking? What are you thinking about me? Don't
despise me. I don't deserve contempt. I'm simply unhappy. If
anyone is unhappy, I am," she articulated, and turning away, she
burst into tears.

Left alone, Darya Alexandrovna said her prayers and went to bed.
She had felt for Anna with all her heart while she was speaking
to her, but now she could not force herself to think of her. The
memories of home and of her children rose up in her imagination
with a peculiar charm quite new to her, with a sort of new
brilliance. That world of her own seemed to her now so sweet and
precious that she would not on any account spend an extra day
outside it, and she made up her mind that she would certainly go
back next day.

Anna meantime went back to her boudoir, took a wine glass and
dropped into it several drops of a medicine, of which