t, and
afterwards at the Tatar restaurant after his champagne, Stepan
Arkadyevitch felt a little refreshed in the atmosphere he was
used to. But still he felt quite unlike himself all that
evening.

On getting home to Pyotr Oblonsky's, where he was staying, Stepan
Arkadyevitch found a note from Betsy. She wrote to him that she
was very anxious to finish their interrupted conversation, and
begged him to come next day. He had scarcely read this note, and
frowned at its contents, when he heard below the ponderous tramp
of the servants, carrying something heavy.

Stepan Arkadyevitch went out to look. It was the rejuvenated
Pyotr Oblonsky. He was so drunk that he could not walk upstairs;
but he told them to set him on his legs when he saw Stepan
Arkadyevitch, and clinging to him, walked with him into his room
and there began telling him how he had spent the evening, and
fell asleep doing so.

Stepan Arkadyevitch was in very low spirits, which happened
rarely with him, and for a long while he could not go to sleep.
Everything he could recall to his mind, everything was
disgusting; but most disgusting of all, as if it were something
shameful, was the memory of the evening he had spent at Countess
Lidia Ivanovna's.

Next day he received from Alexey Alexandrovitch a final answer,
refusing to grant Anna's divorce, and he understood that this
decision was based on what the Frenchman had said in his real or
pretended trance.

Chapter 23

In order to carry through any undertaking in family life, there
must necessarily be either complete division between the husband
and wife, or loving agreement. When the relations of a couple
are vacillating and neither one thing nor the other, no sort of
enterprise can be undertaken.

Many families remain for years in the same place, though both
husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither
complete division nor agreement between them.

Both Vronsky and Anna felt life in Moscow insupportable in the
heat and dust, when the spring sunshine was followed by the glare
of summer, and all the trees in the boulevards had long since
been in full leaf, and the leaves were covered with dust. But
they did not go back to Vozdvizhenskoe, as they had arranged to
do long before; they went on staying in Moscow, though they both
loathed it, because of late there had been no agreement between
them.

The irritability that kept them apart had no external cause, and
all e