“Thank God it’s over! You wouldn’t believe how insufferable it’s been for me.”
“Why so? Isn’t it the life all of you, all young men, always lead?” she said, knitting her brows; and taking up the crochet work that was lying on the table, she began drawing the hook out of it, without looking at Vronsky.
“I gave that life up long ago,” said he, wondering at the change in her face, and trying to divine its meaning. “And I confess,” he said, with a smile, showing his thick, white teeth, “this week I’ve been, as it were, looking at myself in a glass, seeing that life, and I didn’t like it.”
She held the work in her hands, but did not crochet, and looked at him with strange, shining, and hostile eyes.
“This morning Liza came to see me—they’re not afraid to call on me, in spite of the Countess Lidia Ivanovna,” she put in—“and she told me about your Athenian evening. How loathsome!”
“I was just going to say....”
She interrupted him. “It was that Thérèse you used to know?”
“I was just saying....”
“How disgusting you are, you men! How is it you can’t understand that a woman can never forget that,” she said, getting more and more angry, and so letting him see the cause of her irritation, “especially a woman who cannot know your life? What do I know? What have I ever known?” she said, “what you tell me. And how do I know whether you tell me the truth?...”
“Anna, you hurt me. Don’t you trust me? Haven’t I told you that I haven’t a thought I wouldn’t lay bare to you?”