Anna Karenina

' he was beginning, but he checked himself. 'I must ask what it is you want of me?' 'What I can want? All I can want is that you should not desert me, as you think of doing,' she said, understanding all he had not uttered. 'But that I don't want; that's secondary. I want love, and there is none. So then all is over.' She turned towards the door. 'Stop! st—op!' said Vronsky, with no change in the gloomy lines of his brows, though he held her by the hand. 'What is it all about! I said that we must put off going for three days, and on that you told me I was lying, that I was not an honourable man.' 'Yes, and I repeat that the man who reproaches me with having sacrificed everything for me,' she said, recalling the words of a still earlier quarrel, 'that he's worse than a dishonourable man—he's a heartless man.' 'Oh, there are limits to endurance!' he cried, and hastily let go her hand. 'He hates me, that's clear,' she thought, and in silence, without looking round, she walked with faltering steps out of the room. 'He loves another woman, that's even clearer,' she said to herself as she went into her own room. 'I want love, and there is none. So, then, all is over.' She repeated the words she had said, 'and it must be ended.' 'But how?' she asked herself, and she sat down in a low chair before the looking-glass. Thoughts of where she would go now, whether to the aunt who had brought her up, to Dolly, or simply alone abroad, and of what he was doing now alone in his study; whether this was the final quarrel, or whether reconciliation were still possible; and of what all her old friends at Petersburg would say of her now; and of how Alexey Alexandrovitch would look at it, and many other ideas of what would happen now after the rupture, came into her head; but she did not give herself up to them with all her heart. At the bottom of her heart was some obscure idea that alone interested her, but she could not get clear sight of it. Thinking once more of Alexey Alexandrovitch, she recalled the time of her illness after her confinement, and the feeling which never left her at that time. 'Why didn't I die!' and the words and the feeling of that time came back to her. And all at once she knew what was in her soul. Yes, it was that idea which alone solved all. 'Yes, to die! . . . And the shame and disgrace of Alexey Alexandrovitch and of Seryozha, and my awful shame, it will all be saved by death. To die! and he will feel remorse; will be sorry; will love me; he will suffer on my account.'

' he was beginning, but he checked himself.