CHAPTER 24

THE FIRST PERSON to meet Anna at home was her son. He dashed down the stairs to her, in spite of his II/Governess/D147’s call, and with desperate joy shrieked: “Mother! Mother!” Running up to her, he hung on her neck.

“I told you it was mother!” he shouted to the II/Governess/D147, who issued scolding clucks at this rudeness. “I knew!”

But the son, like the husband, aroused in Anna a feeling akin to disappointment. She had imagined him better than he was in reality. She had to let herself drop down to the reality to enjoy him as he really was. But even as he was, he was charming, with his fair curls, his blue eyes, and his plump, graceful little legs in tightly pulled-up stockings. Anna experienced almost physical pleasure in the sensation of his nearness and his caresses, and moral soothing when she met his simple, confiding, and loving glance and heard his naive questions.

Anna took out the Class Is that Dolly’s children had sent him, and told her son what sort of little girl his cousin was in Moscow, how she could read, and even taught the other children.

“Why, am I not so nice as she?” asked Seryozha.

“To me you’re nicer than anyone in the world.”

“I know that,” said Seryozha, smiling.

Various friends visited with Anna, glad to have her back, while Alexei Alexandrovich spent the day at the Ministry, busy with some momentous project that he himself had initiated and was directing. Anna, finally left alone, spent the time till dinner in helping with her son’s dinner (he dined apart from his parents) and in putting her things in order, and in reading and answering the notes and letters that had accumulated on her table.

The feeling of causeless shame, which she had felt on the journey, and her excitement, too, had completely vanished. In the habitual conditions of her life she felt again resolute and irreproachable; in her physical body she felt only the occasional phantasmal tingling just above her breastbone, where the koschei had danced with its dozens of disgusting feet across her chest.

She shuddered at the memory, and then recalled with wonder her curiously joyful state of mind after the nightmare of the attack. What was it? Nothing. Vronsky said something silly, which was easy to put a stop to, and I answered as I ought to have done. To speak of it to my husband would be unnecessary and out of the question. To speak of it would be to attach importance to what has no importance. She remembered how she had told her husband of what was almost a declaration made to her at Petersburg by a young man, one of her husband’s subordinates in the Ministry, and how Alexei Alexandrovich had answered that every woman living in the world was exposed to such incidents, but that he had the fullest confidence in her tact, and could never lower her and himself by jealousy. Neither ever mentioned the incident again, and the man had, anyway, later been revealed as a Janus, and given appropriate punishment in Petersburg Square.

“So then there’s no reason to speak of it? And indeed, thank God, there’s nothing to speak of,” she said to Android Karenina, who nodded her quiet agreement.

“IT’S TIME, IT’S TIME,” HE SAID, WITH A MEANINGFUL SMILE; HIS TELESCOPING OCULUS ZOOMED INAS HE ENTERED THEIR BEDROOM

Alexei Alexandrovich came back from his meeting at four o’clock, but as often happened, he had not time to come in to her. Later they dined together, and after dinner Anna sat down at the hearth to write a letter to Dolly, and waited for her husband. Precisely at twelve o’clock, when Anna was still sitting at her writing table, she heard the sound of measured steps in slippers, and Alexei Alexandrovich, freshly washed and combed, his faceplate glinting in the hearth light, came in to her.

“He’s a good man, truthful, good-hearted, and remarkable in his own line,” Anna whispered to Android Karenina, as her husband approached. “And really, the visible half of his face is handsome in its way.”

“It’s time, it’s time,” he said, with a meaningful smile; his right eye zoomed slowly toward her, its lens opening visibly, before he went into their bedroom.

“And what right had he to look at him like that?” Anna said to her android, recalling Vronsky’s glance at Alexei Alexandrovich. Undressing, she went into the bedroom, and sent Android Karenina, as was appropriate, into Surcease; but her face had none of the eagerness that, during her stay in Moscow, had fairly flashed from her eyes and her smile; on the contrary, now the fire seemed quenched in her, hidden somewhere far away.