She said to herself:  “No, just now I can’t think of it, later on, when I am calmer.”  But this calm for thought never came; every time the thought rose of what she had done and what would happen to her, and what she ought to do, a horror came over her and she drove those thoughts away.

“Later, later,” she said—­“when I am calmer.”

But in dreams, when she had no control over her thoughts, her position presented itself to her in all its hideous nakedness.  One dream haunted her almost every night.  She dreamed that both were her husbands at once, that both were lavishing caresses on her.  Alexey Alexandrovitch was weeping, kissing her hands, and saying, “How happy we are now!” And Alexey Vronsky was there too, and he too was her husband.  And she was marveling that it had once seemed impossible to her, was explaining to them, laughing, that this was ever so much simpler, and that now both of them were happy and contented.  But this dream weighed on her like a nightmare, and she awoke from it in terror.

Chapter 12

In the early days after his return from Moscow, whenever Levin shuddered and grew red, remembering the disgrace of his rejection, he said to himself:  “This was just how I used to shudder and blush, thinking myself utterly lost, when I was plucked in physics and did not get my remove; and how I thought myself utterly ruined after I had mismanaged that affair of my sister’s that was entrusted to me.  And yet, now that years have passed, I recall it and wonder that it could distress me so much.  It will be the same thing too with this trouble.  Time will go by and I shall not mind about this either.”

But three months had passed and he had not left off minding about it; and it was as painful for him to think of it as it had been those first days.  He could not be at peace because after dreaming so long of family life, and feeling himself so ripe for it, he was still not married, and was further than ever from marriage.  He was painfully conscious himself, as were all about him, that at his years it is not well for man to be alone.  He remembered how before starting for Moscow he had once said to his cowman Nikolay, a simple-hearted peasant, whom he liked talking to:  “Well, Nikolay!  I mean to get married,” and how Nikolay had promptly answered, as of a matter on which there could be no possible doubt:  “And high time too, Konstantin Demitrievitch.”  But marriage had now become further off than ever.  The place was taken, and whenever he tried to imagine any of the girls he knew in that place, he felt that it was utterly impossible.  Moreover, the recollection of the rejection and the part he had played in the affair tortured him with shame.  However often he told himself that he was in no wise to blame in it, that recollection, like other humiliating reminiscences of a similar kind, made him twinge and blush.  There had been in his past, as in every man’s,