“I’ve got to go to Bryansky’s; I shall be home within an hour.”

“How often I’m asked that question today!” he said to himself, and he blushed, a thing which rarely happened to him.  The Englishman looked gravely at him; and, as though he, too, knew where Vronsky was going, he added: 

“The great thing’s to keep quiet before a race,” said he; “don’t get out of temper or upset about anything.”

“All right,” answered Vronsky, smiling; and jumping into his carriage, he told the man to drive to Peterhof.

Before he had driven many paces away, the dark clouds that had been threatening rain all day broke, and there was a heavy downpour of rain.

“What a pity!” thought Vronsky, putting up the roof of the carriage.  “It was muddy before, now it will be a perfect swamp.”  As he sat in solitude in the closed carriage, he took out his mother’s letter and his brother’s note, and read them through.

Yes, it was the same thing over and over again.  Everyone, his mother, his brother, everyone thought fit to interfere in the affairs of his heart.  This interference aroused in him a feeling of angry hatred—­a feeling he had rarely known before.  “What business is it of theirs?  Why does everybody feel called upon to concern himself about me?  And why do they worry me so?  Just because they see that this is something they can’t understand.  If it were a common, vulgar, worldly intrigue, they would have left me alone.  They feel that this is something different, that this is not a mere pastime, that this woman is dearer to me than life.  And this is incomprehensible, and that’s why it annoys them.  Whatever our destiny is or may be, we have made it ourselves, and we do not complain of it,” he said, in the word we linking himself with Anna.  “No, they must needs teach us how to live.  They haven’t an idea of what happiness is; they don’t know that without our love, for us there is neither happiness nor unhappiness—­no life at all,” he thought.

He was angry with all of them for their interference just because he felt in his soul that they, all these people, were right.  He felt that the love that bound him to Anna was not a momentary impulse, which would pass, as worldly intrigues do pass, leaving no other traces in the life of either but pleasant or unpleasant memories.  He felt all the torture of his own and her position, all the difficulty there was for them, conspicuous as they were in the eye of all the world, in concealing their love, in lying and deceiving; and in lying, deceiving, feigning, and continually thinking of others, when the passion that united them was so intense that they were both oblivious of everything else but their love.