who came with petitions on no account to give way to tears, if they did not want to ruin their chances.  “He will get angry, and will not listen to you,” they used to say.  And as a fact, in such cases the emotional disturbance set up in Alexey Alexandrovitch by the sight of tears found expression in hasty anger.  “I can do nothing.  Kindly leave the room!” he would commonly cry in such cases.

When returning from the races Anna had informed him of her relations with Vronsky, and immediately afterwards had burst into tears, hiding her face in her hands, Alexey Alexandrovitch, for all the fury aroused in him against her, was aware at the same time of a rush of that emotional disturbance always produced in him by tears.  Conscious of it, and conscious that any expression of his feelings at that minute would be out of keeping with the position, he tried to suppress every manifestation of life in himself, and so neither stirred nor looked at her.  This was what had caused that strange expression of deathlike rigidity in his face which had so impressed Anna.

When they reached the house he helped her to get out of the carriage, and making an effort to master himself, took leave of her with his usual urbanity, and uttered that phrase that bound him to nothing; he said that tomorrow he would let her know his decision.

His wife’s words, confirming his worst suspicions, had sent a cruel pang to the heart of Alexey Alexandrovitch.  That pang was intensified by the strange feeling of physical pity for her set up by her tears.  But when he was all alone in the carriage Alexey Alexandrovitch, to his surprise and delight, felt complete relief both from this pity and from the doubts and agonies of jealousy.

He experienced the sensations of a man who has had a tooth out after suffering long from toothache.  After a fearful agony and a sense of something huge, bigger than the head itself, being torn out of his jaw, the sufferer, hardly able to believe in his own good luck, feels all at once that what has so long poisoned his existence and enchained his attention, exists no longer, and that he can live and think again, and take interest in other things besides his tooth.  This feeling Alexey Alexandrovitch was experiencing.  The agony had been strange and terrible, but now it was over; he felt that he could live again and think of something other than his wife.

“No honor, no heart, no religion; a corrupt woman.  I always knew it and always saw it, though I tried to deceive myself to spare her,” he said to himself.  And it actually seemed to him that he always had seen it:  he recalled incidents of their past life, in which he had never seen anything wrong before—­now these incidents proved clearly that she had always been a corrupt woman.  “I made a mistake in linking my life to hers; but there was nothing wrong in my mistake, and so I cannot be unhappy.  It’s not I that am to blame,” he told himself, “but she.  But I have nothing to do with her.  She does not exist for me...”