Again, just as at the first moment of hearing of her rupture with her husband, Vronsky, on reading the letter, was unconsciously carried away by the natural sensation aroused in him by his own relation to the betrayed husband.  Now while he held his letter in his hands, he could not help picturing the challenge, which he would most likely find at home today or tomorrow, and the duel itself, in which, with the same cold and haughty expression that his face was assuming at this moment he would await the injured husband’s shot, after having himself fired into the air.  And at that instant there flashed across his mind the thought of what Serpuhovskoy had just said to him, and what he had himself been thinking in the morning—­that it was better not to bind himself —­and he knew that this thought he could not tell her.

Having read the letter, he raised his eyes to her, and there was no determination in them.  She saw at once that he had been thinking about it before by himself.  She knew that whatever he might say to her, he would not say all he thought.  And she knew that her last hope had failed her.  This was not what she had been reckoning on.

“You see the sort of man he is,” she said, with a shaking voice; “he...”

“Forgive me, but I rejoice at it,” Vronsky interrupted.  “For God’s sake, let me finish!” he added, his eyes imploring her to give him time to explain his words.  “I rejoice, because things cannot, cannot possibly remain as he supposes.”

“Why can’t they?” Anna said, restraining her tears, and obviously attaching no sort of consequence to what he said.  She felt that her fate was sealed.

Vronsky meant that after the duel—­inevitable, he thought—­ things could not go on as before, but he said something different.

“It can’t go on.  I hope that now you will leave him.  I hope”—­ he was confused, and reddened—­“that you will let me arrange and plan our life.  Tomorrow...” he was beginning.

She did not let him go on.

“But my child!” she shrieked.  “You see what he writes!  I should have to leave him, and I can’t and won’t do that.”

“But, for God’s sake, which is better?—­leave your child, or keep up this degrading position?”

“To whom is it degrading?”

“To all, and most of all to you.”

“You say degrading...don’t say that.  Those words have no meaning for me,” she said in a shaking voice.  She did not want him now to say what was untrue.  She had nothing left her but his love, and she wanted to love him.  “Don’t you understand that from the day I loved you everything has changed for me?  For me there is one thing, and one thing only—­your love.  If that’s mine, I feel so exalted, so strong, that nothing can be humiliating to me.  I am proud of my position, because...proud of being... proud....”  She could not say what she was proud of.  Tears of shame and despair choked her utterance.  She stood still and sobbed.