"N’est-ce pas immoral?" was all she said, after a brief pause.

“Why so?  Think, I have a choice between two alternatives:  either to be with child, that is an invalid, or to be the friend and companion of my husband—­practically my husband,” Anna said in a tone intentionally superficial and frivolous.

“Yes, yes,” said Darya Alexandrovna, hearing the very arguments she had used to herself, and not finding the same force in them as before.

“For you, for other people,” said Anna, as though divining her thoughts, “there may be reason to hesitate; but for me....  You must consider, I am not his wife; he loves me as long as he loves me.  And how am I to keep his love?  Not like this!”

She moved her white hands in a curve before her waist with extraordinary rapidity, as happens during moments of excitement; ideas and memories rushed into Darya Alexandrovna’s head.  “I,” she thought, “did not keep my attraction for Stiva; he left me for others, and the first woman for whom he betrayed me did not keep him by being always pretty and lively.  He deserted her and took another.  And can Anna attract and keep Count Vronsky in that way?  If that is what he looks for, he will find dresses and manners still more attractive and charming.  And however white and beautiful her bare arms are, however beautiful her full figure and her eager face under her black curls, he will find something better still, just as my disgusting, pitiful, and charming husband does.”

Dolly made no answer, she merely sighed.  Anna noticed this sigh, indicating dissent, and she went on.  In her armory she had other arguments so strong that no answer could be made to them.

“Do you say that it’s not right?  But you must consider,” she went on; “you forget my position.  How can I desire children?  I’m not speaking of the suffering, I’m not afraid of that.  Think only, what are my children to be?  Ill-fated children, who will have to bear a stranger’s name.  For the very fact of their birth they will be forced to be ashamed of their mother, their father, their birth.”

“But that is just why a divorce is necessary.”  But Anna did not hear her.  She longed to give utterance to all the arguments with which she had so many times convinced herself.

“What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world!” She looked at Dolly, but without waiting for a reply she went on: 

“I should always feel I had wronged these unhappy children,” she said.  “If they are not, at any rate they are not unhappy; while if they are unhappy, I alone should be to blame for it.”

These were the very arguments Darya Alexandrovna had used in her own reflections; but she heard them without understanding them.  “How can one wrong creatures that don’t exist?” she thought.  And all at once the idea struck her:  could it possibly, under any circumstances, have been better for her favorite Grisha if he had never existed?  And this seemed to her so wild, so strange, that she shook her head to drive away this tangle of whirling, mad ideas.