“You ought to make the attempt,” she said softly.

“Suppose I make the attempt.  What does it mean?” she said, evidently giving utterance to a thought, a thousand times thought over and learned by heart.  “It means that I, hating him, but still recognizing that I have wronged him—­and I consider him magnanimous—­that I humiliate myself to write to him....  Well, suppose I make the effort; I do it.  Either I receive a humiliating refusal or consent....  Well, I have received his consent, say...”  Anna was at that moment at the furthest end of the room, and she stopped there, doing something to the curtain at the window.  “I receive his consent, but my...my son?  They won’t give him up to me.  He will grow up despising me, with his father, whom I’ve abandoned.  Do you see, I love... equally, I think, but both more than myself—­two creatures, Seryozha and Alexey.”

She came out into the middle of the room and stood facing Dolly, with her arms pressed tightly across her chest.  In her white dressing gown her figure seemed more than usually grand and broad.  She bent her head, and with shining, wet eyes looked from under her brows at Dolly, a thin little pitiful figure in her patched dressing jacket and nightcap, shaking all over with emotion.

“It is only those two creatures that I love, and one excludes the other.  I can’t have them together, and that’s the only thing I want.  And since I can’t have that, I don’t care about the rest.  I don’t care about anything, anything.  And it will end one way or another, and so I can’t, I don’t like to talk of it.  So don’t blame me, don’t judge me for anything.  You can’t with your pure heart understand all that I’m suffering.”  She went up, sat down beside Dolly, and with a guilty look, peeped into her face and took her hand.

“What are you thinking?  What are you thinking about me?  Don’t despise me.  I don’t deserve contempt.  I’m simply unhappy.  If anyone is unhappy, I am,” she articulated, and turning away, she burst into tears.

Left alone, Darya Alexandrovna said her prayers and went to bed.  She had felt for Anna with all her heart while she was speaking to her, but now she could not force herself to think of her.  The memories of home and of her children rose up in her imagination with a peculiar charm quite new to her, with a sort of new brilliance.  That world of her own seemed to her now so sweet and precious that she would not on any account spend an extra day outside it, and she made up her mind that she would certainly go back next day.

Anna meantime went back to her boudoir, took a wine glass and dropped into it several drops of a medicine, of which the principal ingredient was morphine.  After drinking it off and sitting still a little while, she went into her bedroom in a soothed and more cheerful frame of mind.