The letter was from Anna.  Before he read the letter, he knew its contents.  Expecting the elections to be over in five days, he had promised to be back on Friday.  Today was Saturday, and he knew that the letter contained reproaches for not being back at the time fixed.  The letter he had sent the previous evening had probably not reached her yet.

The letter was what he had expected, but the form of it was unexpected, and particularly disagreeable to him.  “Annie is very ill, the doctor says it may be inflammation.  I am losing my head all alone.  Princess Varvara is no help, but a hindrance.  I expected you the day before yesterday, and yesterday, and now I am sending to find out where you are and what you are doing.  I wanted to come myself, but thought better of it, knowing you would dislike it.  Send some answer, that I may know what to do.”

The child ill, yet she had thought of coming herself.  Their daughter ill, and this hostile tone.

The innocent festivities over the election, and this gloomy, burdensome love to which he had to return struck Vronsky by their contrast.  But he had to go, and by the first train that night he set off home.

Chapter 32

Before Vronsky’s departure for the elections, Anna had reflected that the scenes constantly repeated between them each time he left home, might only make him cold to her instead of attaching him to her, and resolved to do all she could to control herself so as to bear the parting with composure.  But the cold, severe glance with which he had looked at her when he came to tell her he was going had wounded her, and before he had started her peace of mind was destroyed.

In solitude afterwards, thinking over that glance which had expressed his right to freedom, she came, as she always did, to the same point—­the sense of her own humiliation.  “He has the right to go away when and where he chooses.  Not simply to go away, but to leave me.  He has every right, and I have none.  But knowing that, he ought not to do it.  What has he done, though?...  He looked at me with a cold, severe expression.  Of course that is something indefinable, impalpable, but it has never been so before, and that glance means a great deal,” she thought.  “That glance shows the beginning of indifference.”

And though she felt sure that a coldness was beginning, there was nothing she could do, she could not in any way alter her relations to him.  Just as before, only by love and by charm could she keep him.  And so, just as before, only by occupation in the day, by morphine at night, could she stifle the fearful thought of what would be if he ceased to love her.  It is true there was still one means; not to keep him—­for that she wanted nothing more than his love—­but to be nearer to him, to be in such a position that he would not leave her.  That means was divorce and marriage.  And she began to long for that, and made up her mind to agree to it the first time he or Stiva approached her on the subject.