“I never said that; I said I did not sympathize with this sudden passion.”

“How is it, though you boast of your straightforwardness, you don’t tell the truth?”

“I never boast, and I never tell lies,” he said slowly, restraining his rising anger.  “It’s a great pity if you can’t respect...”

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.  And if you don’t love me any more, it would be better and more honest to say so.”

“No, this is becoming unbearable!” cried Vronsky, getting up from his chair; and stopping short, facing her, he said, speaking deliberately:  “What do you try my patience for?” looking as though he might have said much more, but was restraining himself.  “It has limits.”

“What do you mean by that?” she cried, looking with terror at the undisguised hatred in his whole face, and especially in his cruel, menacing eyes.

“I mean to say...” he was beginning, but he checked himself.  “I must ask what it is you want of me?”

“What can I want?  All I can want is that you should not desert me, as you think of doing,” she said, understanding all he had not uttered.  “But that I don’t want; that’s secondary.  I want love, and there is none.  So then all is over.”

She turned towards the door.

“Stop! sto-op!” said Vronsky, with no change in the gloomy lines of his brows, though he held her by the hand.  “What is it all about?  I said that we must put off going for three days, and on that you told me I was lying, that I was not an honorable man.”

“Yes, and I repeat that the man who reproaches me with having sacrificed everything for me,” she said, recalling the words of a still earlier quarrel, “that he’s worse than a dishonorable man—­ he’s a heartless man.”

“Oh, there are limits to endurance!” he cried, and hastily let go her hand.

“He hates me, that’s clear,” she thought, and in silence, without looking round, she walked with faltering steps out of the room.  “He loves another woman, that’s even clearer,” she said to herself as she went into her own room.  “I want love, and there is none.  So, then, all is over.”  She repeated the words she had said, “and it must be ended.”

“But how?” she asked herself, and she sat down in a low chair before the looking glass.

Thoughts of where she would go now, whether to the aunt who had brought her up, to Dolly, or simply alone abroad, and of what he was doing now alone in his study; whether this was the final quarrel, or whether reconciliation were still possible; and of what all her old friends at Petersburg would say of her now; and of how Alexey Alexandrovitch would look at it, and many other ideas of what would happen now after this rupture, came into her head; but she did not give herself up to them with all her heart.  At the bottom of her heart was some obscure idea that alone interested her, but she could not get clear