Vronsky was eating his beefsteak when she came into the dining-room.

“You wouldn’t believe how distasteful these rooms have become to me,” she said, sitting down beside him to her coffee.  “There’s nothing more awful than these chambres garnies.  There’s no individuality in them, no soul.  These clocks, and curtains, and, worst of all, the wallpapers—­they’re a nightmare.  I think of Vozdvizhenskoe as the promised land.  You’re not sending the horses off yet?”

“No, they will come after us.  Where are you going to?”

“I wanted to go to Wilson’s to take some dresses to her.  So it’s really to be tomorrow?” she said in a cheerful voice; but suddenly her face changed.

Vronsky’s valet came in to ask him to sign a receipt for a telegram from Petersburg.  There was nothing out of the way in Vronsky’s getting a telegram, but he said, as though anxious to conceal something from her, that the receipt was in his study, and he turned hurriedly to her.

“By tomorrow, without fail, I will finish it all.”

“From whom is the telegram?” she asked, not hearing him.

“From Stiva,” he answered reluctantly.

“Why didn’t you show it to me?  What secret can there be between Stiva and me?”

Vronsky called the valet back, and told him to bring the telegram.

“I didn’t want to show it to you, because Stiva has such a passion for telegraphing:  why telegraph when nothing is settled?”

“About the divorce?”

“Yes; but he says he has not been able to come at anything yet.  He has promised a decisive answer in a day or two.  But here it is; read it.”

With trembling hands Anna took the telegram, and read what Vronsky had told her.  At the end was added:  “Little hope; but I will do everything possible and impossible.”

“I said yesterday that it’s absolutely nothing to me when I get, or whether I never get, a divorce,” she said, flushing crimson.  “There was not the slightest necessity to hide it from me.”  “So he may hide and does hide his correspondence with women from me,” she thought.

“Yashvin meant to come this morning with Voytov,” said Vronsky; “I believe he’s won from Pyevtsov all and more than he can pay, about sixty thousand.”

“No,” she said, irritated by his so obviously showing by this change of subject that he was irritated, “why did you suppose that this news would affect me so, that you must even try to hide it?  I said I don’t want to consider it, and I should have liked you to care as little about it as I do.”

“I care about it because I like definiteness,” he said.

“Definiteness is not in the form but the love,” she said, more and more irritated, not by his words, but by the tone of cool composure in which he spoke.  “What do you want it for?”

“My God! love again,” he thought, frowning.

“Oh, you know what for; for your sake and your children’s in the future.”