At Petersburg, as soon as the train stopped and she got out, the first person that attracted her attention was her husband.  “Oh, mercy! why do his ears look like that?” she thought, looking at his frigid and imposing figure, and especially the ears that struck her at the moment as propping up the brim of his round hat.  Catching sight of her, he came to meet her, his lips falling into their habitual sarcastic smile, and his big, tired eyes looking straight at her.  An unpleasant sensation gripped at her heart when she met his obstinate and weary glance, as though she had expected to see him different.  She was especially struck by the feeling of dissatisfaction with herself that she experienced on meeting him.  That feeling was an intimate, familiar feeling, like a consciousness of hypocrisy, which she experienced in her relations with her husband.  But hitherto she had not taken note of the feeling, now she was clearly and painfully aware of it.

“Yes, as you see, your tender spouse, as devoted as the first year after marriage, burned with impatience to see you,” he said in his deliberate, high-pitched voice, and in that tone which he almost always took with her, a tone of jeering at anyone who should say in earnest what he said.

“Is Seryozha quite well?” she asked.

“And is this all the reward,” said he, “for my ardor?  He’s quite well...”

Chapter 31

Vronsky had not even tried to sleep all that night.  He sat in his armchair, looking straight before him or scanning the people who got in and out.  If he had indeed on previous occasions struck and impressed people who did not know him by his air of unhesitating composure, he seemed now more haughty and self-possessed than ever.  He looked at people as if they were things.  A nervous young man, a clerk in a law court, sitting opposite him, hated him for that look.  The young man asked him for a light, and entered into conversation with him, and even pushed against him, to make him feel that he was not a thing, but a person.  But Vronsky gazed at him exactly as he did at the lamp, and the young man made a wry face, feeling that he was losing his self-possession under the oppression of this refusal to recognize him as a person.

Vronsky saw nothing and no one.  He felt himself a king, not because he believed that he had made an impression on Anna—­he did not yet believe that,—­but because the impression she had made on him gave him happiness and pride.

What would come of it all he did not know, he did not even think.  He felt that all his forces, hitherto dissipated, wasted, were centered on one thing, and bent with fearful energy on one blissful goal.  And he was happy at it.  He knew only that he had told her the truth, that he had come where she was, that all the happiness of his life, the only meaning in life for him, now lay in seeing and hearing her.  And when he got out of the carriage at