After Countess Lidia Ivanovna another friend came, the wife of a director of the Department, who told her all the news of the town. At three o'clock she too went away, promising to come to dinner. Alexei Alexandrovich was at the Ministry. Anna, left alone, spent the time till dinner in lending her presence to her son's dinner (he dined apart from his parents), in putting her things in order, and in reading and answering the notes and letters which had accumulated on her escritoire.

The feeling of unreasoning shame, which she had felt during the journey, and her agitation, had completely vanished. In the accustomed conditions of her life she again felt herself firm and irreproachable.

She recalled with wonder her state of mind only yesterday. `What was it? Nothing. Vronsky said something silly, which it was easy to put an end to, and I answered just as I should have. To speak of it to my husband would be unnecessary and impermissible. To speak of it would be to attach importance to that which has none.' She remembered how she had told her husband of what was almost declaration made her in Peterburg by a young man, a subordinate of her husband's, and how Alexei Alexandrovich had answered that every woman of the world was exposed to this sort of thing, but that he had the fullest confidence in her tact, and would never permit himself to degrade her and himself by jealousy. `So then, there's no reason to say anything? And, thank God, there isn't anything to say,' she told herself.


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