Their stay in Petersburg was the more painful to Vronsky that he perceived all the time a sort of new mood that he could not understand in Anna.  At one time she would seem in love with him, and then she would become cold, irritable, and impenetrable.  She was worrying over something, and keeping something back from him, and did not seem to notice the humiliations which poisoned his existence, and for her, with her delicate intuition, must have been still more unbearable.

Chapter 29

One of Anna’s objects in coming back to Russia had been to see her son.  From the day she left Italy the thought of it had never ceased to agitate her.  And as she got nearer to Petersburg, the delight and importance of this meeting grew ever greater in her imagination.  She did not even put to herself the question how to arrange it.  It seemed to her natural and simple to see her son when she should be in the same town with him.  But on her arrival in Petersburg she was suddenly made distinctly aware of her present position in society, and she grasped the fact that to arrange this meeting was no easy matter.

She had now been two days in Petersburg.  The thought of her son never left her for a single instant, but she had not yet seen him.  To go straight to the house, where she might meet Alexey Alexandrovitch, that she felt she had no right to do.  She might be refused admittance and insulted.  To write and so enter into relations with her husband—­that it made her miserable to think of doing; she could only be at peace when she did not think of her husband.  To get a glimpse of her son out walking, finding out where and when he went out, was not enough for her; she had so looked forward to this meeting, she had so much she must say to him, she so longed to embrace him, to kiss him.  Seryozha’s old nurse might be a help to her and show her what to do.  But the nurse was not now living in Alexey Alexandrovitch’s house.  In this uncertainty, and in efforts to find the nurse, two days had slipped by.

Hearing of the close intimacy between Alexey Alexandrovitch and Countess Lidia Ivanovna, Anna decided on the third day to write to her a letter, which cost her great pains, and in which she intentionally said that permission to see her son must depend on her husband’s generosity.  She knew that if the letter were shown to her husband, he would keep up his character of magnanimity, and would not refuse her request.

The commissionaire who took the letter had brought her back the most cruel and unexpected answer, that there was no answer.  She had never felt so humiliated as at the moment when, sending for the commissionaire, she heard from him the exact account of how he had waited, and how afterwards he had been told there was no answer.  Anna felt humiliated, insulted, but she saw that from her point of view Countess Lidia Ivanovna was right.  Her suffering was the more