PART 3
Chapter 15
(continued)
After the thunder showers of the last few days, cold, bright
weather had set in. The air was cold in the bright sun that
filtered through the freshly washed leaves.
She shivered, both from the cold and from the inward horror which
had clutched her with fresh force in the open air.
"Run along, run along to Mariette," she said to Seryozha, who had
followed her out, and she began walking up and down on the straw
matting of the terrace. "Can it be that they won't forgive me,
won't understand how it all couldn't be helped?" she said to
herself.
Standing still, and looking at the tops of the aspen trees waving
in the wind, with their freshly washed, brightly shining leaves
in the cold sunshine, she knew that they would not forgive her,
that everyone and everything would be merciless to her now as
was that sky, that green. And again she felt that everything was
split in two in her soul. "I mustn't, mustn't think," she said
to herself. "I must get ready. To go where? When? Whom to
take with me? Yes, to Moscow by the evening train. Annushka and
Seryozha, and only the most necessary things. But first I must
write to them both." She went quickly indoors into her boudoir,
sat down at the table, and wrote to her husband:--"After what
has happened, I cannot remain any longer in your house. I am
going away, and taking my son with me. I don't know the law, and
so I don't know with which of the parents the son should remain;
but I take him with me because I cannot live without him. Be
generous, leave him to me."
Up to this point she wrote rapidly and naturally, but the appeal
to his generosity, a quality she did not recognize in him, and
the necessity of winding up the letter with something touching,
pulled her up. "Of my fault and my remorse I cannot speak,
because..."
She stopped again, finding no connection in her ideas."No," she
said to herself, "there's no need of anything," and tearing up
the letter, she wrote it again, leaving out the allusion to
generosity, and sealed it up.
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