THE Countess Lidia Ivanovna had, as a very young and sentimental girl, been married to a wealthy man of high rank, a very good-natured, jovial, and extremely dissipated rake. Two months after marriage her husband abandoned her, and her impassioned protestations of affection he met with a sarcasm and even hostility that people knowing the count’s good heart, and seeing no defects in the sentimental Lidia, were at a loss to explain. Though they were divorced and lived apart, yet whenever the husband met the wife, he invariably behaved to her with the same malignant irony, the cause of which was incomprehensible.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna had long given up being in love with her husband, but from that time she had never given up being in love with some one. She was in love with several people at once, both men and women; she had been in love with almost every one who had been particularly distinguished in any way. She was in love with all the new princes and princesses who married into the Imperial family; she had been in love with a high dignitary of the Church, a vicar, and a parish priest; she had been in love with a journalist, three Slavophils, with Komissarov, with a minister, a doctor, an English missionary, and Karenina. All these passions, constantly waning or growing more ardent, did not prevent her from keeping up the most extended and complicated relations with the court and fashionable society. But from the time that after Karenina’s trouble she took him under her special protection, from the time that she set to work in Karenina’s household looking after his welfare, she felt that all her other attachments were not the real thing, and that she was now genuinely in love, and with no one but Karenina. The feeling she now experienced for him seemed to her stronger than any of her former feelings. Analyzing her
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