“Even when she is making her confession to her husband she thinks only of herself. She tells him that she hates him. It does not occur to her that he can have any feelings, because his manner is stiff and he has a habit of cracking his finger-joints.” “It didn’t much matter how she made her confession.” “It did. She needn’t have been brutal.” “Oh, she wasn’t brutal.” “And all the lies?” “But you never seem to think of her situation!” “I do. She deliberately brought about her own situation, after having been warned by her husband. You admire her simply because she loves Wronsky; but there is nothing very wonderful about that kind of love.” “I never said I admired her; I said I understood her. If she sacrificed her husband, she sacrificed herself too.” “Yes――and her lover, and her friend Kitty, and her son, and everything. Levine’s brother, who drinks himself to death, also sacrifices himself. And Yavshine, who gambles away all his fortune.” “You don’t see any difference?” “I don’t see anything fine in the kind of love Anna felt. And when she says she won’t have any more children, it seems to me that it becomes simply disgusting. Have you thought what it means?” “Oh, I know what it means,” I answered sulkily. Owen had managed to completely alter my mood, and I no longer felt pleased with myself or pleased with him. I was irritated because he seemed, now as always, to try to judge what was a matter of emotion by reasoning about it. “If you had ever loved anybody,” I said, “it would make you look at such things differently.” “Perhaps I mightn’t see them any clearer for that.” “Perhaps not. But to judge human beings you require first of all to understand something about human nature.” “Understand! You’re always harping on that! It’s a very cheap way of arguing. Why should I think _you_ understand?” “Because I have felt what we are talking about, and you haven’t.” I suddenly grew violently excited. “You don’t know what it is to care for a person so that nothing else in the world matters, so that it is like a kind of sickness, preventing you even from sleeping. You know nothing, have felt nothing, and yet you bring out your miserable little catechism arguments and pretend to pronounce judgment. I’d rather have a man who had committed all the crimes on the earth than one of those cold, fishy, reasonable creatures you admire, who never did anything wrong, and never made anybody happy.”