“Thank you, yes,” she answered.
Lupo’s narrow canine eyes looked into the single robotic oculus of Alexei Alexandrovich, and the theriomorphic Class III let out a loud, gear-grinding bark. Vronsky silenced him with one raised finger.
Anna’s face looked weary, and there was not that play of eagerness in it peeping out in her smile and her eyes; but for a single instant, as she glanced at Vronsky, there was a flash of something in her eyes, and although the flash died away at once, he was happy for that moment. She glanced at her husband to find out whether he knew Vronsky. Alexei Alexandrovich looked over Vronsky’s silver uniform with displeasure, vaguely recalling who this was. Vronsky’s composure and self-confidence here struck, like a scythe against a stone, upon the cold imperturbability of Alexei Alexandrovich.
“Count Vronsky,” said Anna.
“Ah! We are acquainted, I believe,” said Alexei Alexandrovich indifferently, giving his hand. To Anna he said, “You set off with the mother and you return with the son,” articulating each syllable, as though each were a separate favor he was bestowing.
Lupo barked a second time, sharp and clear, raising his back and baring his teeth at Alexei Alexandrovich, who regarded the beast with weary irritation before addressing his wife in a jesting tone: “Well, were a great many tears shed in Moscow at parting?”
By addressing his wife like this he gave Vronsky to understand that he wished to be left alone, and, turning slightly toward him, he touched his hat; but Vronsky turned to Anna Arkadyevna.
“I hope I may have the honor of calling on you,” he said.
Lupo, his circuits for some reason keenly activated, now emitted from his Vox-Em a piercing, willful aroof. Before Vronsky could chastise the dog-robot, Alexei Alexandrovich cocked his head and stared straight at the Class III with his dark metallic eye for a long moment. Lupo yelped feebly, shuddered, and fell to the ground like a broken Class I plaything. Alexei Alexandrovich then glanced with his biological eye at Vronsky, who was staring with open-mouthed shock at his beloved-companion.
“On Mondays we’re at home,” Alexei Alexandrovich said blandly. Vronsky crouched on the spotless floor of the Grav station cradling Lupo’s great, bristly head in his lap. Lupo stirred feebly, issuing hollow little whimpers and moans.
“How fortunate,” Alexei Alexandrovich said to his wife in the same jesting tone, dismissing Vronsky altogether, “that I should just have half an hour to meet you, so that I can prove my devotion.”
“You lay too much stress on your devotion for me to value it much,” she responded in the same jesting tone, involuntarily glancing backward at the stricken Vronsky. “But what has it to do with me?” she murmured to Android Karenina. She began asking her husband how Seryozha had got on without her.
“Oh, capitally! The II/Governess says he has been very good. And… I must disappoint you… but he has not missed you as your husband has. Well, I must go to my committee. I shall not be alone at dinner again,” Alexei Alexandrovich went on, no longer in a sarcastic tone. “You wouldn’t believe how I’ve missed… “And with a long pressure of her hand and a meaningful smile, he put her in her carriage.
Vronsky remained on the silver floor of the Petersburg Grav station, watching with relief as signs of full functioning returned one by one to his Class III. He shook his head, contemplating the beauty of Anna Karenina, the austere elegance of Android Karenina-and wondering, of her strange, metal-faced husband: What in God’s name is he?
CHAPTER 24
THE FIRST PERSON to meet Anna at home was her son. He dashed down the stairs to her, in spite of his II/Governess/D147’s call, and with desperate joy shrieked: “Mother! Mother!” Running up to her, he hung on her neck.
“I told you it was mother!” he shouted to the II/Governess/D147, who issued scolding clucks at this rudeness. “I knew!”
But the son, like the husband, aroused in Anna a feeling akin to disappointment. She had imagined him better than he was in reality. She had to let herself drop down to the reality to enjoy him as he really was. But even as he was, he was charming, with his fair curls, his blue eyes, and his plump, graceful little legs in tightly pulled-up stockings. Anna experienced almost physical pleasure in the sensation of his nearness and his caresses, and moral soothing when she met his simple, confiding, and loving glance and heard his naive questions.
Anna took out the Class Is that Dolly’s children had sent him, and told her son what sort of little girl his cousin was in Moscow, how she could read, and even taught the other children.
“Why, am I not so nice as she?” asked Seryozha.
“To me you’re nicer than anyone in the world.”
“I know that,” said Seryozha, smiling.
Various friends visited with Anna, glad to have her back, while Alexei Alexandrovich spent the day at the Ministry, busy with some momentous project that he himself had initiated and was directing. Anna, finally left alone, spent the time till dinner in helping with her son’s dinner (he dined apart from his parents) and in putting her things in order, and in reading and answering the notes and letters that had accumulated on her table.
The feeling of causeless shame, which she had felt on the journey, and her excitement, too, had completely vanished. In the habitual conditions of her life she felt again resolute and irreproachable; in her physical body she felt only the occasional phantasmal tingling just above her breastbone, where the koschei had danced with its dozens of disgusting feet across her chest.
She shuddered at the memory, and then recalled with wonder her curiously joyful state of mind after the nightmare of the attack. What was it? Nothing. Vronsky said something silly, which was easy to put a stop to, and I answered as I ought to have done. To speak of it to my husband would be unnecessary and out of the question. To speak of it would be to attach importance to what has no importance. She remembered how she had told her husband of what was almost a declaration made to her at Petersburg by a young man, one of her husband’s subordinates in the Ministry, and how Alexei Alexandrovich had answered that every woman living in the world was exposed to such incidents, but that he had the fullest confidence in her tact, and could never lower her and himself by jealousy. Neither ever mentioned the incident again, and the man had, anyway, later been revealed as a Janus, and given appropriate punishment in Petersburg Square.
“So then there’s no reason to speak of it? And indeed, thank God, there’s nothing to speak of,” she said to Android Karenina, who nodded her quiet agreement.
“IT’S TIME, IT’S TIME,” HE SAID, WITH A MEANINGFUL SMILE; HIS TELESCOPING OCULUS ZOOMED INAS HE ENTERED THEIR BEDROOM
Alexei Alexandrovich came back from his meeting at four o’clock, but as often happened, he had not time to come in to her. Later they dined together, and after dinner Anna sat down at the hearth to write a letter to Dolly, and waited for her husband. Precisely at twelve o’clock, when Anna was still sitting at her writing table, she heard the sound of measured steps in slippers, and Alexei Alexandrovich, freshly washed and combed, his faceplate glinting in the hearth light, came in to her.
“He’s a good man, truthful, good-hearted, and remarkable in his own line,” Anna whispered to Android Karenina, as her husband approached. “And really, the visible half of his face is handsome in its way.”
“It’s time, it’s time,” he said, with a meaningful smile; his right eye zoomed slowly toward her, its lens opening visibly, before he went into their bedroom.