deserted her. He had replied to her effusive expressions of love with scorn and even hatred, which no one who knew the count's kindliness, and were not acquainted with the faults of Lidia's romantic nature, could comprehend. Since then, without any formal divorce, they had lived apart; and when the husband met his wife, he always treated her with a venomous scorn, the reason for which it puzzled people to understand.
The Countess Lidia Ivanovna long ago ceased to worship her husband, but at no time had she ceased to be in love with some one. Not seldom she was in love with several at once — men and women indiscriminately. She had been in love with almost every one of any prominence. Thus she had lost her heart to each of the new princes and princesses who married into the imperial family. Then she had been in love with a metropolitan, a vicar, and a priest. Then she had been in love with a journalist, three Slavophiles, and Komisarof; then with a foreign minister, a doctor, an English missionary, and finally Karenin. These multifarious love-affairs and their different phases of warmth or coldness in no wise hindered her from keeping up the most complicated relations both with the court and society.
But from the day wheh Karenin was touched by misfortune and she took him under her special protection, from the time when she began to busy herself with his domestic affairs and work for his well-being, she felt that all her former passions were of no account, but that she now loved Karenin alone with perfect sincerity. The feeling which she now cherished toward him seemed to her stronger than all the previous feelings. As she analyzed her sentiment and compared it with the former ones, she clearly saw that she would never have been in love with Komisarof if he had not saved the emperor's life, or with Ristitch-Kudzhitsky had there been no Slav question. But Karenin she loved for himself, for his great, unappreciated spirit, for his character, for the delightful sound of his voice,
