Laevsky's not loving Nadyezhda Fyodorovna showed itself chiefly in
the fact that everything she said or did seemed to him a lie, or
equivalent to a lie, and everything he read against women and love
seemed to him to apply perfectly to himself, to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
and her husband. When he returned home, she was sitting at the
window, dressed and with her hair done, and with a preoccupied face
was drinking coffee and turning over the leaves of a fat magazine;
and he thought the drinking of coffee was not such a remarkable
event that she need put on a preoccupied expression over it, and
that she had been wasting her time doing her hair in a fashionable
style, as there was no one here to attract and no need to be
attractive. And in the magazine he saw nothing but falsity. He
thought she had dressed and done her hair so as to look handsomer,
and was reading in order to seem clever.

"Will it be all right for me to go to bathe to-day?" she said.

"Why? There won't be an earthquake whether you go or not, I
suppose . . . ."

"No, I only ask in case the doctor should be vexed."

"Well, ask the doctor, then; I'm not a doctor."

On this occasion what displeased Laevsky most in Nadyezhda Fyodorovna
was her white open neck and the little curls at the back of her
head. And he remembered that when Anna Karenin got tired of her
husband, what she disliked most of all was his ears, and thought:
"How true it is, how true!"