She gave the baby back to the nurse, let her go, and opened the
locket in which there was Seryozha's portrait when he was almost
of the same age as the girl. She got up, and, taking off her
hat, took up from a little table an album in which there were
photographs of her son at different ages. She wanted to compare
them, and began taking them out of the album. She took them all
out except one, the latest and best photograph. In it he was in
a white smock, sitting astride a chair, with frowning eyes and
smiling lips. It was his best, most characteristic expression.
With her little supple hands, her white, delicate fingers, that
moved with a peculiar intensity today, she pulled at a corner of
the photograph, but the photograph had caught somewhere, and she
could not get it out. There was no paper knife on the table, and
so, pulling out the photograph that was next to her son's (it was
a photograph of Vronsky taken at Rome in a round hat and with
long hair), she used it to push out her son's photograph. "Oh,
here is he!" she said, glancing at the portrait of Vronsky, and
she suddenly recalled that he was the cause of her present
misery. She had not once thought of him all the morning. But
now, coming all at once upon that manly, noble face, so familiar
and so dear to her, she felt a sudden rush of love for him.