“I shall leave him!” Dolly pronounced, and Dolickha in her metallic soprano echoed her: “Yes! Leave!” But Dolly knew in her heart of hearts what Dolichka, in the mechanical limitations of her imagination, could not understand: to leave him was impossible. It was impossible because Darya Alexandrovna could not get out of the habit of regarding him as her husband and loving him. Besides this, she realized that if even here in her own house she could hardly manage to look after her five children properly, along with their several dozen Class IIs and countless Class Is, they would be still worse off where she was going with them all.

Seeing her husband, followed closely by the obnoxious oblong form of Small Stiva, she dropped her hands into the drawer of the bureau as though looking for something. But her face, to which she tried to give a severe and resolute expression, betrayed bewilderment and suffering.

“Dolly!” Stepan Arkadyich said in a subdued and timid voice, while Small Stiva bent at midline in a supplicating position toward Dolichka. In a rapid glance Dolly scanned her husband’s figure, and that of his robot. Man and machine both radiated health and freshness. “Yes, he is happy and content!” she whispered to Dolichka, and the bitter confirmation came from the Class III’s Vox-Em, “Happy. Content.”

“While I…,” Dolly continued, but her mouth stiffened, the muscles of the cheek contracted on the right side of her pale, nervous face.

“What do you want?” Dolly said to her husband in a rapid, deep, unnatural voice.

“Dolly!” he repeated, with a quiver in his voice. “Anna and Android Karenina are coming today.”

“Well, what is that to me? I can’t see them!” she cried.

“But you must, really, Dolly…”

“Go away, go away, go away!” she shrieked, not looking at him, as though this shriek were called up by physical pain.

The Galena Box, its simple external sensors attuned to those vocal tonalities indicative of emotional distress, reactuated, pulsing more rapidly.