more difficult.

"She knew Anna Arkadyevna, but only slightly, and she now came to her sister's not without fear of how she would be received by this Petersburg society lady whom everyone praised so much. But Anna Arkadyevna liked her, she saw that at once. Anna obviously admired her beauty and youth, and before Kitty could recover she felt that she was not only under the influence but in love with her, as young girls are capable of being in love with older married ladies.
Anna did not look like a society lady or the mother of an eight-year-old son, but in the litheness of her movements, the freshness and settled animation of her face, which broke through now as a smile, now as a glance, would have looked more like a twenty-year-old girl had it not been for the serious, sometimes sad expression of her eyes, which struck Kitty and drew her to Anna. Kitty felt that Anna was perfectly simple and kept nothing hidden, but that there was in her some other, higher world of interests, inaccessible to her, complex and poetic."
~ Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

That caught my attention. I could vividly picture Anna's graceful, calm, lovable exterior as she consoled Dolly, as she put her son to sleep, and as she danced at the ball. Yet, i could see the curse she held inside, behind her telling eyes. She held the curse of beauty.

She told herself, again and again, that it was no fault of hers; everything would be okay because all will be forgotten in a jiffy. But she still felt that pressing guilt, because she knew that she had the power to change destinies for the worse. She knew her presence alone was capable of destruction, even for an innocent youth like Kitty.

I felt Anna's despair as she held this power, that was torturing her with her unwilling possession of it. All she ever wanted to be was an ordinary person whose mediocrity would not hurt anyone. But this was not to be; her unwilling possession was about to be unleashed, and she could not control it. What she did not know was this: it would eventually consume her, like some fatal harmatia that she was born with. It would cause her death.

But her remorse behind the sad expression in her eyes...i could feel a tinge of it behind mine.

It's scary why all this seems so familiar.