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                                      1870
                                 ANNA KARENINA
                                 by Leo Tolstoy
                        translated by Constance Garnett
                          PART ONE

                Vengeance is mine; I will repay

                             I.

  Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its
own way.
  Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had
discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a
French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had
announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same
house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted two days,
and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of
their family and the household, were painfully conscious of it. All
the members of the family and the household felt that there was no
sense in their living together, and that even stray people brought
together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than
they, the members of the family and the household of the Oblonskys.
The wife did not leave her own apartments; the husband had not been
home for two days. The children ran wild all over the house; the
English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a
friend asking her to look out for a new employ for her; the man cook
had walked off the day before just at dinnertime; the kitchenmaid
and the coachman had given warning.
  Two days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky-
Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable world- woke up at his usual
hour, that is, at eight o'clock in the morning, not in his wife's
bedroom, but on the leather-covered sofa in his study. He turned
over his stout, well-cared-for person on the springy sofa, as though
he would sink into a long sleep again; he vigorously embraced the
pillow on its other side and buried his face in it; but all at once he
jumped up, sat up on the sofa, and opened his eyes.
  "Yes, yes, how was it now?" he thought, going over his dream.
"Yes, how was it? Yes! Alabin was giving a dinner at Darmstadt; no,
not Darmstadt, but something American. Yes, but then, Darmstadt was in
America. Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, and the
tables sang, Il mio tesoro- no, not Il mio tesoro, but something
better, and there were some sort of little decanters on the table,
and, at the same time, these decanters were women," he recalled.
  Stepan Arkadyevich's eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a
smile. "Yes, it was jolly, very jolly. There was a great deal more
that was delightful, only there's no putting it into words, or even
expressing it in one's waking thoughts." And noticing a gleam of light
peeping in beside one of the woolen-cloth curtains, he cheerfully
dropped his feet over the edge of the sofa and felt about with them
for his slippers, a present on his last birthday, worked for him by
his wife on gold-colored morocco. And, as he used to do for the last
nine years, he stretched out his hand, without getting up, toward
the place where his dressing gown always hung in the bedroom. And
thereupon he suddenly remembered that he was not sleeping in his
wife's room, but in his study, as well as the reason; the smile
vanished from his face and he knit his brows.
  "Ah, ah, ah! Oo!..." he muttered, recalling everything that had
happened. And again every detail of his quarrel with his wife was
present to his imagination, all the hopelessness of his position, and,
worst of all, his own fault.
  "Yes, she won't forgive me, and she can't forgive me. And the most
awful thing about it is that it's all my fault- all my fault, though
I'm not to blame. That's the point of the whole tragedy," he
reflected. "Oh, oh, oh!" he kept repeating in despair, as he
remembered the acutely painful sensations caused him by this quarrel.
  Most unpleasant of all was the first minute when, on coming from the
theater, good-humored and lighthearted, with a huge pear in his hand
for his wife, he had not found his wife in the drawing room, to his
surprise, nor in the study, but saw her at last in her bedroom,
clutching the unlucky letter that revealed everything.
  She, his Dolly, forever fussing and worrying over household details,
and limited in her ideas, as he considered, was sitting motionless
with the letter in her hand, looking at him with an expression of
horror, despair and indignation.
  "What is this? This?" she asked, pointing to the letter.
  And at this recollection, Stepan Arkadyevich, as is so often the
case, was not so much annoyed at the fact itself as at the way in
which he had met his wife's words.
  There happened to him at that instant that which happens to people
when they are unexpectedly caught in something very disgraceful. He
did not succeed in adapting his face to the situation in which he
was placed toward his wife by the discovery of his fault. Instead of
being hurt, denying, defending himself, begging forgiveness; instead
of remaining indifferent even- anything would have been better than
what he did do- his face utterly without his volition ("cerebral
reflexes," mused Stepan Arkadyevich, who was fond of physiology) had
assumed its habitual good-humored, and therefore stupid, smile.
  This stupid smile he could not forgive himself. Catching sight of
that smile Dolly shuddered as though from physical pain, broke out
with her characteristic heat into a flood of cruel words, and rushed
out of the room. Since then she had refused to see her husband.
  "It's all the fault of that stupid smile," Stepan Arkadyevich was
thinking.
  "But what's to be done? What's to be done?" he kept saying to
himself in despair- and found no answer.
                             II.

  Stepan Arkadyevich was a truthful man in his relations with himself.
He was incapable of self-deception and of persuading himself that he
repented his conduct. He could not at this date repent the fact that
he, handsome, susceptible to love, a man of thirty-four, was not in
love with his wife, the mother of five living and two dead children,
and only a year younger than himself. All he repented was that he
had not succeeded better in hiding this from his wife. But he felt all
the difficulty of his position and was sorry for his wife, his
children, and himself. Possibly he might have managed to conceal his
sins better from his wife if he had anticipated that the knowledge
of them would have had such an effect upon her. He had never clearly
reflected on the subject, but he had vaguely conceived that his wife
must long ago have suspected him of being unfaithful to her, and had
shut her eyes to the fact. He had even supposed that she, a worn-out
woman no longer young or good-looking, and in no way remarkable or
uncommon- merely a good mother- ought from a sense of fairness to take
an indulgent view. It had turned out quite the other way.
  "Oh, it's awful! Oh dear, oh dear! Awful!" Stepan Arkadyevich kept
repeating to himself, and he could think of nothing to be done. "And
how well things were going up till now! How well we got on! She was
contented and happy in her children; I never interfered with her in
anything; I let her manage the children and the house just as she
liked. True, it's bad her having been a governess in our house. That's
bad! There's something common, vulgar, in flirting with one's
governess. But what a governess!" (He vividly recalled the roguish
black eyes of Mlle. Roland and her smile.) "But after all, while she
was in the house, I kept myself in hand. And the worst of it all is
that she's already... It seems as if ill luck would have it so! Oh,
oh! But what, what is to be done?"
  There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives
to all questions, even the most complex and insolvable: One must
live in the needs of the day- that is, forget oneself. To forget
himself in sleep was impossible now, at least till nighttime; he could
not go back now to the music sung by the decanter women; so he must
forget himself in the dream of daily life.
  "Then we shall see," Stepan Arkadyevich said to himself, and getting
up he put on a gray dressing gown lined with blue silk, tied the
tassels in a knot, and, drawing a deep breath of air into his broad
chest, he walked to the window with his usual confident step,
turning out his feet that carried his full frame so easily. He
pulled up the blind and rang the bell loudly. It was at once
answered by the appearance of an old friend, his valet, Matvei,
carrying his clothes, his boots and a telegram. Matvei was followed by
the barber with all the necessaries for shaving.
  "Are there any papers from the board?" asked Stepan Arkadyevich,
taking the telegram and seating himself at the looking glass.
  "On the table," replied Matvei, glancing with inquiring sympathy
at his master; and, after a short pause, he added with a sly smile:
  "They've sent from the carriage jobber."
  Stepan Arkadyevich made no reply, but merely glanced at Matvei in
the looking glass. The glance, in which their eyes met in the
looking glass, made it clear that they understood one another.
Stepan Arkadyevich's eyes seemed to ask: "Why do you tell me that?
Don't you know?"
  Matvei put his hands in his jacket pockets, thrust out one leg,
and gazed silently, with a good-humored, faint smile, at his master.
  "I told them to come on Sunday, and till then not to trouble you
or themselves for nothing," he said. He had obviously prepared the
sentence beforehand.
  Stepan Arkadyevich saw Matvei wanted to make a joke and attract
attention to himself. Tearing open the telegram, he read it through,
guessing at the words, misspelled as they always are in telegrams, and
his face brightened.
  "Matvei, my sister Anna Arkadyevna will be here tomorrow," he
said, checking for a minute the sleek, plump hand of the barber,
cutting a pink path between his long, curly side whiskers.
  "Thank God!" said Matvei, showing by this response that he, like his
master, realized the significance of this arrival: Anna Arkadyevna,
the sister his master was so fond of, might bring about a
reconciliation between husband and wife.
  "Alone, or with her husband?" inquired Matvei.
  Stepan Arkadyevich could not answer, as the barber was at work on
his upper lip, and he raised one finger. Matvei nodded at the
looking glass.
  "Alone. Is the room to be got ready upstairs?"
  "Inform Darya Alexandrovna: where she orders."
  "Darya Alexandrovna?" Matvei repeated, as though in doubt.
  "Yes, inform her. Here, take the telegram; give it to her, and
then do what she tells you."
  "You want to try it out," Matvei guessed, but only said: "Yes, sir."
  Stepan Arkadyevich was already washed and combed and ready to be
dressed, when Matvei, stepping slowly in his creaky boots, came back
into the room with the telegram in his hand. The barber had gone.
  "Darya Alexandrovna told me to inform you that she is going away.
'Let him'- that is you- 'do as he likes,'" he said, laughing only with
his eyes, and, putting his hands in his pockets, he watched his master
with his head on one side. Stepan Arkadyevich was silent a minute.
Then a good-humored and rather pitiful smile showed itself on his
handsome face.
  "Eh, Matvei?" he said, shaking his head.
  "Never mind, sir; everything will come round," said Matvei.
  "Come round?"
  "Just so, sir."
  "Do you think so?- Who's there?" asked Stepan Arkadyevich, hearing
the rustle of a woman's dress at the door.
  "It's I," said a firm, pleasant feminine voice, and the stern,
pockmarked face of Matriona Philimonovna, the nurse, was thrust in
at the door.
  "Well, what's the matter, Matriosha?" queried Stepan Arkadyevich,
meeting her in the doorway.
  Although Stepan Arkadyevich was completely in the wrong as regards
his wife, and was conscious of this himself, almost everyone in the
house (even the nurse, Darya Alexandrovna's chief ally) was on his
side.
  "Well, what now?" he asked cheerlessly.
  "Go to her, sir; own your fault again. Maybe God will aid you. She
is suffering so, it's pitiful to see her; and besides, everything in
the house is topsy-turvy. You must have pity, sir, on the children.
Beg her forgiveness, sir. There's no help for it! One must pay the
piper...."
  "But she won't see me."
  "You do your part. God is merciful; pray to God, sir- pray to God."
  "Come, that'll do, you can go," said Stepan Arkadyevich, blushing
suddenly. "Well, now, let's dress," he turned to Matvei and resolutely
threw off his dressing gown.
  Matvei was already holding up the shirt like a horse's collar,
and, blowing off some invisible speck, he slipped it with obvious
pleasure over the well-cared-for person of his master.
                             III.

  When he was dressed, Stepan Arkadyevich sprinkled some scent on
himself, pulled down his shirt cuffs, distributed into his pockets his
cigarettes, pocketbook, matches and watch, with its double chain and
seals, and, shaking out his handkerchief, feeling himself clean,
fragrant, healthy and physically at ease, in spite of his
misfortune, he walked with a slight swing of each leg into the
dining room, where coffee was already waiting for him- and,
alongside of his cup, the letters and papers from the office.
  He read the letters. One was very unpleasant, from a merchant who
was buying a forest on his wife's property. To sell this forest was
absolutely essential; but at present, until he was reconciled with his
wife, the subject could not be discussed. The most unpleasant thing of
all was that his pecuniary interests should in this way enter into the
question of his reconciliation with his wife. And the idea that he
might be led on by his interests, that he might seek a
reconciliation with his wife on account of the sale of the forest-
that idea hurt him.
  When he had finished his letters, Stepan Arkadyevich moved the
office papers close to him, rapidly looked through two cases, made a
few notes with a big pencil, and, pushing away the papers, turned to
his coffee. Sipping it, he opened a still damp morning paper and began
to read it.
  Stepan Arkadyevich took in and read a liberal paper, not an
extreme one, but one advocating the views held by the majority. And in
spite of the fact that science, art and politics had no special
interest for him, he firmly held those views on all these subjects
which were held by the majority and by his paper, and he only
changed them when the majority changed them- or, more strictly
speaking, he did not change them, but they imperceptibly changed of
themselves within him.
  Stepan Arkadyevich had not chosen his political opinions or his
views- these political opinions and views had come to him of
themselves- just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and
coat, but simply accepted those that were being worn. And for him,
living in a certain society- owing to the need, ordinarily developed
at years of discretion, for some degree of mental activity- to have
views was just as indispensable as to have a hat. If there was a
reason for his preferring liberal to conservative views, which were
held also by many of his circle, it arose not from his considering
liberalism more rational, but from its being in closer accordance with
his manner of life. The liberal party said that in Russia everything
was wrong, and indeed Stepan Arkadyevich had many debts and was
decidedly short of money. The liberal party said that marriage was
an institution quite out of date, and that it stood in need of
reconstruction, and indeed family life afforded Stepan Arkadyevich
little gratification, and forced him into lying and hypocrisy, which
were so repulsive to his nature. The liberal party said, or rather
allowed it to be understood, that religion was only a curb to keep
in check the barbarous classes of the people, and indeed Stepan
Arkadyevich could not stand through even a short service without his
legs aching, and could never make out what was the object of all the
terrible and high-flown language about another world when life might
be so very amusing in this world. And with all this Stepan
Arkadyevich, who liked a merry joke, was fond of embarrassing some
plain man by saying that if one were to pride oneself on one's origin,
one ought not to stop at Rurik and disown the founder of the line- the
monkey. And so liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevich,
and he liked his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for
the slight fog it diffused in his brain. He read the leading
article, which maintained that it was quite senseless in our day to
raise an outcry that radicalism was threatening to swallow up all
conservative elements, and that the government ought to take
measures to crush the revolutionary hydra; that, on the contrary,
"in our opinion the danger lies not in that imaginary revolutionary
hydra, but in the obstinacy of traditionalism clogging progress,"
etc., etc. He read another article, too, a financial one, which
alluded to Bentham and Mill, and dropped some innuendoes reflecting on
the ministry. With his characteristic quick-wittedness he caught the
drift of each innuendo, divined whence it came, at whom and on what
ground it was aimed, and that afforded him, as it always did, a
certain gratification. But today that gratification was embittered
by Matriona Philimonovna's advice and the unsatisfactory state of
his household. He read, too, that Count Beist was rumored to have left
for Wiesbaden, and that one need have no more gray hair, and of the
sale of a light carriage, and of a young person seeking a situation;
but these items of information did not give him, as usual, a quiet,
ironical gratification.
  Having finished the paper, a second cup of coffee and a roll and
butter, he got up, shaking the crumbs off his waistcoat; and, squaring
his broad chest, he smiled joyously; not because there was anything
particularly agreeable in his mind- the joyous smile was evoked by a
good digestion.
  But this joyous smile at once recalled everything to him, and he
grew thoughtful.
  Two childish voices (Stepan Arkadyevich recognized the voices of
Grisha, his youngest boy, and Tania, his eldest girl) were heard
outside the door. They were carrying something, and dropped it.
  "I told you not to sit passengers on the roof," said the little girl
in English; "there, pick them up!"
  "Everything's in confusion," thought Stepan Arkadyevich; "there
are the children running about by themselves." And going to the
door, he called them. They left off the box that represented a
train, and came in to their father.
  The little girl, her father's favorite, ran up boldly, embraced
him and hung laughingly on his neck, enjoying as she always did the
well-known smell of scent that came from his whiskers. At last the
little girl kissed his face, which was flushed from his stooping
posture and beaming with tenderness, loosed her hands, and was about
to run away again; but her father held her back.
  "How is mamma?" he asked, passing his hand over his daughter's
smooth, soft little neck. "Good morning," he said, smiling to the boy,
who had come up to greet him.
  He was conscious that he loved the boy less, and always tried to
be fair; but the boy felt it, and did not smile responsively to his
father's chilly smile.
  "Mamma? She is up," answered the girl.
  Stepan Arkadyevich sighed.
  "That means she hasn't slept again all night," he thought.
  "Well, is she cheerful?"
  The little girl knew that there was a quarrel between her father and
mother, and that her mother could not be cheerful, and that her father
must be aware of this, and that he was pretending when he asked
about it so lightly. And she blushed for her father. He at once
perceived it, and blushed too.
  "I don't know," she said. "She did not say we must do our lessons,
but she said we were to go for a walk with Miss Hoole to
grandmamma's."
  "Well, go, Tania, my darling. Oh, wait a minute, though," he said,
still holding her and stroking her soft little hand.
  He took off the mantelpiece, where he had put it yesterday, a little
box of sweets, and gave her two, picking out her favorites, a
chocolate and a bonbon.
  "For Grisha?" said the little girl, pointing to the chocolate.
  "Yes, yes." And still stroking her little shoulder, he kissed the
nape of her neck, and let her go.
  "The carriage is ready," said Matvei; "but there's someone to see
you with a petition."
  "Been here long?" asked Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "Half an hour or so."
  "How many times have I told you to tell me at once?"
  "One must let you drink your coffee in peace, at least," said
Matvei, in the affectionately gruff tone with which it was
impossible to be angry.
  "Well, show the person up at once," said Oblonsky, frowning with
vexation.
  The petitioner, the widow of a staff captain Kalinin, came with a
request impossible and unreasonable; but Stepan Arkadyevich, as he
generally did, made her sit down, heard her to the end attentively
without interrupting her, and gave her detailed advice as to how and
to whom to apply, and even wrote for her, easily and clearly, in his
large, sprawling calligraphic and legible hand, a little note to a
personage who might be of use to her. Having got rid of the staff
captain's widow, Stepan Arkadyevich took his hat and stopped to
recollect whether he had forgotten anything. It appeared that he had
forgotten nothing except what he wanted to forget- his wife.
  "Ah, yes!" He bowed his head, and his handsome face assumed a
melancholy expression. "To go, or not to go?" he said to himself;
and an inner voice told him he must not go, that nothing could come of
it but falsity; that to amend, to set right their relations was
impossible, because it was impossible to make her attractive again and
able to inspire love, or to make him an old man, not susceptible to
love. Except deceit and lying nothing could come of it now; and deceit
and lying were opposed to his nature.
  "It must be some day, though: it can't go on like this," he said,
trying to give himself courage. He set straight his chest, took out
a cigarette, lighted it, took two whiffs at it, flung it into a
mother-of-pearl ash tray, and with rapid steps walked through the
drawing room and opened the other door into his wife's bedroom.
                             IV.

  Darya Alexandrovna, in a dressing jacket, and with her now scanty
hair (once luxuriant and beautiful) fastened up with hairpins on the
nape of her neck, with a sunken, thin face and large, startled eyes,
which looked prominent from the thinness of her face, was standing,
among a litter of all sorts of things scattered all over the room,
before an open bureau, from which she was taking something. Hearing
her husband's steps, she stopped, looking toward the door, and
trying in vain to give her features a severe and contemptuous
expression. She felt she was afraid of him, and afraid of the coming
interview. She was just attempting to do what she had attempted to
do ten times already in these last three days- to sort out the
children's things and her own, so as to take them to her mother's- and
again she could not bring herself to do this; but now again, as each
time before, she kept saying to herself, that things cannot go on like
this, that she must undertake something, punish him, put him to shame,
avenge on him some little part at least of the suffering he had caused
her. She still continued to tell herself that she should leave him,
but she was conscious that this was impossible; it was impossible
because she could not get out of the habit of regarding him as her
husband and of 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, they would be still worse off where she was going
with all of them. As it was, even in the course of these three days,
the youngest was unwell from being given unwholesome soup, and the
others had almost gone without their dinner the day before. She was
conscious that it was impossible to go away; but, cheating herself,
she went on all the same sorting out her things and pretending she was
going.
  Seeing her husband, she dropped her hands into the drawer of the
bureau as though looking for something, and only looked round at him
when he had come quite up to her. But her face, to which she tried
to give a severe and resolute expression, expressed bewilderment and
suffering.
  "Dolly!" he said in a subdued and timid voice. He had hunched up his
shoulders and tried to look pitiful and humble, but for all that he
was radiant with freshness and health. In a rapid glance she scanned
his figure, beaming with freshness and health. "Yes, he is happy and
content!" she thought; "while I... And that disgusting good nature
which everyone likes him for and praises- I hate that good nature of
his," she thought. Her mouth stiffened, the muscles of the cheek
trembled on the right side of her pale, nervous face.
  "What do you want?" she said in a rapid, deep, unnatural voice.
  "Dolly!" he repeated, with a quiver in his voice. "Anna is coming
today."
  "Well, what is that to me? I can't see her!" she cried.
  "But you must, really, Dolly..."
  "Go away, go away, go away!" she shrieked, without looking at him,
as though this shriek were called up by physical pain.
  Stepan Arkadyevich could be calm when he thought of his wife, he
could hope that everything would come round, as Matvei expressed it,
and had been able to go on reading his paper and drinking his
coffee; but when he saw her tortured, suffering face, heard the tone
of her voice, submissive to fate and full of despair, his breath was
cut short and a lump came to this throat, and his eyes began to
shine with tears.
  "My God! What have I done? Dolly! For God's sake!... You know..." He
could not go on; there was a sob in his throat.
  She shut the bureau with a slam, and glanced at him.
  "Dolly, what can I say?... One thing: forgive me... Remember, cannot
nine years of our life atone for an instant..."
  She dropped her eyes and listened, expecting what he would say, as
if beseeching him in some way or other to make her believe
differently.
  "...instant of passion..." he said, and would have gone on, but at
that word, as at a pang of physical pain, her lips stiffened again,
and again the muscles of her right cheek worked.
  "Go away, go out of the room!" she shrieked still more shrilly, "and
don't talk to me of your passions and your vilenesses."
  She tried to go out, but tottered, and clung to the back of a
chair to support herself. His face relaxed, his lips became puffy;
tears welled up in his eyes.
  "Dolly!" he said, sobbing now. "For mercy's sake, think of the
children; they are not to blame! I am to blame- punish me then, make
me expiate my fault. Anything I can do, I am ready to do! I am to
blame, no words can express how much I am to blame! But, Dolly,
forgive me!"
  She sat down. He listened to her hard, heavy breathing, and he was
unutterably sorry for her. She made several attempts to speak, but
could not. He waited.
  "You remember the children, Stiva, to play with them; but I
remember, and know that they go to ruin now," she said- obviously
one of the phrases she had more than once repeated to herself in the
course of the last three days.
  She had called him "Stiva," and he glanced at her with gratitude and
moved to take her hand, but she drew back from him with aversion.
  "I remember the children, and for that reason I would do anything in
the world to save them; but I don't myself know the means. By taking
them away from their father, or by leaving them with a vicious father-
yes, a vicious father.... Tell me, after what... has happened, can
we live together? Is that possible? Do tell me- is it possible?" she
repeated, raising her voice. "After my husband, the father of my
children, enters into a love affair with his own children's
governess...."
  "But what's to be done? What's to be done?" he kept saying in a
pitiful voice, not knowing what he was saying, as his head sank
lower and lower.
  "You are loathsome to me, repulsive!" she shrieked, getting more and
more heated. "Your tears mean nothing! You have never loved me; you
have neither a heart nor a sense of honor! You are hateful to me,
disgusting, a stranger- yes, a complete stranger!" With pain and wrath
she uttered the word so terrible to herself- stranger.
  He looked at her, and the fury expressed in her face alarmed and
amazed him. He did not understand that it was his pity for her that
exasperated her. She saw in him compassion for her, but not love. "No,
she hates me. She will not forgive me," he thought.
  "It is awful Awful!" he said.
  At that moment in the next room a child began to cry; probably it
had fallen down. Darya Alexandrovna listened, and her face suddenly
softened.
  She seemed pulling herself together for a few seconds, as though she
did not know where she was nor what she was doing, and, getting up
rapidly, she moved toward the door.
  "Well, she loves my child," he thought, noticing the change of her
face at the child's cry, "my child: how can she hate me then?"
  "Dolly, one word more," he said, following her.
  "If you follow me, I will call in the servants, and the children!
Let them all know you are a scoundrel! I am going away at once, and
you may live here with your mistress!"
  And she went out, slamming the door.
  Stepan Arkadyevich sighed, mopped his face, and with a subdued tread
walked out of the room. "Matvei says everything will come round; but
how? I don't see the least chance of it. Ah, ah, how horrible it is!
And how vulgarly she shouted," he said to himself, remembering her
shrieks and the words- "scoundrel" and "mistress." "And very likely
the maids were listening! Horribly vulgar, horribly." Stepan
Arkadyevich stood a few seconds alone, wiped his eyes, thrust out
his chest and walked out of the room.
  It was Friday, and in the dining room the watchmaker, a German,
was winding up the clock. Stepan Arkadyevich remembered his joke about
this punctual, bald watchmaker, "that the German was wound up for a
whole lifetime himself, to wind up watches," and he smiled. Stepan
Arkadyevich was fond of a nice joke. "And maybe it will come round!"
That's a good expression, 'come round,' he thought. "I must tell
that."
  "Matvei!" he shouted. "Arrange everything with Marya in the
sitting room for Anna Arkadyevna," he said to Matvei when he came in.
  "Yes, sir."
  Stepan Arkadyevich put on his fur coat and went out on the front
steps.
  "You won't dine at home?" said Matvei, seeing him off.
  "It all depends. But here's for the housekeeping," he said, taking
ten roubles from his pocketbook. "Will it be enough?"
  "Enough or not enough, we must make it do," said Matvei, slamming
the carriage door and going back to the steps.
  Darya Alexandrovna meanwhile having pacified the child, and
knowing from the sound of the carriage that he had gone off, went back
to her bedroom. It was her only refuge from the household cares
which crowded upon her directly she went out from it. Even now, in the
short time she had been in the nursery, the English governess and
Matriona Philimonovna had succeeded in putting several questions to
her, which did not admit of delay, and which only she could answer:
"What were the children to put on for their walk? Should they have any
milk? Should not a new cook be sent for?"
  "Ah, let me alone, let me alone!" she said, and going back to her
bedroom she sat down in the same place she had occupied when talking
to her husband, clasping tightly her thin hands, her rings slipping
down on her bony fingers, and fell to going over her recollections
of the entire interview. "He has gone! But what has he finally arrived
at with her?" she thought. "Can it be he sees her? Why didn't I ask
him! No, no, reconciliation is impossible. Even if we remain in the
same house, we are strangers- strangers forever!" She repeated again
with special significance the word so dreadful to her. "And how I
loved him! my God, how I loved him!... How I loved him! And now
don't I love him? Don't I love him more than before? The most horrible
thing is," she began, but did not finish her thought, because Matriona
Philimonovna put her head in at the door.
  "Let us send for my brother," she said; "he can get a dinner anyway,
or we shall have the children getting nothing to eat till six again,
like yesterday."
  "Very well, I will come directly and see about it. But did you
send for some new milk?"
  And Darya Alexandrovna plunged into the duties of the day, and
drowned her grief in them for a time.
                             V.

  Stepan Arkadyevich had learned easily at school, thanks to his
excellent abilities, but he had been idle and mischievous, and
therefore was one of the lowest in his class. But in spite of his
habitually dissipated mode of life, his inferior grade in the service,
and his comparative youth, he occupied the honorable and lucrative
position of president of one of the government boards at Moscow.
This post he had received through his sister Anna's husband, Alexei
Alexandrovich Karenin, who held one of the most important positions in
the ministry to which the Moscow office belonged. But if Karenin had
not got his brother-in-law this berth, then through a hundred other
personages- brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts- Stiva
Oblonsky would have received this post or some other like it, together
with the salary of six thousand absolutely needful for him, as his
affairs, in spite of his wife's considerable property, were in a
poor state.
  Half Moscow and Peterburg were friends and relations of Stepan
Arkadyevich. He was born in the midst of those who had been, and had
become, the powerful ones of this world. One-third of the men in the
government, the older men, had been friends of his father's, and had
known him in pinafores; another third were his intimate chums, and the
remainder were friendly acquaintances. Consequently the distributors
of earthly blessings in the shape of posts, rents, concessions and
such, were all his friends, and could not overlook one of their own
set; and Oblonsky had no need to make any special exertion to get a
lucrative post. He had only not to refuse things, not to show
jealousy, not to be quarrelsome or take offense, all of which from his
characteristic good nature he never did. It would have struck him as
absurd if he had been told that he would not get a position with the
salary he required, especially as he expected nothing out of the
way; he only wanted what the men of his own age and standing did
get, and he was no worse qualified for performing duties of this
kind than any other man.
  Stepan Arkadyevich was not merely liked by all who knew him for
his good humor, his bright disposition and his unquestionable honesty;
in him, in his handsome, radiant figure, his sparkling eyes, black
hair and eyebrows, and his white and pink complexion, there was
something which produced a physical effect of kindliness and good
humor on the people who met him. "Aha! Stiva! Oblonsky! The man
himself!" was almost always said with a smile of delight on meeting
him. Even though it happened at times that after a conversation with
him it seemed that nothing particularly delightful had happened, the
next day, and the next, everyone was just as delighted to meet him
again.
  After filling for two years the post of president of one of the
government boards at Moscow, Stepan Arkadyevich had won the respect,
as well as the liking, of his fellow officials, subordinates and
superiors, and all who had had business with him. The principal
qualities in Stepan Arkadyevich which had gained him this universal
respect in the service consisted, in the first place, of his extreme
indulgence for others, founded on a consciousness of his own
shortcomings; secondly, of his perfect liberalism- not the
liberalism he read of in the papers, but the liberalism that was in
his blood, in virtue of which he treated all men perfectly equally and
exactly the same, whatever their fortune or rank might be; and
thirdly- the most important point- of his complete indifference to the
business in which he was engaged, in consequence of which he was never
carried away, and made no mistakes.
  On reaching the offices of the board Stepan Arkadyevich, escorted by
a deferential porter with a portfolio, went into his little private
room, put on his uniform, and went into the board room. The clerks and
officials all rose, greeting him with good-humored deference. Stepan
Arkadyevich moved quickly, as always, to his place, shook hands with
the members of the board, and sat down. He made a joke or two, and
talked just as much as was consistent with due decorum, and began
work. No one knew better than Stepan Arkadyevich how to hit on that
exact limit of freedom, simplicity and official stiffness which is
necessary for the agreeable conduct of business. A secretary, with the
good-humored deference common to everyone in Stepan Arkadyevich's
office, came up with papers, and began to speak in the familiar and
easy tone which had been introduced by Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "We have succeeded in getting the information from the government
department of Penza. Here, would you care?..."
  "You've got it at last?" said Stepan Arkadyevich, laying his
finger on the paper. "Now, gentlemen..."
  And the sitting of the board began.
  "If they but knew," he thought, inclining his head with an important
air and listening to the report, "what a guilty little boy their
president was half an hour ago!" And his eyes were laughing during the
reading of the report. Till two o'clock the sitting would go on
without a break- then there would be an interval and luncheon.
  It was not yet two, when the large glass doors of the board room
suddenly opened and someone came in.
  All the members of the board, sitting at the table, from below the
portrait of the Czar and from behind the mirror of justice,
delighted at any distraction, looked round at the door; but the
doorkeeper standing there at once drove out the intruder, and closed
the glass door after him.
  When the case had been read through, Stepan Arkadyevich got up and
stretched, and by way of tribute to the liberalism of the times took
out a cigarette, being in the board room, and went into his private
room. Two of his board fellows, the old veteran in the service,
Nikitin, and the Kammerjunker Grinevich, went in with him.
  "We shall have time to finish after lunch," said Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "To be sure we shall!" said Nikitin.
  "A pretty sharp fellow this Fomin must be," said Grinevich of one of
the persons taking part in the case they were examining.
  Stepan Arkadyevich frowned at Grinevich's words, giving him
thereby to understand that it was improper to pass judgment
prematurely, and made him no reply.
  "Who was it who came in?" he asked the doorkeeper.
  "Some fellow, your excellency, sneaked in without permission
directly my back was turned. He was asking for you. I told him: when
the members come out, then..."
  "Where is he?"
  "Maybe he's gone into the passage, he was strolling here till now.
That's he," said the doorkeeper, pointing to a strongly built, broad
shouldered man with a curly beard, who, without taking off his
sheepskin cap, was running lightly and rapidly up the worn steps of
the stone staircase. One of the officials going down- a lean fellow
with a portfolio- stood out of his way, looked disapprovingly at the
legs of the running man, and then glanced inquiringly at Oblonsky.
  Stepan Arkadyevich was standing at the top of the stairs. His
good-naturedly beaming face above the embroidered collar of his
uniform beamed more than ever when he recognized the man coming up.
  "Why, it's actually you, Levin, at last!" he said with a friendly
mocking smile, gazing on the approaching man. "How is it you have
deigned to look me up in this den?" said Stepan Arkadyevich and, not
content with shaking hands, he kissed his friend. "Have you been
here long?"
  "I have just come, and very much wanted to see you," said Levin,
looking about him shyly, and, at the same time, angrily and uneasily.
  "Well, let's go into my room," said Stepan Arkadyevich, who knew his
friend's sensitive and irritable shyness, and, taking his arm, he drew
him along, as though guiding him through dangers.
  Stepan Arkadyevich was on familiar terms with almost all his
acquaintances, and called almost all of them by their Christian names:
old men of sixty, boys of twenty, actors, ministers, merchants and
adjutant generals, so that many of his intimate chums were to be found
at the extreme ends of the social ladder, and would have been very
much surprised to learn that they had, through the medium of Oblonsky,
something in common. He was the familiar friend of everyone with
whom he took a glass of champagne, and he took a glass of champagne
with everyone, and when in consequence he met any of his
disreputable chums, as he used in joke to call many of his friends, in
the presence of his subordinates, he well knew how, with his
characteristic tact, to diminish any possible disagreeable impression.
Levin was not a disreputable chum, but Oblonsky, with his ready
tact, felt that Levin fancied Oblonsky might not care to show his
intimacy with him before subordinates, and so Stepan Arkadyevich
made haste to take him off into his room.
  Levin was almost of the same age as Oblonsky; their intimacy did not
rest merely on champagne. Levin had been the friend and companion of
his early youth. They were fond of one another in spite of the
difference of their characters and tastes, as friends are fond of
one another who have been together in early youth. But in spite of
this, each of them- as is often the way with men who have selected
careers of different kinds- though in discussion he would even justify
the other's career, in his heart despised it. It seemed to each of
them that the life he led himself was the only real life, and the life
led by his friend was a mere phantasm. Oblonsky could not restrain a
slight mocking smile at the sight of Levin. How often he had seen
him come up to Moscow from the country where he was doing something,
but what precisely Stepan Arkadyevich could never quite make out,
and indeed took no interest in the matter. Levin arrived in Moscow
always excited and in a hurry, rather ill at ease and irritated by his
own want of ease, and for the most part with a perfectly new,
unexpected view of things. Stepan Arkadyevich laughed at this, and
liked it. In the same way Levin in his heart despised the town mode of
life of his friend, and his official duties, which he laughed at and
regarded as trifling. But the difference was that Oblonsky, since he
was doing the same as everyone did, laughed assuredly and
good-humoredly, while Levin laughed without assuredness and
sometimes angrily.
  "We have long been expecting you," said Stepan Arkadyevich, going
into his room and letting Levin's hand go as though to show that
here all danger was over. "I am very, very glad to see you," he went
on. "Well, what now? How are you? When did you come?"
  Levin was silent, looking at the unfamiliar faces of Oblonsky's
two companions, and especially at the elegant Grinevich's hands-
with such long white fingers, such long yellow nails, curved at
their end, and such huge shining studs on the shirt cuff, that
apparently these hands absorbed all his attention, and allowed him
no freedom of thought. Oblonsky noticed this at once, and smiled.
  "Ah, to be sure, let me introduce you," he said. "My colleagues:
Philip Ivanich Nikitin, Mikhail Stanislavich Grinevich"- and turning
to Levin- "a Zemstvo member, a modern Zemstvo man, a gymnast who lifts
five poods with one hand, a cattle breeder and sportsman, and my
friend- Constantin Dmitrievich Levin, the brother of Sergei
Ivanovich Koznishev."
  "Delighted," said the veteran.
  "I have the honor of knowing your brother, Sergei Ivanovich," said
Grinevich, holding out his slender hand with its long nails.
  Levin frowned, shook hands coldly, and at once turned to Oblonsky.
Though he had a great respect for his half-brother, an author well
known to all Russia, he could not endure it when people treated him
not as Constantin Levin, but as the brother of the celebrated
Koznishev.
  "No, I am no longer a Zemstvo man. I have quarreled with them all,
and don't go to the sessions any more," he said, turning to Oblonsky.
  "You've been quick about it!" said Oblonsky with a smile. "But
how? Why?"
  "It's a long story. I will tell you some time," said Levin- but
began telling him at once. "Well, to put it shortly, I was convinced
that nothing was really done by the Zemstvo councils, or ever could
be," he began, as though someone had just insulted him. "On one side
it's a plaything; they play at being a parliament, and I'm neither
young enough nor old enough to find amusement in playthings; and on
the other side" (he stammered) "it's a means for the coterie of the
district to feather their nests. Formerly they did this through
wardships and courts of justice, now they do it through the Zemstvo-
instead of taking the bribes, they take the unearned salary," he said,
as hotly as though one of those present had opposed his opinion.
  "Aha! You're in a new phase again, I see- a conservative," said
Stepan Arkadyevich. "However, we can go into that later."
  "Yes, later. But I had to see you," said Levin, looking with
hatred at Grinevich's hand.
  Stepan Arkadyevich gave a scarcely perceptible smile.
  "But you used to say you'd never wear European dress again," he
said, gazing on Levin's new suit, obviously cut by a French tailor.
"So! I see: a new phase."
  Levin suddenly blushed, not as grown men blush, slightly, without
being themselves aware of it, but as boys blush, feeling that they are
ridiculous through their shyness, and consequently ashamed of it,
and blushing still more, almost to the point of tears. And it was so
strange to see this sensible, manly face in such a childish plight,
that Oblonsky left off looking at him.
  "Oh, where shall we meet? You know I want very much to talk to you,"
said Levin.
  Oblonsky seemed to ponder.
  "I'll tell you what: let's go to Gurin's to lunch, and there we
can talk. I am free till three."
  "No," answered Levin, after an instant's thought, "I have another
visit to make."
  "All right, then, let's dine together."
  "Dine together? But I have nothing very particular- just a word or
two, a question; then a little chatting."
  "Well, let's have your word or two right now- and we'll talk it over
in the course of the dinner."
  "Well, it's this," said Levin, "however- it's of no importance."
  His face suddenly assumed an expression of anger from the effort
he was making to surmount his shyness.
  "What are the Shcherbatskys doing? Everything as it used to be?"
he said.
  Stepan Arkadyevich, who had long known that Levin was in love with
his sister-in-law, Kitty, gave a hardly perceptible smile, and his
eyes sparkled merrily.
  "You've said your word or two, but I can't answer in a few words,
because... Excuse me for just a minute...."
  A secretary came in, with respectful familiarity and the modest
consciousness, characteristic of every secretary, of superiority to
his chief in the knowledge of affairs; he went up to Oblonsky with
some papers, and began, under pretense of asking a question, to
explain some objection. Stepan Arkadyevich, without hearing him out,
laid his hand genially on the secretary's sleeve.
  "No, you do as I told you," he said, smoothing his remark with a
smile, and with a brief explanation of his view of the matter he moved
away the papers, and said: "So do it that way, if you please, Zakhar
Nikitich."
  The secretary retired in confusion. During the consultation with the
secretary Levin had completely recovered from his embarrassment. He
was standing with elbows on the back of a chair, and on his face was a
look of ironical attention.
  "I don't understand it- I don't understand it," he said.
  "What don't you understand?" said Oblonsky, smiling just as
cheerfully, and picking up a cigarette. He expected some queer
outburst from Levin.
  "I don't understand what you are doing," said Levin, shrugging his
shoulders. "How can you be serious about it?"
  "Why not?"
  "Why, because there's nothing in it."
  "You think so- yet we're overwhelmed with work."
  "On paper. But, there, you've a gift for it," added Levin.
  "That's to say, you think there's a lack of something in me?"
  "Perhaps so," said Levin. "But all the same I admire your
grandeur, and am proud to have such a great person as a friend. You've
not answered my question, though," he went on, with a desperate effort
looking Oblonsky straight in the face.
  "Oh, that's all very well. You wait a bit, and you'll come to this
yourself. It's very nice for you to have three thousand dessiatinas in
the Karazinsky district, and such muscles, and the freshness of a girl
of twelve; still you'll be one of us one day. Yes, as to your
question, there is no change, but it's a pity you've been away so
long."
  "Oh, why so?" Levin queried, frightened.
  "Oh, nothing," responded Oblonsky. "We'll talk it over. But what's
brought you up to town?"
  "Oh, we'll talk about that, too, later on," said Levin, reddening
again up to his ears.
  "All right. I see," said Stepan Arkadyevich. "I should ask you to
come to us, you know, but my wife's not quite well. But I'll tell
you what: if you want to see them, they're sure now to be at the
Zoological Gardens from four to five. Kitty skates. You drive along
there, and I'll come and fetch you, and we'll go and dine somewhere
together."
  "Capital. So good-by till then."
  "Now mind, you'll forget- I know you!- or rush off home to the
country!" Stepan Arkadyevich called out laughing.
  "No, truly!"
  And Levin went out of the room, recalling only when he was in the
doorway that he had forgotten to take leave of Oblonsky's colleagues.
  "That gentleman must be a man of great energy," said Grinevich, when
Levin had gone away.
  "Yes, my dear sir," said Stepan Arkadyevich, nodding his head, "he's
a lucky fellow! Three thousand dessiatinas in the Karazinsky district;
everything before him; and what youth and vigor! Not like some of us."
  "But why are you complaining, Stepan Arkadyevich?"
  "Why, it goes hard with me, very bad," said Stepan Arkadyevich
with a heavy sigh.
                             VI.

  When Oblonsky asked Levin what had brought him to town, Levin
blushed, and was furious with himself for blushing, because he could
not answer: "I have come to make your sister-in-law a proposal,"
though that was solely what he had come for.
  The families of the Levins and the Shcherbatskys were old, noble
Moscow families, and had always been on intimate and friendly terms.
This intimacy had grown still closer during Levin's student days. He
had both prepared for the university with the young Prince
Shcherbatsky, the brother of Kitty and Dolly, and had entered at the
same time with him. In those days Levin was a frequent visitor at
the house of the Shcherbatskys, and he was in love with the
Shcherbatsky household. Strange as it may appear, it was with the
household, the family that Constantin Levin was in love, especially
with the feminine half of the household. Levin did not remember his
own mother, and his only sister was older than he was, so that it
was in the Shcherbatskys' house that he saw for the first time that
inner life of an old, noble, cultured and honorable family of which he
had been deprived by the death of his father and mother. All the
members of that family, especially the feminine half, were pictured by
him, as it were, wrapped about with a mysterious poetical veil, and he
not only perceived no defects whatever in them, but, under the
poetical veil that shrouded them, he assumed the existence of the
loftiest sentiments and every possible perfection. Why it was the
three young ladies had one day to speak French, and the next
English; why it was that at certain hours they played by turns on
the piano, the sounds of which were audible in their brother's room
above, where the students used to work; why they were visited by those
professors of French literature, of music, of drawing, of dancing; why
at certain hours all the three young ladies, with Mademoiselle
Linon, drove in the coach to the Tverskoy boulevard, dressed in
their satin cloaks, Dolly in a long one, Natalie in a half-long one,
and Kitty in one so short that her shapely legs in tightly-drawn red
stockings were visible to all beholders; why it was they had to walk
about the Tverskoy boulevard escorted by a footman with a gold cockade
in his hat- all this and much more that was done in their mysterious
world he did not understand, but he was sure that everything that
was done there was very good, and he was in love precisely with the
mystery of the proceedings.
  In his student days he had all but been in love with the eldest,
Dolly, but she was soon married to Oblonsky. Then he began being in
love with the second. He felt, as it were, that he had to be in love
with one of the sisters, only he could not quite make out which. But
Natalie, too, had hardly made her appearance in the world when she
married the diplomat Lvov. Kitty was still a child when Levin left the
university. Young Shcherbatsky went into the navy, was drowned in
the Baltic and Levin's visits to the Shcherbatskys, despite his
friendship with Oblonsky, became less frequent. But when early in
the winter of this year Levin came to Moscow, after a year in the
country, and saw the Shcherbatskys, he realized which of the three
sisters he was indeed destined to love.
  One would have thought that nothing could be simpler than for him, a
man of good family, rather rich than poor, and thirty-two years old,
to make the young Princess Shcherbatskaia an offer of marriage; in all
likelihood he would at once have been looked upon as a good match. But
Levin was in love, and so it seemed to him that Kitty was so perfect
in every respect, a creature so far above everything earthly, while he
was a creature so low and so earthly that it could not even be
conceived that other people and she herself could regard him as worthy
of her.
  After spending two months in Moscow in a state of befuddlement,
seeing Kitty almost every day in society, into which he went so as
to meet her, he abruptly decided that it could not be, and went back
to the country.
  Levin's conviction that it could not be was founded on the idea that
in the eyes of her family he was a disadvantageous and worthless match
for the charming Kitty, and that Kitty herself could not love him.
In her family's eyes he had no ordinary, definite career and
position in society, while his comrades by this time, when he was
thirty-two, were already one a colonel, and another a professor,
another director of a bank and railways, or chairman of a board,
like Oblonsky. But he (he knew very well how he must appear to others)
was a country gentleman, occupied in breeding cattle, shooting game
and building barns; in other words, a fellow of no ability, who had
not turned out well, and who was doing just what, according to the
ideas of the world, is done by people fit for nothing else.
  The mysterious, enchanting Kitty herself could not love such an ugly
person as he conceived himself to be, and, above all, such an
ordinary, in no way striking person. Moreover, his attitude to Kitty
in the past- the attitude of a grown-up person to a child, arising
from his friendship with her brother- seemed to him yet another
obstacle to love. An ugly, good-natured man, as he considered himself,
might, he supposed, be liked as a friend; but to be loved with such
a love as that with which he loved Kitty, one would need to be
handsome and, still more, a distinguished man.
  He had heard that women often did care for ugly and ordinary men,
but he did not believe it, for he judged by himself, and he could
not himself have loved any but beautiful, mysterious and exceptional
women.
  But, after spending two months alone in the country, he was
convinced that this was not one of those passions of which he had
had experience in his early youth; that this feeling gave him not an
instant's rest; that he could not live without deciding the question
as to whether she would or would not be his wife; that his despair had
arisen only from his own imaginings, and that he had no sort of
proof that he would be rejected. So he had now come to Moscow with a
firm determination to make a proposal, and get married if he were
accepted. Or... he could not conceive what would become of him if he
were rejected.
                             VII.

  On arriving in Moscow by a morning train, Levin had put up at the
house of his elder half-brother, Koznishev. After changing his clothes
he went down to his brother's study, intending to talk to him at
once about the object of his visit, and to ask his advice; but his
brother was not alone. With him there was a well-known professor of
philosophy, who had come from Charkov expressly to clear up a
difference that had arisen between them on a very important
philosophical question. The professor was carrying on a hot crusade
against materialists. Sergei Koznishev had been following this crusade
with interest, and after reading the professor's last article had
written him a letter stating his objections. He accused the
professor of making too great concessions to the materialists. And the
professor had promptly appeared to argue the matter out. The point
in discussion was the question then in vogue: Is there a line to be
drawn between psychical and physiological phenomena in man? And if so,
where?
  Sergei Ivanovich met his brother with the smile of chilly
friendliness he always had for everyone, and, introducing him to the
professor, went on with the conversation.
  A little man in spectacles, with a narrow forehead, tore himself
from the discussion for an instant to greet Levin, and then went on
talking without paying any further attention to him. Levin sat down to
wait till the professor should go, but he soon began to get interested
in the subject under discussion.
  Levin had come across the magazine articles about which they were
disputing, and had read them, interested in them as a development of
the first principles of science, familiar to him when a natural
science student at the university. But he had never connected these
scientific deductions as to the origin of man as an animal, as to
reflex action, biology and sociology, with those questions as to the
meaning to himself of life and death, which had of late been more
and more often in his mind.
  As he listened to his brother's argument with the professor, he
noticed that they connected these scientific questions with those
spiritual problems- that at times they almost touched on the latter;
but every time they were close upon what seemed to him the chief point
they promptly beat a hasty retreat, and plunged again into a sea of
subtle distinctions, reservations, quotations, allusions and appeals
to authorities, and it was with difficulty that he understood what
they were talking about.
  "I cannot admit it," said Sergei Ivanovich, with his habitual
clearness and distinctness of expression, and elegance of diction.
"I cannot in any case agree with Keiss that my whole conception of the
external world has been derived from impressions. The most fundamental
idea- the idea of existence- has not been received by me through
sensation; indeed, there is no special sense organ for the
transmission of such an idea."
  "Yes, but they- Wurst, and Knaust, and Pripassov- would answer
that your consciousness of existence is derived from the conjunction
of all your sensations, that that consciousness of existence is the
result of your sensations. Wurst, indeed, says plainly that,
assuming there are no sensations, it follows that there is no idea
of existence."
  "I maintain the contrary," began Sergei Ivanovich.
  But here it seemed again to Levin that, just as they were close upon
the real point of the matter, they were again retreating, and he
made up his mind to put a question to the professor.
  "According to that, if my senses are annihilated, if my body is
dead, I can have no existence of any sort?" he queried.
  The professor, in annoyance, and, as it were, mental suffering at
the interruption, looked round at the strange inquirer, more like a
hauler of a barge than a philosopher, and turned his eyes upon
Sergei Ivanovich, as though to ask: What's one to say to him? But
Sergei Ivanovich, who had been talking with far less stress and
one-sidedness than the professor, and who had sufficient breadth of
mind to answer the professor, and at the same time to comprehend the
simple and natural point of view from which the question was put,
smiled and said:
  "That question we have no right to answer as yet...."
  "We have not the requisite data," confirmed the professor, and he
went back to his argument. "No," he said; "I would point out the
fact that if, as Pripassov directly asserts, sensation is based on
impression, then we are bound to distinguish sharply between these two
conceptions."
  Levin listened no more, and simply waited for the professor to go.
                             VIII.

  When the professor had gone, Sergei Ivanovich turned to his brother.
  "Delighted that you've come. For how long? How's your farming
getting on?"
  Levin knew that his elder brother took little interest in farming,
and only put the question in deference to him, and therefore he told
him only about the sale of his wheat and money matters.
  Levin had meant to tell his brother of his determination to get
married, and to ask his advice; he had indeed firmly resolved to do
so. But after seeing his brother, listening to his conversation with
the professor, hearing afterward the unconsciously patronizing tone in
which his brother questioned him about agricultural matters (their
mother's property had not been divided, and Levin took charge of
both their shares), Levin felt that he could not for some reason
broach to him his intention of marrying. He felt that his brother
would not look on it as he would have wished him.
  "Well, how is your Zemstvo doing?" asked Sergei Ivanovich, who was
greatly interested in Zemstvo establishments and attached great
importance to them.
  "I really don't know."
  "What! But surely, you're a member of the board?"
  "No, I'm not a member now; I've resigned," answered Levin, "and I no
longer attend the sessions."
  "What a pity!" commented Sergei Ivanovich, frowning.
  Levin in self-defense began to describe what took place at the
sessions in his district.
  "That's how it always is!" Sergei Ivanovich interrupted him. "We
Russians are always like that. Perhaps it's our strong point,
really- this faculty of seeing our own shortcomings; but we overdo it,
we comfort ourselves with irony, which we always have on the tip of
our tongues. All I say is, give such rights as our Zemstvo
establishments to any other European people, and... Why, the Germans
or the English would have worked their way to freedom with them, while
we simply turn them into ridicule."
  "But how can it be helped?" said Levin penitently. "It was my last
trial. And I did try with all my soul. I can't. I'm no good at it."
  "It's not that you're no good at it," said Sergei Ivanovich, "it
is that you don't look at it as you should."
  "Perhaps not," Levin answered dejectedly.
  "Oh! do you know brother Nikolai's turned up again?"
  This brother Nikolai was the elder brother of Constantin Levin,
and half-brother of Sergei Ivanovich; a man who was done for, who
had dissipated the greater part of his fortune, was living in the
strangest and lowest company, and had quarreled with his brothers.
  "What did you say?" Levin cried with horror. "How do you know?"
  "Procophii saw him in the street."
  "Here in Moscow? Where is he? Do you know?" Levin got up from his
chair, as though on the point of starting off at once.
  "I'm sorry I told you," said Sergei Ivanovich, shaking his head at
his younger brother's excitement. "I sent to find out where he is
living, and sent him his I O U to Trubin, which I paid. This is the
answer he sent me."
  And Sergei Ivanovich took a note from under a paperweight and handed
it to his brother.
  Levin read in the queer, familiar handwriting: "I humbly beg you
to leave me in peace. That's the only favor I ask of my gracious
brothers.- Nikolai Levin."
  Levin read it, and without raising his head stood with the note in
his hands opposite Sergei Ivanovich.
  There was a struggle in his heart between the desire to forget his
unhappy brother for the time, and the consciousness that it would be
base to do so.
  "He obviously wants to offend me," pursued Sergei Ivanovich; "but he
cannot offend me, and I should have wished with all my heart to assist
him, but I know it's impossible to do that."
  "Yes, yes," repeated Levin. "I understand and appreciate your
attitude to him; but I shall go and see him."
  "If you want to, do; but I shouldn't advise it," said Sergei
Ivanovich. "As regards myself, I have no fear of your doing so; he
will not make you quarrel with me; but for your own sake, I should say
you would do better not to go. You can't do him any good; still, do as
you please."
  "Very likely I can't do any good, but I feel- especially at such a
moment- but that's another thing- I feel I could not be at peace."
  "Well, that's something I don't understand," said Sergei
Ivanovich. "One thing I do understand," he added, "it's a lesson in
humility. I have come to look very differently and more indulgently on
what is called infamy since brother Nikolai has become what he is...
you know what he did...."
  "Oh, it's awful, awful!" repeated Levin.
  After obtaining his brother's address from Sergei Ivanovich's
footman, Levin was on the point of setting off at once to see him, but
on second thought he decided to put off his visit till the evening.
The thing to do to set his heart at rest was to accomplish what he had
come to Moscow for. From his brother's Levin went to Oblonsky's
office, and on getting news of the Shcherbatskys from him, he drove to
the place where he had been told he might find Kitty.
                             IX.

  At four o'clock, conscious of his throbbing heart, Levin stepped out
of a hired sleigh at the Zoological Gardens and turned along the
path to the frozen mounds and the skating ground, knowing that he
would certainly find her there, as he had seen the Shcherbatskys'
carriage at the entrance.
  It was a bright, frosty day. Rows of carriages, sleighs, drivers and
gendarmes were standing in the approach. Crowds of well-dressed
people, with hats bright in the sun, swarmed about the entrance and
along the well-swept paths between the little houses adorned with
carving in the Russian style. The old curly birches of the gardens,
all their twigs laden with snow, looked as though freshly decked in
sacred vestments.
  He walked along the path toward the skating ground, and kept
saying to himself- "You mustn't be excited, you must be calm. What's
the matter with you? What do you want? Be still, foolish one," he
conjured his heart. And the more he tried to compose himself, the more
breathless he found himself. An acquaintance met him and called him by
his name, but Levin did not even recognize him. He went toward the
mounds, whence came the clank of the chains of sleighs as they slipped
down or were dragged up, the rumble of the sliding sleighs and the
sounds of merry voices. He walked on a few steps, and the skating
ground lay open before him, and at once, amid all the skaters, he
recognized her.
  He knew she was there by the rapture and the terror that seized
his heart. She was standing talking to a lady at the opposite end of
the ground. There was apparently nothing striking either in her
dress or her attitude, but for Levin she was as easy to find in that
crowd as a rose among nettles. Everything was made bright by her.
She was the smile that shed light on all around her. "Is it possible I
can go over there on the ice- approach her?" he thought. The place
where she stood seemed to him a holy shrine, unapproachable, and there
was one moment when he was almost retreating, so overwhelmed was he
with terror. He had to make an effort to master himself, and to remind
himself that people of all sorts were moving about her, and that he,
too, might have come there to skate. He descended, for a long while
avoiding looking at her as at the sun, yet seeing her, as one does the
sun, without looking.
  On that day of the week, and at that time of day, people of one set,
all acquainted with one another, used to meet on the ice. There were
skillful skaters there, showing off their skill, and beginners
clinging to chairs with timid, awkward movements, and boys and elderly
people skating with hygienic motives. They seemed to Levin an elect
band of blissful beings because they were here, near her. All the
skaters, it seemed, with perfect self-possession, skated toward her,
skated by her, even spoke to her, and were happy, quite apart from
her, enjoying the capital ice and the fine weather.
  Nikolai Shcherbatsky, Kitty's cousin, in a short jacket and tight
trousers, was sitting on a bench with his skates on. Seeing Levin,
he shouted to him:
  "Ah, the first skater in Russia! Been here long? First-rate ice-
do put your skates on."
  "I haven't got my skates," Levin answered, marveling at this
boldness and ease in her presence, and not for one second losing sight
of her, though he did not look at her. He felt as though the sun
were coming near him. She was in a corner, and turning out her slender
feet in their high boots, she, with obvious timidity, skated toward
him. A boy in Russian dress, desperately waving his arms and bending
down to the ground, overtook her. She skated a little uncertainly;
taking her hands out of the little muff that hung on a cord, she
held them ready for emergency, and looking toward Levin, whom she
had recognized, she smiled at him and at her own fears. When she had
got round the turn, she got a start with one foot and skated
straight up to Shcherbatsky. Clutching at his arm, she nodded with a
smile to Levin. She was more beautiful than he had imagined her.
  When he thought of her, he could call up a vivid picture of her to
himself, especially the charm of that little fair head, so freely
set on the shapely girlish shoulders, and so full of childish
brightness and kindness. Her childish countenance, together with the
delicate beauty of her figure, made up that special charm of hers,
which he appreciated so well. But what always struck him in her as
something unlooked for was the expression of her eyes- soft, serene
and truthful; and, above all, her smile, which always transported
Levin to an enchanted world, where he felt moved and tender, as he
remembered himself during certain rare days of his early childhood.
  "Have you been here long?" she said, giving him her hand. "Thank
you," she added, as he picked up the handkerchief that had fallen
out of her muff.
  "I? Not long ago... yesterday... I mean I arrived... today..."
answered Levin, in his emotion not comprehending her question
immediately. "I meant to come and see you," he said; and then,
recollecting what his intention was in seeking her, he was promptly
overcome with confusion, and blushed. "I didn't know you could
skate, and skate so well."
  She looked at him attentively, as though wishing to make out the
cause of his confusion.
  "Your praise is worth having. The tradition is kept up here that you
are the best of skaters," she said, with her little black-gloved
hand brushing some needles of hoarfrost off her muff.
  "Yes, I used to skate with passion once upon a time; I wanted to
attain perfection."
  "You do everything with passion, I think," she said smiling. "I
should so like to see how you skate. Do put on skates, and let's skate
together."
  "Skate together Can that be possible?" thought Levin, gazing at her.
  "I'll put them on directly," he said.
  And he went off to get skates.
  "It's a long while since we've seen you here, sir," said the
attendant, supporting his foot, and screwing on the heel of the skate.
"Except you, there's none of the gentlemen first-rate skaters. Will
that be all right?" said he, tightening the strap.
  "Oh, yes, yes; make haste, please," answered Levin, with
difficulty restraining the smile of rapture which would overspread his
face. "Yes," he thought, "this is life, this is happiness! Together,
she said; let us skate together! Speak to her now? But that's just why
I'm afraid to speak- because I'm happy now, happy even though only
in hope.... And then?... But I must! I must! I must! Away,
faintheartedness!"
  Levin rose to his feet, took off his overcoat, and, gaining speed
over the rough ice round the pavilion, came out on the smooth ice
and skated without effort, as it were, by, simple exercise of will,
increasing and slackening speed and turning his course. He
approached her with timidity, but again her smile reassured him.
  She gave him her hand, and they set off side by side, going faster
and faster, and the more rapidly they moved the more tightly she
grasped his hand.
  "With you I should soon learn; I somehow feel confidence in you,"
she said to him.
  "And I have confidence in myself when you are leaning on me," he
said, but was at once frightened at what he had said, and blushed. And
indeed, no sooner had he uttered these words, than all at once, like
the sun going behind a cloud, her face lost all its tenderness, and
Levin detected the familiar change in her expression that denoted
mental concentration; a tiny wrinkle came upon her smooth brow.
  "Is there anything troubling you? However, I've no right to ask such
a question," he said hurriedly.
  "Oh, why so?... No, I have nothing to trouble me," she responded
coldly, and immediately added: "You haven't seen Mlle. Linon, have
you?"
  "Not yet."
  "Go and speak to her- she likes you so much."
  "What's wrong? I have offended her. Lord help me!" thought Levin,
and he flew towards the old Frenchwoman with the gray ringlets, who
was sitting on a bench. Smiling and showing her false teeth, she
greeted him as an old friend.
  "Yes, you see we're growing up," she said to him, glancing toward
Kitty, "and growing old. Tiny bear has grown big now!" pursued the
Frenchwoman, laughing, and she reminded him of his joke about the
three young ladies whom he had compared to the three bears in the
English nursery tale. "Do you remember that's what you used to call
them?"
  He remembered absolutely nothing, but she had been laughing at the
joke for ten years now and was fond of it.
  "Now, go and skate, go and skate. Our Kitty has learned to skate
nicely, hasn't she?"
  When Levin darted up to Kitty her face was no longer stern; her eyes
looked at him with the same sincerity and tenderness, but Levin
fancied that in her tenderness there was a certain note of
deliberate composure. And he felt depressed. After talking a little of
her old governess and her peculiarities, she questioned him about
his life.
  "Surely, you must feel dull in the country in the winter," she said.
  "No, I'm not dull- I am very busy," he said, feeling that she was
making him submit to her composed tone, which he would not have the
strength to break through- just as had been the case at the
beginning of the winter.
  "Are you going to stay in town long?" Kitty questioned him.
  "I don't know," he answered, not thinking of what he was saying. The
thought came into his mind that if he were held in submission by her
tone of quiet friendliness he would end by going back again without
deciding anything, and he resolved to mutiny against it.
  "How is it you don't know?"
  "I don't know. It depends upon you," he said, and was immediately
horror-stricken at his own words.
  Whether it was that she did not hear his words, or that she did
not want to hear them, she made a sort of stumble, twice struck out,
and hurriedly skated away from him. She skated up to Mlle. Linon, said
something to her, and went toward the pavilion where the ladies took
off their skates.
  "My God! What have I done! Merciful God! Help me, guide me," said
Levin, praying inwardly, and at the same time, feeling a need of
violent exercise, he skated about, describing concentric and eccentric
circles.
  At that moment one of the young men, the best of the skaters of
the day, came out of the coffeehouse on his skates, with a cigarette
in his mouth. Taking a run he dashed down the steps on his skates,
crashing and leaping. He flew down, and without even changing the
free-and-easy position of his hands, skated away over the ice.
  "Ah, that's a new trick!" said Levin, and he promptly ran up to
the top to perform this new trick.
  "Don't break your neck! This needs practice!" Nikolai Shcherbatsky
shouted after him.
  Levin went to the steps, took a run from above as best he could, and
dashed down, preserving his balance in this unwonted movement with his
hands. On the last step he stumbled, but barely touching the ice
with his hand, with a violent effort recovered himself, and skated
off, laughing.
  "What a fine, darling chap he is!" Kitty was thinking at that
moment, as she came out of the pavilion with Mlle. Linon and looked
toward him with a smile of quiet kindness, as though he were a
favorite brother. "And can it be my fault, can I have done anything
wrong? They talk of coquetry. I know it's not he that I love; but
still I am happy with him, and he's so nice. Only, why did he say
that?..." she mused.
  Catching sight of Kitty going away, and her mother meeting her at
the steps, Levin, flushed from his rapid exercise, stood still and
pondered a minute. He took off his skates, and overtook the mother and
daughter at the entrance of the gardens.
  "Delighted to see you," said Princess Shcherbatskaia. "On
Thursdays we are home, as always."
  "Today, then?"
  "We shall be pleased to see you," the Princess said stiffly.
  This stiffness hurt Kitty, and she could not resist the desire to
smooth over her mother's coldness. She turned her head, and with a
smile said:
  "Good-by till this evening."
  At that moment Stepan Arkadyevich, his hat cocked on one side,
with beaming face and eyes, strode into the garden like a buoyant
conqueror. But as he approached his mother-in-law, he responded to her
inquiries about Dolly's health with a mournful and guilty countenance.
After a little subdued and dejected conversation with her he set
straight his chest again, and took Levin by the arm.
  "Well, shall we set off?" he asked. "I've been thinking about you
all this time, and I'm very, very glad you've come," he said,
looking him in the face with a significant air.
  "Yes, come along," answered Levin in ecstasy, hearing unceasingly
the sound of that voice saying, "Good-by till this evening," and
seeing the smile with which it was said.
  "To England or The Hermitage?"
  "It's all the same to me."
  "Well, then, England it is," said Stepan Arkadyevich, selecting that
restaurant because he owed more there than at The Hermitage, and
consequently considered it mean to avoid it. "Have you got a sleigh?
That's fine- for I sent my carriage home."
  The friends hardly spoke all the way. Levin was wondering what
that change in Kitty's expression had meant, and alternately
assuring himself that there was hope, and falling into despair, seeing
clearly that his hopes were insane, and yet all the while he felt
himself quite another man, utterly unlike what he had been before
her smile and those words, "Good-by till this evening."
  Stepan Arkadyevich was absorbed during the drive in composing the
menu of the dinner.
  "You like turbot, don't you?" he said to Levin as they were
arriving.
  "Eh?" responded Levin. "Turbot? Yes, I'm awfully fond of turbot."
                             X.

  When Levin went into the restaurant with Oblonsky, he could not help
noticing a certain peculiarity of expression, as it were, a restrained
radiance, about the face and whole figure of Stepan Arkadyevich.
Oblonsky took off his overcoat, and with his hat over one ear walked
into the dining room, giving directions to the Tatar waiters, who were
clustered about him in evening coats, and with napkins under their
arms. Bowing right and left to acquaintances who, here as
everywhere, greeted him joyously, he went up to the bar, took a little
wineglass of vodka and a snack of fish, and said to the painted
Frenchwoman decked in ribbons, lace and ringlets, behind the desk,
something so amusing that even that Frenchwoman was moved to genuine
laughter. Levin for his part refrained from taking any vodka only
because he found most offensive this Frenchwoman, all made up, it
seemed, of false hair, poudre de riz and vinaigre de toilette. He made
haste to move away from her, as from a dirty place. His whole soul was
filled with memories of Kitty, and there was a smile of triumph and
happiness shining in his eyes.
  "This way, Your Excellency, please. Your Excellency won't be
disturbed here," said a particularly pertinacious, white-headed old
Tatar with immense hips and coattails gaping widely behind. "Walk
in, your Excellency," he said to Levin- being attentive to his guest
as well, by way of showing his respect to Stepan Arkadyevich.
  Instantly flinging a fresh cloth over the round table under the
bronze sconce, though it already had a tablecloth on it, he pushed
up velvet chairs and came to a standstill before Stepan Arkadyevich
with a napkin and a bill of fare in his hands, awaiting his commands.
  "If you prefer it, Your Excellency, a private room will be free
directly: Prince Golitsin with a lady. Fresh oysters have come in."
  "Ah, oysters!" Stepan Arkadyevich became thoughtful.
  "How if we were to change our program, Levin?" he said, keeping
his finger on the bill of fare. And his face expressed serious
hesitation. "Are the oysters good? Mind, now!"
  "They're Flensburg, Your Excellency. We've no Ostend."
  "Flensburg will do- but are they fresh?"
  "Only arrived yesterday."
  "Well, then, how if we were to begin with oysters, and so change the
whole program? Eh?"
  "It's all the same to me. I should like cabbage soup and porridge
better than anything; but of course there's nothing like that here."
  "Porridge a la Russe, Your Honor would like?" said the Tatar,
bending down to Levin, like a nurse speaking to a child.
  "No, joking apart, whatever you choose is sure to be good. I've been
skating, and I'm hungry. And don't imagine," he added, detecting a
look of dissatisfaction on Oblonsky's face, "that I shan't
appreciate your choice. I don't object to a good dinner."
  "I should hope so! After all, it's one of the pleasures of life,"
said Stepan Arkadyevich. "Well, then, my friend, you give us two- or
better say three- dozen oysters, clear soup with vegetables..."
  "Printaniere," prompted the Tatar. But Stepan Arkadyevich apparently
did not care to allow him the satisfaction of giving the French
names of the dishes.
  "With vegetables in it, you know. Then turbot with thick sauce,
then... roast beef; and mind it's good. Yes, and capons, perhaps,
and then stewed fruit."
  The Tatar, recollecting that it was Stepan Arkadyevich's way not
to call the dishes by the names in the French bill of fare, did not
repeat them after him, but could not resist rehearsing the whole
menu to himself according to the bill: "Soupe printaniere, turbot
sauce Beaumarchais, poulard a l'estragon, Macedoine de fruits..."
and then instantly, as though worked by springs, laying down one bound
bill of fare, he took up another, the list of wines, and submitted
it to Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "What shall we drink?"
  "What you like, only not too much. Champagne," said Levin.
  "What! to start with? You're right though, I dare say. Do you like
the white seal?"
  "Cachet blanc," prompted the Tatar.
  "Very well, then, give us that brand with the oysters, and then
we'll see."
  "Yes, sir. And what table wine?"
  "You can give us Nuits. Oh, no- better the classic Chablis."
  "Yes, sir. And your cheese, Your Excellency?"
  "Oh, yes, Parmesan. Or would you like another?"
  "No, it's all the same to me," said Levin, unable to suppress a
smile.
  And the Tatar ran off with flying coattails, and in five minutes
darted in with a dish of opened oysters in their nacreous shells,
and a bottle between his fingers.
  Stepan Arkadyevich crushed the starchy napkin, tucked it into his
waistcoat, and, settling his arms comfortably, started on the oysters.
  "Not bad," he said, detaching the jellied oysters from their
pearly shells with a small silver fork, and swallowing them one
after another. "Not bad," he repeated, turning his dewy, brilliant
eyes now upon Levin, now upon the Tatar.
  Levin ate the oysters too, though white bread and cheese pleased him
better. But he was admiring Oblonsky. Even the Tatar, uncorking the
bottle and pouring the sparkling wine into the delicate
funnel-shaped glasses, and adjusting his white cravat, kept on
glancing at Stepan Arkadyevich with a perceptible smile of
satisfaction.
  "You don't care much for oysters, do you?" said Stepan
Arkadyevich, emptying his wineglass, "or are you worried about
something. Eh?"
  He wanted Levin to be in good spirits. But it was not that Levin was
not in good spirits, he was ill at ease. With what he had in his soul,
he felt hard and awkward in the restaurant, in the midst of private
rooms where men were dining with ladies, in all this fuss and
bustle; the surroundings of bronzes, looking glasses, gas and
Tatars- all of this was offensive to him. He was afraid of sullying
what his soul was brimful of.
  "I? Yes, I am worried; but besides that, all this bothers me," he
said. "You can't conceive how queer it all seems to a countryman
like me, as queer as that gentleman's nails I saw at your office...."
  "Yes, I saw how much interested you were in poor Grinevich's nails,"
said Stepan Arkadyevich, laughing.
  "It's too much for me," responded Levin. "Do try, now, to put
yourself in my place- take the point of view of a countryman. We in
the country try to bring our hands into such a state as will be most
convenient for working with. So we cut our nails; sometimes we tuck up
our sleeves. And here people purposely let their nails grow as long as
possible, and link on small saucers by way of studs, so that they
can do nothing with their hands."
  Stepan Arkadyevich smiled gaily.
  "Oh, yes, that's just a sign that he has no need to do coarse
work. His work is with the mind...."
  "Maybe. But still it's queer to me, just as at this moment it
seems queer to me that we countryfolks try to satiate ourselves as
soon as we can, so as to be ready for work, while here are we trying
to delay satiety as long as possible, and with that object are
eating oysters...."
  "Why, of course," objected Stepan Arkadyevich. "But that's just
the aim of culture- to make everything a source of enjoyment."
  "Well, if that's its aim, I'd rather be a savage."
  "You are a savage, as it is. All you Levins are savages."
  Levin sighed. He remembered his brother Nikolai, and felt ashamed
and pained, and he scowled; but Oblonsky began speaking of a subject
which at once drew his attention.
  "Oh, I say, are you going tonight to our people- the Shcherbatskys',
I mean?" he said, his eyes sparkling significantly as he pushed away
the empty rough shells, and drew the cheese toward him.
  "Yes, I shall certainly go," replied Levin; "though I fancied the
Princess was not very warm in her invitation."
  "What nonsense! That's her manner.... Come, boy, the soup!... That's
her manner- grande dame," said Stepan Arkadyevich. "I'm coming, too,
but I have to go to the Countess Bonin's rehearsal. Come, isn't it
true that you're a savage? How do you explain the sudden way in
which you vanished from Moscow? The Shcherbatskys were continually
asking me about you, as though I ought to know. The only thing I
know is that you always do what no one else does."
  "Yes," said Levin, slowly and with emotion, "you're right. I am a
savage. Only, my savageness is not in having gone away, but in
coming now. Now I have come..."
  "Oh, what a lucky fellow you are!" broke in Stepan Arkadyevich,
looking into Levin's eyes.
  "Why?"
  "I can tell the gallant steeds," by some... I don't know what...
'paces'; I can tell youths 'by their faces,'" declaimed Stepan
Arkadyevich. "Everything is before you."
  "Why, is it over for you already?"
  "No; not over exactly, but the future is yours, and the present is
mine, and the present- well, it's only fair to middling."
  "How so?"
  "Oh, things aren't right. But I don't want to talk of myself,
besides I can't explain it all," said Stepan Arkadyevich. "Well, why
have you come to Moscow, then?... Hi! clear the table!" he called to
the Tatar.
  "Are you trying to surmise?" responded Levin, his eyes, gleaming
in their depth, fixed on Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "I am, but I can't be the first to talk about it. You can see by
that whether I surmise right or wrong," said Stepan Arkadyevich,
gazing at Levin with a subtle smile.
  "Well, and what have you to say to me?" said Levin in a quivering
voice, feeling that all the muscles of his face were quivering too.
"How do you look at it?
  Stepan Arkadyevich slowly emptied his glass of Chablis, never taking
his eyes off Levin.
  "I?" said Stepan Arkadyevich. "There's nothing I desire so much as
that- nothing! It would be the best thing that could happen."
  "But you're not making a mistake? You know what we're speaking
of?" said Levin, piercing him with his eyes. "You think it's
possible?"
  "I think it's possible. Why not?"
  "No! Do you really think it's possible? No- tell me all you think!
Oh, but if... If refusal's in store for me!... Indeed I feel sure..."
  "What makes you think so?" said Stepan Arkadyevich, smiling at his
excitement.
  "It seems so to me sometimes. That will be awful for me, and for her
too."
  "Oh, well, anyway there's nothing awful in it for a girl. Every
girl's proud of a proposal."
  "Yes, every girl, but not she."
  Stepan Arkadyevich smiled. He so well knew that feeling of
Levin's, that for him all the girls in the world were divided into two
classes: one class- all the girls in the world except her, and those
girls with all sorts of human failings, and very ordinary girls: the
other class- she alone, having no failings of any sort and higher than
all humanity.
  "Stay, take some sauce," he said, holding back Levin's hand, who was
pushing the sauce away.
  Levin obediently helped himself to sauce, but would not let Stepan
Arkadyevich go on with his dinner.
  "No, stop a minute, stop a minute," he said. "You must understand
that it's a question of life and death for me. I have never spoken
to anyone of this. And there's no one to whom I could speak of it,
except yourself. You know we're utterly unlike each other, different
in tastes, and views, and everything; but I know you're fond of me and
understand me, and that's why I like you awfully. But for God's
sake, be quite straightforward with me."
  "I tell you what I think," said Stepan Arkadyevich, smiling. "But
I'll say more: my wife is a wonderful woman..." Stepan Arkadyevich
sighed, recalling his relations with his wife, and, after a moment's
silence, resumed- "She has a gift of foreseeing things. She sees right
through people; but that's not all; she knows what will come to
pass, especially in the way of marriages. She foretold, for
instance, that Princess Shahovskaia would marry Brenteln. No one would
believe it, but it came to pass. And she's on your side."
  "How do you mean?"
  "It's not only that she likes you- she says that Kitty is certain to
be your wife."
  At these words Levin's face suddenly lighted up with a smile, a
smile not far from touching tears.
  "She says that!" cried out Levin. "I always said she was charming,
your wife. There, that's enough said about it," he said, getting up
from his seat.
  "Well, but do sit down."
  But Levin could not sit down. He walked with his firm tread twice up
and down the little cage of a room, blinked his eyelids that his tears
might not fall, and only then sat down to the table.
  "You must understand," said he, "it's not love. I've been in love,
but it's not that. It's not my feeling, but a sort of force outside me
that has taken possession of me. I went away, you see, because I
made up my mind that it could never be- you understand, like a
happiness which is not of this earth; but I've struggled with
myself, and I see there's no living without it. And it must be
settled."
  "What did you go away for?"
  "Ah, stop a minute! Ah, the thoughts that come crowding on one!
The questions one must ask oneself! Listen. You can't imagine what
you've done for me by what you said. I'm so happy that I've become
positively hateful; I've forgotten everything. I heard today that my
brother Nikolai... you know, he's here... I had forgotten even him. It
seems to me that he's happy too. It's a sort of madness. But one
thing's awful.... Here, you've been married, you know the
feeling.... It's awful that we- fully mature- with a past... a past
not of love, but of sins... are brought all at once so near to a
creature pure and innocent; it's loathsome, and that's why one can't
help feeling oneself unworthy."
  "Oh, well, you haven't many sins on your conscience."
  "Ah, still," said Levin, "'When, with loathing, I go o'er my life, I
shudder and I curse and bitterly regret...' Yes."
  "What would you have? That's the way of the world," said Stepan
Arkadyevich.
  "There's one comfort, like that of the prayer which I always
liked: 'Forgive me not according to my deeds, but according to Thy
loving-kindness.' That's the only way she can forgive me."
                             XI.

  Levin emptied his glass, and they were silent for a while.
  "There's one other thing I ought to tell you. Do you know
Vronsky?" Stepan Arkadyevich asked Levin.
  "No, I don't. Why do you ask?"
  "Give us another bottle," Stepan Arkadyevich directed the Tatar, who
was filling up their glasses and fidgeting round them just when he was
least wanted.
  "Why, you ought to know Vronsky because he's one of your rivals."
  "Who's Vronsky?" said Levin, and his face was suddenly transformed
from the look of childlike ecstasy which Oblonsky had just been
admiring to an angry and unpleasant expression.
  "Vronsky is one of the sons of Count Kirill Ivanovich Vronsky, and
one of the finest specimens of the gilded youth of Peterburg. I made
his acquaintance in Tver, when I was there on official business, and
he came there for the levy of recruits. Fearfully rich, handsome,
great connections, an aide-de-camp, and with all that a very fine
good-natured fellow. But he's more than simply a good-natured
fellow, as I've found out here- he's a cultured man, too, and very
intelligent; he's a man who'll make his mark."
  Levin scowled and kept silent.
  "Well, he turned up here soon after you'd gone, and, as I can see,
he's over head and ears in love with Kitty, and you know that her
mother..."
  "Excuse me, but I know nothing," said Levin, frowning gloomily.
And immediately he recalled his brother Nikolai, and how vile he was
to have been able to forget him.
  "You wait a bit- wait a bit," said Stepan Arkadyevich, smiling and
touching his hand. "I've told you what I know, and I repeat that in
this delicate and tender matter, as far as one can conjecture, I
believe the chances are in your favor."
  Levin dropped back in his chair; his face was pale.
  "But I would advise you to settle the thing as soon as possible,"
pursued Oblonsky, filling up his glass.
  "No, thanks, I can't drink any more," said Levin, pushing away his
glass. "I shall get drunk.... Come, tell me how are you getting on?"
he went on, obviously anxious to change the conversation.
  "One word more: in any case I advise you to settle the question
soon. Tonight I don't advise you to speak," said Stepan Arkadyevich.
"Go round tomorrow morning, make a proposal in classic form, and God
bless you...."
  "Oh, do you still think of coming to me for some shooting? Come next
spring, do," said Levin.
  Now his whole soul was full of remorse that he had begun this
conversation with Stepan Arkadyevich. His peculiar feeling was
profaned by talk of the rivalry of some Peterburg officer, of the
suppositions and the counsels of Stepan Arkadyevich.
  Stepan Arkadyevich smiled. He knew what was passing in Levin's soul.
  "I'll come some day," he said. "Yes, my dear, women- they're the
pivot everything turns upon. Things are in a bad way with me, very
bad. And it's all through women. Tell me frankly, now," he pursued,
picking up a cigar and keeping one hand on his glass; "give me your
advice."
  "Why, what is it?"
  "I'll tell you. Suppose you're married; you love your wife, but
are fascinated by another woman..."
  "Excuse me, but I'm absolutely unable to comprehend how just as I
can't comprehend how I could now, after my dinner, go straight to a
baker's shop and steal a loaf."
  Stepan Arkadyevich's eyes sparkled more than usual.
  "Why not? A loaf will sometimes smell so good that one can't
resist it.

            "Himmlisch ist's wenn ich bezwungen
               Meine irdische Begier;
             Aber doch wenn's nicht gelungen
               Hatt' ich auch recht hubsch Plaisir!"

  As he said this, Stepan Arkadyevich smiled subtly. Levin, too, could
not help smiling.
  "Yes, but joking apart," resumed Oblonsky, "you must understand that
the woman, a sweet, gentle, loving creature, poor and lonely, has
sacrificed everything. Now, when the thing's done, don't you see,
can one possibly cast her off? Even supposing one parts from her, so
as not to break up one's family life, still, can one help feeling
for her, setting her on her feet, lightening her lot?"
  "Well, you must excuse me there. You know to me all women are
divided into two classes.... Well, no... it would be truer to say:
there are women, and there are... I've never seen charming fallen
beings, and I never shall see them, but such creatures as that painted
Frenchwoman at the counter with the ringlets are vermin to my mind,
and all fallen women are like her."
  "But the Magdalen?"
  "Ah, drop that! Christ would never have said those words if He had
known how they would be abused. Of all the Gospel those words are
the only ones remembered. However, I'm not saying so much what I
think, as what I feel. I have a loathing for fallen women. You're
afraid of spiders, and I of these vermin. Most likely you've not
made a study of spiders and don't know their character; and so it is
with me."
  "It's very well for you to talk like that; it's very much like
that gentleman in Dickens who used to fling all difficult questions
over his right shoulder with his left hand. But denying the facts is
no answer. What's to be done- you tell me that; what's to be done?
Your wife gets older, while you're full of life. Before you've time to
look round, you feel that you can't love your wife with love,
however much you may esteem her. And then all at once love turns up-
and you're done for; you're done for," Stepan Arkadyevich said with
weary despair.
  Levin smiled slightly.
  "Yes, you're done for," resumed Oblonsky. "But what's to be done?"
  "Don't steal loaves."
  Stepan Arkadyevich laughed outright.
  "Oh, moralist! But you must understand, there are two women; one
insists only on her rights, and those rights are your love, which
you can't give her; while the other sacrifices everything for you
and asks for nothing. What are you to do? How are you to act?
There's a fearful tragedy in it."
  "If you care for my profession of faith as regards that, I'll tell
you that I don't believe there was any tragedy about it. And this is
why. To my mind, love... both sorts of love, which you remember
Plato defines in his Banquet, serve as the touchstone of men. Some men
only understand one sort, and some only the other. And those who
only know the nonplatonic love talk in vain of tragedy. In such love
there can be no sort of tragedy. 'I'm much obliged for the
gratification, my humble respects,'- that's all the tragedy. And in
platonic love there can be no tragedy, because in that love all is
clear and pure, because..."
  At that instant Levin recollected his own sins and the inner
conflict he had lived through. And he added unexpectedly:
  "But perhaps you are right. Very likely... I don't know- I
positively don't know."
  "You see," said Stepan Arkadyevich, "you're very much all of a
piece. That's your quality and your failing. You have a character
that's all of a piece, and you want the whole of life to be of a piece
too- but that's not how it is. You despise public official work
because you want the reality to be constantly corresponding with the
aim- and that's not how it is. You want a man's work, too, always to
have a defined aim, and love and family life always to be undivided-
and that's not how it is. All the variety, all the charm, all the
beauty of life is made up of light and shadow."
  Levin sighed and made no reply. He was thinking of his own
affairs, and was not listening to Oblonsky.
  And suddenly both of them felt that though they were friends, though
they had been dining together, and drunk wine which should have
drawn them closer, yet each was thinking only of his own affairs,
and they had nothing to do with one another. Oblonsky had more than
once experienced this extreme sense of aloofness, instead of intimacy,
coming on after dinner, and he knew what to do in such cases.
  "Let's have the check!" he called, and he went into the next room,
where he promptly came across an aide-de-camp of his acquaintance
and dropped into conversation with him about an actress and her
protector. And at once, in this conversation with the aide-de-camp,
Oblonsky had a sense of relaxation and relief after his conversation
with Levin, which always put him to too great a mental and spiritual
strain.
  When the Tatar appeared with a check of twenty-six roubles and
some kopecks, besides a tip for himself, Levin, who would another time
have been horrified, like anyone from the country, at his share of
fourteen roubles, did not notice it, paid, and set off homeward to
dress and go to the Shcherbatskys', where his fate was to be decided.
                             XII.

  The young princess Kitty Shcherbatskaia was eighteen. It was the
first winter that she had been out in the world. Her success in
society had been greater than that of either of her elder sisters, and
greater even than her mother had anticipated. To say nothing of the
young men who danced at the Moscow balls being almost all in love with
Kitty, two serious suitors had already, the first winter, made their
appearance: Levin, and, immediately after his departure, Count
Vronsky.
  Levin's appearance at the beginning of the winter, his frequent
visits, and evident love for Kitty, had led to the first serious
conversations between Kitty's parents as to her future, and to
disputes between them. The Prince was on Levin's side; he said he
wished for nothing better for Kitty. The Princess for her part,
going round the question in the manner peculiar to women, maintained
that Kitty was too young, that Levin had done nothing to prove that he
had serious intentions, that Kitty felt no great attraction to him,
and there were some other reasons too; but she did not state the
principal point, which was that she looked for a better match for
her daughter, that Levin was not to her liking, and that she did not
understand him. When Levin had abruptly departed, the Princess was
delighted, and said to her husband triumphantly: 'You see, I was
right.' When Vronsky appeared on the scene, she was still more
delighted, confirmed in her opinion that Kitty was to make not
simply a good, but a brilliant match.
  In the mother's eyes there could be no comparison between Vronsky
and Levin. The mother disliked in Levin his strange and uncompromising
opinions and his shyness in society, founded on his pride, as she
supposed, and his queer sort of life, as she considered it, absorbed
in cattle and peasants. She did not very much like it that he, who was
in love with her daughter, had kept coming to the house for six weeks,
as though he were waiting for something, inspecting, as though he were
afraid he might be doing them too great an honor by making a proposal,
and did not realize that a man who continually visits at a house where
there is a young unmarried girl, is bound to make his intentions
clear. And suddenly, without doing so, he disappeared. "It's as well
he's not attractive enough for Kitty to have fallen in love with him,"
thought the mother.
  Vronsky satisfied all the mother's desires. Very wealthy, clever, of
aristocratic family, on the highroad to a brilliant career in the army
and at court, and a fascinating man. Nothing better could be wished
for.
  Vronsky openly flirted with Kitty at balls, danced with her, and
came continually to the house; consequently there could be no doubt of
the seriousness of his intentions. But, in spite of that, the mother
had spent the whole of that winter in a state of terrible anxiety
and agitation.
  Princess Shcherbatskaia had herself been married thirty years ago,
her aunt arranging the match. The wooer, about whom everything was
well known beforehand, had come, looked at his intended, and been
looked at. The matchmaking aunt had ascertained and communicated their
mutual impression. That impression had been favorable. Afterward, on a
day fixed beforehand, the expected proposal was made to her parents,
and accepted. All had passed very simply and easily. So it seemed,
at least, to the Princess. But over her own daughters she had felt how
far from simple and easy is the business, apparently so commonplace,
of marrying off one's daughters. The panics that had been lived
through, the thoughts that had been brooded over, the money that had
been wasted, and the disputes with her husband over marrying the two
elder girls, Darya and Natalya! Now, since the youngest began to
come out in the world, the Princess was going through the same
terrors, the same doubts, and still more violent quarrels with her
husband, than she had over the elder girls. The old Prince, like all
fathers indeed, was exceedingly scrupulous on the score of the honor
and reputation of his daughters; he was unreasonably jealous over
his daughters, especially over Kitty, who was his favorite, and at
every turn he had scenes with the Princess for compromising her
daughter. The Princess had grown accustomed to this already with her
other daughters, but now she felt that there was more ground for the
Prince's scrupulousness. She saw that of late years much was changed
in the manners of society, that a mother's duties had become still
more difficult. She saw that girls of Kitty's age formed some sort
of clubs, went to some sort of lectures, mixed freely in men's
society, drove about the streets alone; many of them did not curtsy;
and, what was the most important thing, all of them were firmly
convinced that to choose their husband was their own affair, and not
their parents'. "Marriages aren't made nowadays as they used to be,"
was thought and said by all these young girls, and even by their
elders. But just how marriages were made nowadays, the Princess
could not learn from anyone. The French fashion- of the parents
arranging their children's future- was not accepted; it was condemned.
The English fashion of the complete independence of girls was also not
accepted, and not possible in Russian society. The Russian fashion
of matchmaking was considered unseemly; it was ridiculed by
everyone- even by the Princess herself. But how girls were to be
married, and how parents were to marry them, no one knew. Everyone
with whom the Princess had chanced to discuss the matter said the same
thing: "Mercy on us, it's high time in our day to cast off all that
old-fashioned business. It's the young people have to marry, and not
their parents; and so we ought to leave the young people to arrange it
as they choose." It was very easy for anyone to say who had no
daughters, but the Princess realized that, in the process of getting
to know each other, her daughter might fall in love, and fall in
love with someone who did not care to marry her, or who was quite
unfit to be her husband. And, however much it was instilled into the
Princess that in our times young people ought to arrange their lives
for themselves, she was unable to believe it, just as she would have
been unable to believe that, at any time whatever, loaded pistols were
the most suitable playthings for children five years old. And so the
Princess was more uneasy over Kitty than she had been over the elder
daughters.
  Now she was afraid that Vronsky might confine himself to simply
flirting with her daughter. She saw that her daughter was in love with
him, but tried to comfort herself with the thought that he was an
honorable man, and would not do this. But at the same time she knew
how easy it is, with the freedom of manners of today, to turn a girl's
head, and how lightly men generally regard such a crime. The week
before, Kitty had told her mother of a conversation she had with
Vronsky during a mazurka. This conversation had partly reassured the
Princess; yet her assurance could not be perfect. Vronsky had told
Kitty that both he and his brother were so used to obeying their
mother that they never made up their minds to any important
undertaking without consulting her. "And, just now, I am impatiently
awaiting my mother's coming from Peterburg, as a peculiar piece of
luck," he had told her.
  Kitty had repeated this without attaching any significance to the
words. But her mother saw them in a different light. She knew that the
old lady was expected from day to day, that she would be pleased at
her son's choice, and she felt it strange that he should not make
his proposal through fear of vexing his mother. However, she was so
anxious for the marriage itself, and still more for relief from her
fears, that she believed it was so. Bitter as it was for the
Princess to see the unhappiness of her eldest daughter, Dolly, on
the point of leaving her husband, her anxiety over the decision of her
youngest daughter's fate engrossed all her feelings. Today, with
Levin's reappearance, a fresh source of anxiety arose. She was
afraid that her daughter, who had at one time, as she fancied, a
feeling for Levin, might, from an extreme sense of honesty, refuse
Vronsky, and that Levin's arrival might generally complicate and delay
the affair, now so near conclusion.
  "Why, has he been here long?" the Princess asked about Levin, as
they returned home.
  "He came today, maman."
  "There's one thing I want to say..." began the Princess, and from
her serious and alert face, Kitty guessed what it would be.
  "Mamma," she said, flushing hotly and turning quickly to her,
"please, please don't say anything about that. I know, I know all
about it."
  She wished what her mother wished for, but the motives of her
mother's wishes hurt her.
  "I only want to say that to raise hopes..."
  "Mamma, darling, for goodness' sake, don't talk about it. It's so
horrible to talk about it."
  "I won't," said her mother, seeing the tears in her daughter's eyes;
"but one thing, my love; you promised me you would have no secrets
from me. You won't?"
  "Never, mamma- none," answered Kitty, flushing and looking her
mother straight in the face; "but I have nothing to tell you now,
and I... I... If I wanted to, I don't know what to say or how... I
don't know..."
  "No, she could not tell an untruth with those eyes," thought the
mother, smiling at her agitation and happiness. The Princess smiled:
so immense and so important seemed to the poor child everything that
was taking place just now in her soul.
                             XIII.

  After dinner, and till the beginning of the evening, Kitty was
experiencing a sensation akin to that of a young man before a
battle. Her heart throbbed violently, and her thoughts would not
rest on anything.
  She felt that this evening, when both these men would meet for the
first time, would be a turning point in her life. And she was
continually picturing them to herself, at one moment each
individually, and then both together. When she mused on the past,
she dwelt with pleasure, with tenderness, on the memories of her
relations with Levin. The memories of childhood and of Levin's
friendship with her dead brother have a special poetic charm to her
relations with him. His love for her, of which she felt certain, was
flattering and delightful to her; and it was easy for her to think
of Levin. In her memories of Vronsky there always entered a certain
element of awkwardness, though he was in the highest degree a
fashionable and even-tempered man, as though there were some false
note- not in Vronsky, he was very simple and charming- but in herself;
while with Levin she felt herself perfectly simple and clear. But,
on the other hand, directly she thought of the future with Vronsky,
there arose before her a perspective of brilliant happiness; with
Levin the future seemed misty.
  When she went upstairs to dress, and looked into the looking
glass, she noticed with joy that it was one of her good days, and that
she was in complete possession of all her forces- she needed this so
for what lay before her: she was conscious of external composure and
free grace in her movements.
  At half-past seven she had only just gone down into the drawing
room, when the footman announced, "Constantin Dmitrievich Levin."
The Princess was still in her room, and the Prince had not come in.
"So it is to be," thought Kitty, and all the blood seemed to rush to
her heart. She was horrified at her paleness, as she glanced into
the looking glass.
  At that moment she knew beyond doubt that he had come early on
purpose to find her alone and to propose to her. And only then for the
first time the whole thing presented itself in a new, different
aspect; only then she realized that the question did not affect her
only- with whom she would be happy, and whom she loved- but that she
would have that moment to wound a man whom she liked. And to wound him
cruelly... Wherefore? Because he, dear fellow, loved her, was in
love with her. But there was no help for it; it must be so- it would
have to be so.
  "My God! shall I myself really have to say it to him?" she
thought. "Can I tell him I don't love him? That will be a lie. What am
I to say to him? That I love someone else? No, that's impossible.
I'm going away- I'm going away."
  She had reached the door, when she heard his step. "No It's not
honest. What have I to be afraid of? I have done nothing wrong. What
is to be, will be! I'll tell the truth. And with him one can't be
ill at ease. Here he is," she said to herself, seeing his powerful and
timid figure, with his shining eyes fixed on her. She looked
straight into his face, as though imploring him to spare her, and gave
him her hand.
  "It's not time yet; I think I'm too early," he said glancing round
the empty drawing room. When he saw that his expectations were
realized, that there was nothing to prevent him from speaking, his
face became somber.
  "Oh, no," said Kitty, and sat down at a table.
  "But this was just what I wanted, to find you alone," he began,
without sitting down, and not looking at her, so as not to lose
courage.
  "Mamma will be down directly. She was very much tired yesterday.
Yesterday..."
  She talked on, not knowing what her lips were uttering, and not
taking her supplicating and caressing eyes off him.
  He glanced at her; she blushed, and ceased speaking.
  "I told you I did not know whether I should be here long... that
it depended on you..."
  She dropped her head lower and lower, not knowing herself what
answer she should make to what was coming.
  "That it depended on you," he repeated. "I meant to say... I meant
to say... I came for this... To have you be my wife!" he blurted
out, not knowing what he was saying, but feeling that the most
terrible thing was said, he stopped short and looked at her.
  She was breathing heavily, without looking at him. She was feeling
ecstasy. Her soul was flooded with happiness. She had never
anticipated that his utterance of love would produce such a powerful
effect on her. But it lasted only an instant. She remembered
Vronsky. She lifted her clear, truthful eyes, and, seeing Levin's
desperate face, she answered hastily:
  "That cannot be... Forgive me."
  A moment ago, and how close she had been to him, of what
importance in his life! And how aloof and remote from him she had
become now!
  "It could not have been otherwise," he said, without looking at her.
He bowed, and was about to leave.
                             XIV.

  But at that very moment the Princess came in. There was a look of
horror on her face when she beheld them alone, and saw their disturbed
faces. Levin bowed to her, and said nothing. Kitty neither spoke nor
lifted her eyes. "Thank God, she has refused him," thought the mother,
and her face lighted up with the habitual smile with which she greeted
her guests on Thursdays. She sat down and began questioning Levin
about his life in the country. He sat down again, waiting for other
visitors to arrive, in order to go off unnoticed.
  Five minutes later there came in a friend of Kitty's, married the
preceding winter- Countess Nordstone.
  She was a thin, sallow, sickly and nervous woman, with brilliant
black eyes. She was fond of Kitty, and her affection for her showed
itself, as the affection of married women for girls always does, in
the desire to make a match for Kitty after her own ideal of married
happiness; she wanted her to marry Vronsky. Levin she had often met at
the Shcherbatskys' early in the winter, and she had always disliked
him. Her invariable and favorite pursuit, when they met, consisted
in making fun of him.
  "I do like it when he looks down at me from the height of his
grandeur, or breaks off his wise conversation with me because I'm a
fool, or is condescending to me. I like that so- to see him
condescending! I am so glad he can't bear me," she used to say of him.
  She was right, for Levin actually could not bear her, and despised
her for what she was proud of and regarded as a fine characteristic-
her nervousness, her refined contempt and indifference for
everything coarse and earthly.
  The Countess Nordstone and Levin had got into that mutual relation
not infrequently seen in society, when two persons, who remain
externally on friendly terms, despise each other to such a degree that
they cannot even take each other seriously, and cannot even be
offended by each other.
  The Countess Nordstone pounced upon Levin at once.
  "Ah, Constantin Dmitrievich! So you've come back to our corrupt
Babylon," she said, giving him her tiny, yellow hand and recalling
what he had chanced to say early in the winter, that Moscow was a
Babylon. "Come, is Babylon reformed, or have you degenerated?" she
added, glancing with a simper at Kitty.
  "It's very flattering for me, Countess, that you remember my words
so well," responded Levin, who had succeeded in recovering his
composure, and at once from habit dropped into his tone of joking
hostility to the Countess Nordstone. "They must certainly make a great
impression on you."
  "Oh, I should think so! I always note everything down. Well,
Kitty, have you been skating again?..."
  And she began talking to Kitty. Awkward as it was for Levin to
withdraw now, it would still have been easier for him to perpetrate
this awkwardness than to remain all the evening and see Kitty, who
glanced at him now and then and avoided his eyes. He was on the
point of getting up, when the Princess, noticing that he was silent,
addressed him.
  "Shall you be long in Moscow? You're busy with the Zemstvo,
though, aren't you, and can't be away for long?"
  "No, Princess, I'm no longer a member of the board," he said. "I
have come up for a few days."
  "There's something the matter with him," thought Countess Nordstone,
glancing at his stern, serious face. "He isn't in his old
argumentative mood. But I'll draw him out. I do love making a fool
of him before Kitty, and I'll do it."
  "Constantin Dmitrievich," she said to him, "do explain to me please,
what does it mean- you know all about such things- in our village of
Kaluga all the peasants and all the women have drunk up all they
possessed, and now they can't pay us any rent. What's the meaning of
that? You always praise the mouzhiks so."
  At that instant another lady came into the room, and Levin got up.
  "Excuse me, Countess, but I really know nothing about it, and
can't tell you anything," he said, and looked round at the officer who
came in behind the lady.
  "That must be Vronsky," thought Levin, and, to be sure of it,
glanced at Kitty. She had already had time to look at Vronsky, and
looked round at Levin. And, simply from the look in her eyes, that
grew unconsciously brighter, Levin knew that she loved this man-
knew it as surely as if she had told him in so many words. But what
sort of a man was he?
  Now, whether for good or for ill, Levin could not choose but remain;
he must find out what the man was like whom she loved.
  There are people who, on meeting a successful rival, no matter in
what, are at once disposed to turn their backs on everything good in
him, and to see only what is bad. There are people who, on the
contrary, desire above all to find in that successful rival the
qualities by which he has worsted them, and seek with a throbbing ache
at heart only what is good. Levin belonged to the second class. But he
had no difficulty in finding what was good and attractive in
Vronsky. It was apparent at the first glance. Vronsky was a squarely
built, dark man, not very tall, with a good-humored, handsome and
exceedingly calm and firm face. Everything about his face and
figure, from his short-cropped black hair and freshly shaven chin down
to his loosely fitting, brand-new uniform, was simple and at the
same time elegant. Making way for the lady who had come in, Vronsky
went up to the Princess and then to Kitty.
  As he approached her, his beautiful eyes shone with an especially
tender light, and with a faint, happy and modestly triumphant smile
(so it seemed to Levin), bowing carefully and respectfully over her,
he held out his small broad hand to her.
  Greeting and saying a few words to everyone, he sat down without
once glancing at Levin, who had never taken his eyes off him.
  "Let me introduce you," said the Princess, indicating Levin.
"Constantin Dmitrievich Levin, Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky."
  Vronsky got up and, looking cordially at Levin, shook hands with
him.
  "I believe I was to have dined with you this winter," he said,
smiling his simple and open smile; "but you had unexpectedly left
for the country."
  "Constantin Dmitrievich despises and hates the town, and us
townspeople," said Countess Nordstone.
  "My words must make a deep impression on you, since you remember
them so well," said Levin, and, suddenly becoming conscious that he
had said just the same thing before, he reddened.
  Vronsky looked at Levin and Countess Nordstone, and smiled.
  "Are you always in the country?" he inquired. "I should think it
must be dull in the winter."
  "It's not dull if one has work to do; besides, one's not dull by
oneself," Levin replied abruptly.
  "I am fond of the country," said Vronsky, noticing, yet affecting
not to notice, Levin's tone.
  "But I hope, Count, you would not consent to live in the country
always," said Countess Nordstone.
  "I don't know; I have never tried for long. I experienced a queer
feeling once," he went on. "I never longed so for the country- Russian
country, with bast shoes and peasants- as when I was spending a winter
with my mother in Nice. Nice itself is dull enough, you know. And,
indeed, Naples and Sorrento are only pleasant for a short time. And
it's just there that Russia comes back to one's mind most vividly, and
especially the country. It's as though..."
  He talked on, addressing both Kitty and Levin, turning his serene,
friendly eyes from one to the other, and saying obviously just what
came into his head.
  Noticing that Countess Nordstone wanted to say something, he stopped
short without finishing what he had begun, and listened attentively to
her.
  The conversation did not flag for an instant, so that the old
Princess, who always kept in reserve, in case a subject should be
lacking, two heavy guns- the classical and professional education, and
universal military service- had not to move out either of them,
while Countess Nordstone had no chance of chaffing Levin.
  Levin wanted to, and could not, take part in the general
conversation; saying to himself every instant, "Now go," he still
did not go, as though waiting for something.
  The conversation fell upon table turning and spirits, and Countess
Nordstone, who believed in spiritualism, began to describe the
miracles she had seen.
  "Ah, Countess, you really must take me; for pity's sake do take me
to see them! I have never seen anything extraordinary, though I am
always on the lookout for it everywhere," said Vronsky, smiling.
  "Very well- next Saturday," answered Countess Nordstone. "But you,
Constantin Dmitrievich- are you a believer?" she asked Levin.
  "Why do you ask me? You know what I shall say."
  "But I want to hear your opinion."
  "My opinion," answered Levin, "is merely that this table turning
proves that educated society- so called- is no higher than the
peasants. They believe in the evil eye, and in witchcraft and
conjurations, while we..."
  "Oh, then you aren't a believer?"
  "I can't believe, Countess."
  "But if I've seen for myself?"
  "The peasant women, too, tell us they have seen hobgoblins."
  "Then you think I tell a lie?"
  And she laughed a mirthless laugh.
  "Oh, no, Masha, Constantin Dmitrievich merely said he could not
believe," said Kitty, blushing for Levin, and Levin saw this, and,
still more exasperated, would have answered; but Vronsky with his
bright frank smile rushed to the support of the conversation, which
was threatening to become disagreeable.
  "You do not admit the possibility at all?" he queried. "But why not?
We admit the existence of electricity, of which we know nothing. Why
should there not be some new force, still unknown to us, which..."
  "When electricity was discovered," Levin interrupted hurriedly,
"it was only the phenomenon that was discovered, and it was unknown
from what it proceeded and what were its effects, and ages passed
before its applications were conceived. But the spiritualists, on
the contrary, have begun with tables writing for them, and spirits
appearing to them, and have only later started saying that it is an
unknown force."
  Vronsky listened attentively to Levin, as he always did listen,
obviously interested in his words.
  "Yes, but the spiritualists say we don't know at present what this
force is, but there is a force, and these are the conditions in
which it acts. Let the scientific men find out what the force consists
of. No, I don't see why there should not be a new force, if it..."
  "Why, because with electricity," Levin interrupted again, "every
time you rub tar against wool, a certain phenomenon is manifested; but
in this case it does not happen every time, and so it follows it is
not a natural phenomenon."
  Feeling probably that the conversation was taking a tone too serious
for a drawing room, Vronsky made no rejoinder, but by way of trying to
change the conversation, he smiled brightly, and turned to the ladies.
  "Do let us try at once, Countess," he said; but Levin would finish
saying what he thought.
  "I think," he went on, "that this attempt of the spiritualists to
explain their miracles as some sort of new natural force is most
futile. They boldly talk of spiritual force, and then try to subject
it to material experiment."
  Everyone was waiting for him to finish, and he felt this.
  "Why, I think you would be a first-rate medium," said Countess
Nordstone, "there's something enthusiastic about you."
  Levin opened his mouth, was about to say something, reddened, and
said nothing.
  "Do let us try table turning at once, please," said Vronsky.
"Princess, will you allow it?
  And Vronsky stood up, looking about for a little table.
  Kitty got up to fetch a table, and, as she passed, her eyes met
Levin's. She felt for him with her whole heart, the more because she
was pitying him for a suffering of which she was herself the cause.
"If you can forgive me, forgive me," said her eyes, "I am so happy."
  "I hate them all, and you, and myself," his eyes responded, and he
took up his hat. But he was not destined to escape. just as they
were arranging themselves round the table, and Levin was on the
point of retiring, the old Prince came in, and, after greeting the
ladies, addressed Levin.
  "Ah!" he began joyously. "Been here long, my boy? I didn't even know
you were in town. Very glad to see you." The old Prince embraced
Levin, and, talking to him, did not observe Vronsky, who had risen,
and was calmly waiting till the Prince should turn to him.
  Kitty felt how grievous her father's cordiality was to Levin after
what had happened. She saw, too, how coldly her father responded at
last to Vronsky's bow, and how Vronsky looked with amiable
perplexity at her father, trying and failing to understand how and why
anyone could be hostilely disposed toward him, and she flushed.
  "Prince, let us have Constantin Dmitrievich," said Countess
Nordstone, "we want to try an experiment."
  "What experiment? Table turning? Well, you must excuse me, ladies
and gentlemen, but to my mind it is better fun to play the ring game,"
said the old Prince, looking at Vronsky, and guessing that it had been
his suggestion. "There's some sense in that, anyway."
  Vronsky looked wonderingly at the Prince with his firm eyes, and,
with a faint smile, began immediately talking to Countess Nordstone of
the great ball that was to come off next week.
  "I hope you will be there?" he said to Kitty. As soon as the old
Prince turned away from him, Levin slipped out unnoticed, and the last
impression he carried away with him of that evening was the smiling,
happy face of Kitty answering Vronsky's inquiry about the ball.
                             XV.

  At the end of the evening Kitty told her mother of her
conversation with Levin, and in spite of all the pity she felt for
Levin, she was glad at the thought that she had received a proposal.
She had no doubt that she had acted rightly. But after she had gone to
bed, she could not sleep for a long while. One impression pursued
her relentlessly. It was Levin's face, with his scowling brows, and
his kind eyes looking out in dark dejection below them, as he stood
listening to her father, and glancing at her and at Vronsky. And she
felt so sorry for him that tears came into her eyes. But immediately
she thought of the man for whom she had given him up. She vividly
recalled his manly, firm face, his noble calmness, and the good nature
so conspicuous toward everyone. She remembered the love for her of the
man she loved, and once more all was gladness in her soul, and she lay
on the pillow smiling with happiness. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry; but
what could I do? It's not my fault," she said to herself; but an inner
voice told her otherwise. Whether she felt remorse at having
captivated Levin, or at having refused him, she did not know. But
her happiness was poisoned by doubts. "Lord, have pity on us; Lord,
have pity, Lord, have pity!" she said over to herself till she fell
asleep.
  Meanwhile there took place below, in the Prince's little study,
one of the scenes so often repeated between the parents on account
of their favorite daughter.
  "What? I'll tell you what!" shouted the Prince, brandishing his
arms, and at once wrapping his squirrel-lined dressing gown round
him again. "That you've no pride, no dignity; that you're
disgracing, ruining your daughter by this vulgar, stupid matchmaking!"
  "But, really, for mercy's sake, Prince, what have I done?" said
the Princess, almost crying.
  She, pleased and happy after her conversation with her daughter, had
gone to the Prince to say good night as usual, and though she had no
intention of telling him of Levin's proposal and Kitty's refusal,
still she hinted to her husband that she fancied things were
practically settled with Vronsky, and would be definitely so as soon
as his mother arrived. And thereupon, at those words, the Prince had
all at once flown into a passion, and begun to use unseemly language.
  "What have you done? I'll tell you what. First of all, you're trying
to allure an eligible gentleman, and all Moscow will be talking of it,
and with good reason. If you have evening parties, invite everyone,
don't pick out the possible suitors. Invite all these whelps [so the
Prince styled the youths of Moscow]; engage a piano player, and let
them dance- and not as you did tonight: only the wooers, and doing
your matching. It makes me sick- sick to see it- and you've gone on
till you've turned the poor lass's head. Levin's a thousand times
the better man. As for this Peterburg swell- they're turned out by
machinery, all on one pattern, and all precious rubbish. But if he
were a prince of the blood, my daughter need not run after anyone."
  "But what have I done?"
  "Why, you've..." The Prince was yelling wrathfully.
  "I know if one were to listen to you," interrupted the Princess, "we
should never marry off our daughter. If it's to be so, we'd better
go into the country."
  "Well, we had better."
  "But do wait a minute. Do I wheedle them? I don't wheedle them in
the least. A young man, and a very nice one, has fallen in love with
her, and she, I fancy..."
  "Oh, yes, you fancy! And how if she really is in love, and he's no
more thinking of marriage than I am!... Oh, that I should live to
see it!... "Ah- spiritualism! Ah- Nice! Ah- the ball!'" And the
Prince, imagining that he was mimicking his wife, made a mincing
curtsy at each word. "And this is how we prepare wretchedness for
Katenka; and she's really got the notion into her head...."
  "But what makes you suppose so?"
  "I don't suppose; I know. For such things we have eyes; womenfolk
haven't. I see a man who has serious intentions, that's Levin: and I
see a quail, like this cackler, who's only amusing himself."
  "Oh, well, when once you get an idea into your head!..."
  "Well, you'll remember my words, but too late, just as with
Dashenka."
  "Well, well, we won't talk of it," the Princess stopped him,
recollecting her unlucky Dolly.
  "By all means, and good night!"
  And signing each other with the cross, the husband and wife parted
with a kiss, feeling that each remained of his or her own opinion.
  The Princess had at first been quite certain that that evening had
settled Kitty's fortune, and that there could be no doubt of Vronsky's
intentions, but her husband's words had disturbed her. And returning
to her own room, in terror before the unknown future, she, too, like
Kitty, repeated several times in her heart, "Lord, have pity; Lord,
have pity; Lord, have pity!"
                             XVI.

  Vronsky had never had a real home life. His mother had been in her
youth a brilliant society woman, who had had during her married
life, and still more afterward, many love affairs notorious in the
whole fashionable world. His father he scarcely remembered, and he had
been educated in the Corps of Pages.
  Leaving the school very young as a brilliant officer, he had at once
got into the circle of wealthy Peterburg army men. Although he did
go more or less into Peterburg society, his love affairs had always
hitherto been outside it.
  In Moscow he had for the first time felt, after his luxurious and
coarse life at Peterburg, all the charm of intimacy with a sweet and
innocent girl of his own rank, who cared for him. It never even
entered his head that there could be any harm in his relations with
Kitty. At balls he danced principally with her. He was a constant
visitor at her house. He talked to her as people commonly do talk in
society- all sorts of nonsense, but nonsense to which he could not
help attaching a special meaning in her case. Although he said nothing
to her that he could not have said before everybody, he felt that
she was becoming more and more dependent upon him, and the more he
felt this, the better he liked it, and the tenderer was his feeling
for her. He did not know that this mode of behavior in relation to
Kitty had a definite character, that it is courting young girls with
no intention of marriage, and that such courting is one of the evil
actions common among brilliant young men such as he was. It seemed
to him that he was the first who had discovered this pleasure, and
he was enjoying his discovery.
  If he could have heard what her parents were saying that evening, if
he could have put himself at the point of view of the family, and have
heard that Kitty would be unhappy if he did not marry her, he would
have been greatly astonished, and would not have believed it. He could
not believe that what gave such great and delicate pleasure to him,
and above all to her, could be wrong. Still less could he have
believed that he ought to marry.
  Marriage had never presented itself to him as a possibility. He
not only disliked family life, but a family, and especially a husband,
in accordance with the views general in the bachelor world in which he
lived, were conceived as something alien, repellent, and, above all,
ridiculous. But though Vronsky had not the least suspicion of what the
parents were saying, he felt on coming away from the Shcherbatskys'
that the secret spiritual bond which existed between him and Kitty had
grown so much stronger that evening that some step must be taken.
But what step could and should be taken he could not imagine.
  "What is so exquisite," he thought, as he returned from the
Shcherbatskys', carrying away with him, as he always did, a
delicious feeling of purity and freshness, arising partly from the
fact that he had not been smoking for a whole evening, and with it a
new feeling of tenderness at her love for him- "what is so exquisite
is that not a word has been said by me or by her, yet we understand
each other so well in this unseen language of looks and tones, that
this evening more clearly than ever she told me she loves me. And
how sweetly, simply, and most of all, how trustfully! I feel myself
better, purer. I feel that I have a heart, and that there is a great
deal of good in me Those sweet, loving eyes! When she said: 'Indeed
I do...'"
  "Well, what then? Oh, nothing. It's good for me, and good for
her." And he began wondering where to finish the evening.
  He passed in review the places he might go to. "Club? a game of
bezique; champagne with Ignatov? No, I'm not going. Chateau des
Fleurs; there I shall find Oblonsky, songs, the cancan. No, I'm sick
of it. That's why I like the Shcherbatskys', because I'm growing
better. I'll go home." He went straight to his room at Dussot's Hotel,
ordered supper, and then undressed, and as soon as his head touched
the pillow, fell into a sound sleep.
                             XVII.

  Next day, at eleven o'clock in the morning, Vronsky drove to the
station of the Peterburg railway to meet his mother, and the first
person he came across on the great flight of steps was Oblonsky, who
was expecting his sister by the same train.
  "Ah! Your Excellency!" cried Oblonsky, "Whom are you meeting?"
  "My mother," Vronsky responded, smiling, as everyone did who met
Oblonsky. He shook hands with him, and together they ascended the
steps. "She is to be here from Peterburg today."
  "I was looking out for you till two o'clock last night. Where did
you go from the Shcherbatskys'?"
  "Home," answered Vronsky. "I must own I felt so well content
yesterday after the Shcherbatskys' that I didn't care to go anywhere."
  "'I can tell the gallant steeds' by some... I don't know what...
'paces'; I can tell youths 'by their faces,'" declaimed Stepan
Arkadyevich, just as he had done before to Levin.
  Vronsky smiled with a look that seemed to say that he did not deny
it, but he promptly changed the subject.
  "And whom are you meeting?" he asked.
  "I? I've come to meet a pretty woman," said Oblonsky.
  "So that's it!"
  "Honi soit qui mal y pense! My sister Anna."
  "Ah! that's Madame Karenina," said Vronsky.
  "You know her, no doubt?"
  "I think I do. Or perhaps not... I really am not sure," Vronsky
answered heedlessly, with a vague recollection of something stiff
and tedious evoked by the name Karenina.
  "But Alexei Alexandrovich, my celebrated brother-in-law, you
surely must know. All the world knows him."
  "I know him by reputation and by sight. I know that he's clever,
learned, religious somewhat... But you know that's not... not in my
line," said Vronsky in English.
  "Yes, he's a very remarkable man; rather a conservative, but a
very nice man," observed Stepan Arkadyevich, "a very nice man."
  "Oh, well, so much the better for him," said Vronsky smiling. "Oh,
you've come," he said, addressing a tall old footman of his mother's
standing at the door; "come here."
  Besides the charm Oblonsky had in general for everyone, Vronsky
had felt of late specially drawn to him by the fact that in his
imagination he was associated with Kitty.
  "Well, what do you say? Shall we give a supper on Sunday for the
diva?" he said to him with a smile, taking his arm.
  "Of course. I'm collecting subscriptions. Oh, did you make the
acquaintance of my friend Levin?" asked Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "Yes; but he left rather early."
  "He's a capital fellow," pursued Oblonsky. "Isn't he?"
  "I don't know why it is," responded Vronsky, "in all Moscow
people- present company of course excepted," he put in jestingly,
"there's something uncompromising. They are all on the defensive, lose
their tempers, as though they all want to make one feel something...."
  "Yes, that's true, it's so," said Stepan Arkadyevich, laughing
cheerfully.
  "Will the train be in soon?" Vronsky asked a railway official.
  "The train's signaled," answered the man.
  The approach of the train was more and more evident by the
preparatory bustle in the station, the rush of porters, the movement
of gendarmes and attendants, and crowding people meeting the train.
Through the frosty vapor could be seen workmen in short sheepskins and
soft felt boots crossing the rails of the curving line. The hiss of
the boiler could be heard on the distant rails, and the rumble of
something heavy.
  "No," said Stepan Arkadyevich, who felt a great inclination to
tell Vronsky of Levin's intentions in regard to Kitty. "No, you
haven't got a true impression of Levin. He's a very nervous man, and
is sometimes out of humor, it's true, but then he is often very
charming. He has such a true, honest nature, and a heart of gold.
But yesterday there were special reasons," pursued Stepan Arkadyevich,
with a meaning smile, totally oblivious of the genuine sympathy he had
felt the day before for his friend, and feeling the same sympathy now,
only for Vronsky. "Yes, there were reasons why he could not help being
either particularly happy or particularly unhappy."
  Vronsky stood still and asked directly: "How so? Do you mean he
proposed to your belle-soeur yesterday?"
  "Maybe," said Stepan Arkadyevich. "I fancied something of the sort
yesterday. Yes, if he went away early, and was out of humor too,
such must be the case.... He's been so long in love, and I'm very
sorry for him."
  "So that's it!... I should imagine, though, she might reckon on a
better match," said Vronsky, setting his chest straight and walking
about again, "though I don't know him, of course," he added. "Yes,
that is a hateful position! That's why most fellows prefer to have
to do with the Claras. If you don't succeed with them it only proves
that you've not enough cash, but in this case one's dignity is in
the balance. But here's the train."
  The engine had already whistled in the distance. A few instants
later the platform began to shake, and, with puffs of steam hanging
low in the air from the frost, the engine rolled up, with the rod of
the middle wheel rhythmically moving up and down, and the bowed,
muffled figure of the engine driver covered with hoarfrost. Behind the
tender, setting the platform more and more slowly and more
powerfully shaking, came the luggage van with a dog whining in it.
At last the passenger carriages rolled in, quivering before coming
to a standstill.
  A smart guard jumped out, giving a whistle, and after him one by one
the impatient passengers began to get down: an officer of the
guards, holding himself erect, and looking severely about him; a
nimble young merchant with a bag, smiling gaily; a peasant with a sack
over his shoulder.
  Vronsky, standing beside Oblonsky, watched the carriages and the
passengers, totally oblivious of his mother. What he had just heard
about Kitty excited and delighted him. Unconsciously he straightened
his chest, and his eyes flashed. He felt himself a conqueror.
  "Countess Vronskaia is in that compartment," said the smart guard,
going up to Vronsky.
  The guard's words roused him, and forced him to think of his
mother and his approaching meeting with her. He did not in his heart
respect his mother, and, without acknowledging it to himself, he did
not love her, though in accordance with the ideas of the set in
which he lived, and with his own upbringing, he could not have
conceived of any behavior to his mother not in the highest degree
respectful and obedient, and the more externally obedient and
respectful, the less in his heart he respected and loved her.
                             XVIII.

  Vronsky followed the guard to the carriage, and at the door of the
compartment he stopped short to make room for a lady who was getting
out.
  With the habitual feeling of a man of the world, from one glance
at this lady's appearance Vronsky classified her as belonging to the
best society. He begged pardon, and was getting into the carriage, but
felt he must glance at her once more; not because she was very
beautiful, not because of that elegance and modest grace which were
apparent in her whole figure, but because in the expression of her
charming face, as she passed close by him, there was something
peculiarly caressing and soft. As he looked round, she too turned
her head. Her shining gray eyes, that looked dark because of her thick
lashes, rested with friendly attention on his face, as though she were
recognizing him, and then promptly turned away to the passing crowd,
as though seeking someone. In that brief look Vronsky had time to
notice the suppressed animation which played over her face, and
flitted between the brilliant eyes and the faint smile that curved her
red lips. It was as though her nature were so brimming over with
something that, against her will, it showed itself now in the flash of
her eyes, and now in her smile. Deliberately she shrouded the light in
her eyes, but it shone against her will in her faintly perceptible
smile.
  Vronsky stepped into the carriage. His mother, a dried-up old lady
with black eyes and ringlets, screwed up her eyes, scanning her son,
and smiled slightly with her thin lips. Getting up from the seat and
handing her maid a handbag, she gave her little wrinkled hand to her
son to kiss, and lifting his head from her hand, kissed him on the
cheek.
  "You got my telegram? Quite well? Thank God."
  "You had a good journey?" said her son, sitting down beside her, and
involuntarily listening to a woman's voice outside the door. He knew
it was the voice of the lady he had met at the door.
  "All the same I don't agree with you," said the lady's voice.
  "It's the Peterburg view, madame."
  "Not Peterburg, but simply feminine," she responded.
  "Well, well, allow me to kiss your hand."
  "Good-by, Ivan Petrovich. And would you see if my brother is here,
and send him to me?" said the lady in the doorway, and stepped back
again into the compartment.
  "Well, have you found your brother?" said Countess Vronskaia,
addressing the lady.
  Vronsky understood now that this was Madame Karenina.
  "Your brother is here," he said, standing up. "Excuse me, I did
not know you, and, indeed, our acquaintance was so slight," said
Vronsky bowing, "that no doubt you do not remember me."
  "Oh, no," said she, "I should have known you because your mother and
I have been talking, I think, of nothing but you all the way." As
she spoke she let the animation that would insist on coming out show
itself in her smile. "And still no sign of my brother."
  "Do call him, Aliosha," said the old countess.
  Vronsky stepped out onto the platform and shouted: "Oblonsky! Here!"
  Madame Karenina, however, did not wait for her brother, but catching
sight of him she stepped out with her light, resolute step. And as
soon as her brother had reached her, with a gesture that struck
Vronsky by its decision and its grace, she flung her left arm around
his neck, drew him rapidly to her, and kissed him warmly. Vronsky
looked on, never taking his eyes from her, and smiled, he could not
have said why. But recollecting that his mother was waiting for him,
he went back again into the carriage.
  "She's very sweet, isn't she?" said the Countess of Madame Karenina.
"Her husband put her with me, and I was delighted to have her. We've
been talking all the way. And so you, I hear... vous filez le
parfait amour. Tant mieux, mon cher, tant mieux."
  "I don't know what you are referring to, maman," he answered coldly.
"Come, maman, let us go."
  Madame Karenina entered the carriage again to say good-by to the
Countess.
  "Well, Countess, you have met your son, and I my brother," she
said gaily. "And all my stories are exhausted; I should have nothing
more to tell you."
  "Oh, no," said the Countess, taking her hand. "I could go all around
the world with you and never be dull. You are one of those
delightful women in whose company it's sweet either to be silent or to
chat. Now please don't fret over your son; you can't expect never to
be parted."
  Madame Karenina stood quite still, holding herself very erect, and
her eyes were smiling.
  "Anna Arkadyevna," the Countess said in explanation to her son, "has
a little son eight years old, I believe, and she has never been parted
from him before, and she keeps fretting over leaving him."
  "Yes, the Countess and I have been talking all the time, I of my son
and she of hers," said Madame Karenina, and again a smile lighted up
her face- a caressing smile intended for him.
  "I am afraid that you must have been dreadfully bored," he said,
promptly catching the ball of coquetry she had flung him. But
apparently she did not care to pursue the conversation in that strain,
and she turned to the old Countess.
  "Thank you so much. The time has passed so quickly. Good-by,
Countess."
  "Good-by, my love," answered the Countess. "Let me kiss your
pretty face. I speak plainly, at my age, and I tell you simply that
I've lost my heart to you."
  Stereotyped as the phrase was, Madame Karenina obviously believed it
and was delighted by it. She flushed, bent down slightly, and put
her cheek to the Countess's lips, drew herself up again, and, with the
same smile fluttering between her lips and her eyes, she gave her hand
to Vronsky. He pressed the little hand she gave him, and was
delighted, as though at something special, by the energetic squeeze
with which she freely and vigorously shook his hand. She went out with
the rapid step which bore her rather fully developed figure with
such strange lightness.
  "Very charming," said the Countess.
  That was precisely what her son was thinking. His eyes followed
her till her graceful figure was out of sight, and then the smile
remained on his face. He saw out of the window how she went up to
her brother, put her arm in his, and began telling him something
animatedly- obviously something that had nothing to do with him,
Vronsky, and at that he felt annoyed.
  "Well, maman, are you perfectly well?" he repeated, turning to his
mother.
  "Everything has been delightful. Alexandre has been very good, and
Marie has grown very pretty. She's very interesting."
  And she began telling him again of what interested her most- the
christening of her grandson, for which she had been staying in
Peterburg, and the special favor shown her elder son by the Czar.
  "Here's Lavrentii," said Vronsky, looking out of the window; "now we
can go, if you like."
  The old butler who had traveled with the Countess came to the
carriage to announce that everything was ready, and the Countess got
up to go.
  "Come; there's not such a crowd now," said Vronsky.
  The maid took a handbag and the lap dog, the butler and a porter the
other baggage. Vronsky gave his mother his arm; but just as they
were getting out of the carriage several men ran suddenly by with
panic-stricken faces. The stationmaster, too, ran by in his
extraordinarily colored cap. Obviously something unusual had happened.
The crowd was running to the tail end of the train.
  "What?... What?... Where?... Flung himself!... Crushed!..." was
heard among the crowd.
  Stepan Arkadyevich, with his sister on his arm, turned back. They
too looked scared, and stopped at the carriage door to avoid the
crowd.
  The ladies got in, while Vronsky and Stepan Arkadyevich followed the
crowd to find out details of the disaster.
  A watchman, either drunk or too much muffled up in the bitter frost,
had not heard the train moving back, and had been crushed.
  Before Vronsky and Oblonsky came back the ladies heard the facts
from the butler.
  Oblonsky and Vronsky had both seen the mutilated corpse. Oblonsky
was evidently distressed. He frowned and seemed ready to cry.
  "Ah, how awful! Ah, Anna, if you had seen it! Ah, how awful!" he
kept repeating.
  Vronsky did not speak; his handsome face was serious, but
perfectly calm.
  "Ah, if you had seen it, Countess," said Stepan Arkadyevich. "And
his wife was there.... It was awful to see her!... She flung herself
on the body. They say he was the only support of an immense family.
How awful!"
  "Couldn't one do anything for her?" said Madame Karenina in an
agitated whisper.
  Vronsky glanced at her, and immediately got out of the carriage.
  "I'll be back directly, maman," he remarked, turning round in the
doorway.
  When he came back a few minutes later, Stepan Arkadyevich was
already in conversation with the Countess about a new singer, while
she was impatiently looking toward the door, waiting for her son.
  "Now let us be off," said Vronsky, coming in.
  They went out together. Vronsky was in front with his mother. Behind
walked Madame Karenina with her brother. Just as they were going out
of the station the stationmaster overtook Vronsky.
  "You gave my assistant two hundred roubles. Would you kindly explain
for whose benefit you intend them?"
  "For the widow," said Vronsky, shrugging his shoulders. "I should
have thought there was no need to ask."
  "You gave that?" cried Oblonsky behind, and, pressing his sister's
hand, he added: "Most charming, most charming! Isn't he a fine fellow?
Good-by, Countess."
  And he and his sister stood still, looking for her maid.
  When they went out the Vronskys' carriage had already driven away.
People coming in were still talking of what had happened.
  "What a horrible death!" said a gentleman, passing by. "They say
he was cut in two."
  "On the contrary, I think it's the easiest- instantaneous," observed
another.
  "How is it they don't take proper precautions?" a third was saying.
  Madame Karenina seated herself in the carriage, and Stepan
Arkadyevich saw with surprise that her lips were quivering, and that
she was with difficulty restraining her tears.
  "What is it, Anna?" he asked, when they had driven a few hundred
sagenes.
  "It's an omen of evil," she said.
  "What nonsense!" said Stepan Arkadyevich. "You've come, that's the
chief thing. You can't conceive how I'm resting my hopes on you."
  "Have you known Vronsky long? she asked.
  "Yes. You know we're hoping he will marry Kitty."
  "Yes?" said Anna softly. "Come now, let us talk of you," she
added, tossing her head, as though she would physically shake off
something superfluous oppressing her. "Let us talk of your affairs.
I got your letter, and here I am."
  "Yes, all my hopes are in you," said Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "Well, tell me all about it."
  And Stepan Arkadyevich began his story.
  On reaching home Oblonsky helped his sister out, sighed, pressed her
hand, and set off to his office.
                             XIX.

  When Anna entered the tiny drawing room, she found Dolly sitting
there with a white-headed plump little boy, already resembling his
father; she was listening to a lesson in French reading. As the boy
read, he kept twisting and trying to tear off a button that was nearly
off his jacket. His mother had several times taken his hand from it,
but the plump little hand went back to the button again. His mother
pulled the button off and put it in her pocket.
  "Keep your hands still, Grisha," she said, and she took up her work,
a coverlet she had long been making. She always set to work on it at
depressed moments, and now she knitted at it nervously, twitching
her fingers and counting the stitches. Though she had sent word the
day before to her husband that it was nothing to her whether his
sister came or not, she had made everything ready for her arrival, and
was expecting her sister-in-law with agitation.
  Dolly was crushed by her sorrow, utterly swallowed up by it. Still
she did not forget that Anna, her sister-in-law, was the wife of one
of the most important personages in Peterburg, and was a Peterburg
grande dame. And, thanks to this circumstance, she did not carry out
her threat to her husband- that is to say, she had not forgotten
that her sister-in-law was coming. "And, after all, Anna is in no wise
to blame," thought Dolly. "I know nothing save the very best about
her, and I have seen nothing but kindness and affection from her
toward myself." It was true that as far as she could recall her
impressions at Peterburg at the Karenins', she did not like their
household itself; there was something artificial about the whole
arrangement of their family life. "But why should I not receive her?
If only she doesn't take it into her head to console me!" thought
Dolly. "All consolations and exhortations and Christian forgiveness- I
have thought all this over a thousand times, and it's all no use."
  All these days Dolly had been alone with her children. She did not
want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she
could not talk of outside matters.
  She knew that in one way or another she would tell Anna
everything, and she was alternately glad at the thought of speaking
freely, and angry at the necessity of speaking of her humiliation with
her, his sister, and of hearing her ready-made phrases of
exhortation and consolation.
  She had been on the lookout for her, glancing at her watch every
minute, and, as often happens, let slip that precise minute when her
visitor arrived, so that she did not hear the bell.
  Catching the sound of skirts and of light steps at the door, she
looked round, and her careworn face unconsciously expressed not
gladness, but wonder. She got up and embraced her sister-in-law.
  "What, here already?" she said as she kissed her.
  "Dolly, how glad I am to see you!"
  "I am glad, too," said Dolly, faintly smiling, and trying by the
expression of Anna's face to find out whether she knew. "Most likely
she knows," she thought, noticing the sympathy in Anna's face.
"Well, come along, I'll take you to your room," she went on, trying to
defer as long as possible the time of explanation.
  "Is this Grisha? Heavens, how he's grown!" said Anna; and kissing
him, never taking her eyes off Dolly, she stood still and flushed.
"No, please, let us stay here."
  She took off her shawl and her hat, and catching it in a lock of her
black hair, which was a mass of curls, she tossed her head and shook
her hair down.
  "You are radiant with health and happiness!" said Dolly, almost with
envy.
  "I?... Yes," said Anna. "Merciful heavens, Tania! You're the same
age as my Seriozha," she added, addressing the little girl as she
ran in. She took her in her arms and kissed her. "Delightful child,
delightful! Show me them all."
  She mentioned them, not only remembering the names, but the years,
months, characters, illnesses of all the children, and Dolly could not
but appreciate that.
  "Very well, we will go to them," she said. "It's a pity Vassia's
asleep."
  After seeing the children, they sat down, alone now, in the
drawing room, to coffee. Anna took the tray, and then pushed it away
from her.
  "Dolly," she said, "he has told me."
  Dolly looked coldly at Anna; she was waiting now for
hypocritically sympathetic phrases, but Anna said nothing of the sort.
  "Dolly, darling," she said, "I don't want to intercede for him,
nor to try to comfort you- that's impossible. But, my dearest, I'm
simply sorry, sorry from my heart for you!"
  Under the thick lashes of her shining eyes tears suddenly glittered.
She moved nearer to her sister-in-law and took her hand in her own,
vigorous and little. Dolly did not shrink away, but her face did not
lose its frigid expression. She said:
  "To comfort me is impossible. Everything's lost after what has
happened, everything's over!"
  And directly she had said this, her face suddenly softened. Anna
lifted the wasted, thin hand of Dolly, kissed it and said:
  "But, Dolly, what's to be done, what's to be done? How is it best to
act in this awful position- that's what you must think of."
  "All's over, and there's nothing more," said Dolly. "And the worst
of it all is, you see, that I can't cast him off: there are the
children- my hands are tied. And I can't live with him! It's a torture
for me to see him."
  "Dolly, darling, he has spoken to me, but I want to hear it from
you: tell me all about it."
  Dolly looked at her inquiringly.
  Sympathy and love unfeigned were apparent on Anna's face.
  "Very well," she suddenly said. "But I will begin at the
beginning. You know how I was married. With the education maman gave
us I was more than innocent- I was foolish. I knew nothing. They
say, I know, men tell their wives of their former lives, but Stiva"-
she corrected herself- "Stepan Arkadyevich told me nothing. You'll
hardly believe it, but till now I imagined that I was the only woman
he had known. So I lived eight years. You must understand that I was
not only far from suspecting infidelity, but I regarded it as
impossible, and then- try to imagine it- with such conceptions to find
out suddenly all the horror, all the loathsomeness... You must try and
understand me. To be fully convinced of one's happiness, and all at
once..." continued Dolly, holding back her sobs, "To get a letter...
His letter to his mistress, a governess in my employ. No, it's too
awful!" She hastily pulled out her handkerchief and hid her face in
it. "I can understand if it were passion," she went on, after a
brief silence, "but to deceive me deliberately, slyly... And with
whom?... To go on being my husband while he and she... It's awful! You
can't understand..."
  "Oh, yes, I understand! I understand! Dolly, dearest, I do
understand," said Anna, pressing her hand.
  "And do you imagine he realizes all the awfulness of my position?
Dolly resumed. "Not in the slightest! He's happy and contented."
  "Oh, no!" Anna interposed quickly. "He's to be pitied, he's
weighed down by remorse..."
  "Is he capable of remorse?" Dolly interrupted, gazing intently
into her sister-in-law's face.
  "Yes. I know him. I could not look at him without feeling sorry
for him. We both know him. He's good-natured, but he's proud, and
now he's so humiliated. What touched me most..." (And here Anna
guessed what would touch Dolly most.) "He's tortured by two things:
that he's ashamed for the children's sake, and that, loving you-
yes, yes, loving you beyond everything on earth," she hurriedly
interrupted Dolly, who would have rejoined- "he has hurt you,
pierced you to the heart. 'No, no, she cannot forgive me,' he keeps on
saying."
  Dolly looked pensively past her sister-in-law as she listened to her
words.
  "Yes, I can see that his position is awful; it's worse for the
guilty than the innocent," she said, "if he feels that all the
misery comes from his fault. But how am I to forgive him, how am I
to be his wife again after her? For me to live with him now would be
torture, just because I love my past love for him..."
  And sobs cut short her words.
  But as though of set design, each time she was softened she began to
speak again of what exasperated her.
  "She's young, you see, she's pretty," she went on. "Do you know,
Anna, my youth and my beauty are gone, taken by whom? By him and his
children. I have worked for him, and all I had has gone in his
service, and now of course any fresh, vulgar creature has more charm
for him. No doubt they talked of me together, or, worse still, they
were silent about me.... Do you understand?"
  Again her eyes glowed with hatred.
  "And after that he will tell me... What! Am I to believe him? Never!
No, everything is over, everything that once constituted my comfort,
the reward of my work and of my sufferings... Would you believe it?
I was teaching Grisha just now: once this was a joy to me, now it is a
torture. What have I to strive and toil for? Why to have children?
What's so awful is that all at once my heart's turned, and instead
of love and tenderness, I have nothing but hatred for him; yes,
hatred. I could kill him and..."
  "Darling Dolly, I understand, but don't torture yourself You are
so insulted, so excited, that you look at many things mistakenly."
  Dolly grew calmer, and for two minutes both were silent.
  "What's to be done? Think for me, Anna, help me. I have thought over
everything, and I see nothing."
  Anna could not find anything, but her heart echoed instantly to each
word, to each change of expression on her sister-in-law's face.
  "One thing I would say," began Anna. "I am his sister, I know his
character, that faculty of forgetting everything, everything" (she
waved her hand before her forehead), "that faculty for being
completely carried away, but for completely repenting, too. He
cannot believe it, he cannot comprehend now, how he could have acted
as he did."
  "No; he understands, and understood!" Dolly broke in. "But I...
You are forgetting me... Does that make it easier for me?"
  "Wait a minute. When he told me, I will own I did not realize all
the horror of your position. I saw nothing but him, and that the
family was broken up. I felt sorry for him, but after talking to
you, I see it, as a woman, quite differently. I see your agony, and
I can't tell you how sorry I am for you! But, Dolly, darling, while
I fully realize your sufferings, there is one thing I don't know; I
don't know... I don't know how much love there is still in your
heart for him. That you know- whether there is enough for you to be
able to forgive him. If there is- forgive him!"
  "No," Dolly was beginning, but Anna cut her short, kissing her
hand once more.
  "I know more of the world than you do," she said. I know how men
like Stiva look at it. You speak of his talking of you with her.
That never happened. Such men are unfaithful, but their own home and
wife are sacred to them. Somehow or other these women are still looked
on with contempt by them, and do not touch on their feeling for
their family. They draw a sort of line that can't be crossed between
them and their families. I don't understand it, but it is so."
  "Yes, but he has kissed her..."
  "Dolly, hush, darling. I saw Stiva when he was in love with you. I
remember the time when he came to me and cried, talking of you, and of
what a poetry and loftiness you were for him, and I know that the
longer he has lived with you the loftier you have been in his eyes.
You know we have sometimes laughed at him for putting in at every
word: "Dolly's a marvelous woman." have always been a divinity for
him, and you are that still, and this has not been a passion of the
heart...
  "But if it be repeated?"
  "It cannot be, as I understand it...
  "Yes, but could you forgive it?"
  "I don't know, I can't judge... No, I can judge," said Anna,
thinking a moment; and grasping the position in her thought and
weighing it in her inner balance, she added: "Yes, I can, I can, I
can. Yes, I could forgive. I could not be the same, no; but I could
forgive, and forgive as though it had never been, never been at
all...."
  "Oh, of course," Dolly interposed quickly, as though saying what she
had more than once thought, "else it would not be forgiveness. If
one forgives, it must be completely, completely. Come, let us go; I'll
take you to your room," she said, getting up, and on the way she
embraced Anna. "My dear, how glad I am you came. It has made things
better, ever so much better."
                             XX.

  The whole of that day Anna spent at home- that is, at the
Oblonskys', and received no one, though some of her acquaintances
had already heard of her arrival, and came to call the same day.
Anna spent the whole morning with Dolly and the children. She merely
sent a brief note to her brother to tell him that he must not fail
to dine at home. "Come, God is merciful," she wrote.
  Oblonsky did dine at home: the conversation was general, and his
wife, speaking to him, addressed him as "Stiva," as she had not done
for some time past. In the relations of husband and wife the same
estrangement still remained, but there was no talk of separation,
and Stepan Arkadyevich saw the possibility of explanation and
reconciliation.
  Immediately after dinner Kitty came in. She knew Anna Arkadyevna,
but only very slightly, and she came now to her sister's with some
trepidation, at the prospect of meeting this fashionable Peterburg
lady, of whom everyone spoke so highly. But she made a favorable
impression on Anna Arkadyevna- she perceived that at once. Anna was
unmistakably admiring her loveliness and her youth: before Kitty
knew where she was she found herself not merely under Anna's sway, but
in love with her, as young girls do fall in love with older and
married women. Anna did not resemble a fashionable lady, or the mother
of a boy eight years old. In the elasticity of her movements, the
freshness and the animation which persisted in her face and broke
out in her smile and her glance, she would rather have passed for a
girl of twenty, had it not been for a serious and, at times, a
mournful look in her eyes, which struck and attracted Kitty. Kitty
felt that Anna was perfectly simple and was concealing nothing, but
that she had another higher world of interests, complex and poetic,
which were inaccessible to Kitty.
  After dinner, when Dolly withdrew to her own room, Anna rose quickly
and went up to her brother, who was just lighting a cigar.
  "Stiva," she said to him, winking gaily, making the sign of the
cross over him, and glancing toward the door, "go, and God help you.
  He tossed away his cigar, having understood her, and departed
through the doorway.
  When Stepan Arkadyevich had disappeared, she went back to the sofa
where she had been sitting, surrounded by the children. Either because
the children saw that their mother was fond of this aunt, or that they
themselves sensed a special charm in her, the two elder ones, and
the younger following their lead, as children so often do, had clung
about their new aunt since before dinner, and would not leave her
side. And it had become a sort of game among them to sit as close as
possible to their aunt, to touch her, hold her little hand, kiss it,
play with her ring, or even touch the flounce of her skirt.
  "Come, come, as we were sitting before," said Anna Arkadyevna,
sitting down in her place.
  And again Grisha poked his little face under her arm, and nestled
with his head on her gown, beaming with pride and happiness.
  "And when is your next ball?" she asked Kitty.
  "Next week- and a splendid ball. One of those balls where one always
enjoys oneself."
  "Why, are there balls where one always enjoys oneself?" Anna said,
with tender irony.
  "It's strange, but there are. At the Bobrishchevs' one always enjoys
oneself, and at the Nikitins' too, while at the Mezhkovs' it's
always dull. Haven't you noticed it?"
  "No, my dear, for me there are no balls now where one enjoys
oneself," said Anna, and Kitty detected in her eyes that peculiar
world which was not revealed to her. "For me there are some which
are less dull and tiresome than others."
  "How can you be dull at a ball?"
  "Why should not I be dull at a ball?" inquired Anna.
  Kitty perceived that Anna knew what answer would follow.
  "Because you always look the loveliest of all."
  Anna had the faculty of blushing. She blushed, and said:
  "In the first place it's never so; and secondly, if it were, what
difference would it make to me?"
  "Are you coming to this ball? asked Kitty.
  "I imagine it won't be possible to avoid going. Here, take it,"
she said to Tania, who was pulling the loosely fitting ring off her
white, slender-tipped finger.
  "I shall be so glad if you go. I should so like to see you at a
ball."
  "Anyway, if I do go, I shall comfort myself with the thought that
it's a pleasure to you.... Grisha, don't pull my hair. It's untidy
enough without that," she said, putting up a straying lock, which
Grisha had been playing with.
  "I imagine you at the ball in lilac."
  "And why in lilac, precisely?" asked Anna, smiling. "Now,
children, run along, run along. Do you hear? Miss Hoole is calling you
to tea," she said tearing the children from her, and sending them
off to the dining room.
  "I know why you press me to come to the ball. You expect a great
deal of this ball, and you want everyone to be there and take part
in it."
  "How do you know? Yes!"
  "Oh! What a happy time you are at," pursued Anna. "I remember, and I
know this blue haze, like the mist on the mountains in Switzerland.
This mist, which covers everything in that blissful time when
childhood is just ending, and out of that vast circle, happy and
gay, there is a path growing narrower and narrower, and it is
delightful and alarming to enter the ballroom, bright and splendid
as it is.... Who has not been through it?"
  Kitty smiled without speaking. "But how did she go through it? How I
should like to know all her love story!" thought Kitty, recalling
the unromantic appearance of Alexei Alexandrovich, her husband.
  "I know something. Stiva told me, and I congratulate you. I liked
him so much," Anna continued. "I met Vronsky at the railway station."
  "Oh, was he there?" asked Kitty, blushing. "What was it Stiva told
you?"
  "Stiva blabbed about it all. And I should be so glad. I traveled
yesterday with Vronsky's mother," she went on; "and his mother
talked without a pause of him; he's her favorite. I know mothers are
partial, but..."
  "What did his mother tell you?"
  "Oh, a great deal! And although I know that he's her favorite, one
can still see how chivalrous he is.... Well, for instance, she told me
that he had wanted to give up all his property to his brother; that he
had done something extraordinary when he was quite a child- saved a
woman from the water. He's a hero, in fact," said Anna, smiling and
recollecting the two hundred roubles he had given at the station.
  But she did not tell Kitty about the two hundred roubles. For some
reason it was disagreeable to her to think of it. She felt that
there was something that had to do with her in it, and something
that ought not to have been.
  "She pressed me very much to go and see her," Anna went on; "and I
shall be glad to go to see her tomorrow. Stiva is staying a long while
in Dolly's room, thank God," Anna added, changing the subject, and
getting up, Kitty fancied, displeased with something.
  "No, I'm first! No, I!" screamed the children, who had finished tea,
running up to their Aunt Anna.
  "All together," said Anna, and she ran laughing to meet them, and,
embracing them, threw all the children, shrieking with delight, into a
swarming heap.
                             XXI.

  Dolly came out of her room to the tea of the grownups. Stepan
Arkadyevich did not come out. He must have left his wife's room by a
back door.
  "I am afraid you'll be cold upstairs," observed Dolly, addressing
Anna; "I want to move you downstairs, and we shall be nearer."
  "Oh, please, don't trouble about me," answered Anna, looking
intently into Dolly's face, trying to make out whether there had
been a reconciliation or not.
  "It will be lighter for you here," answered her sister-in-law.
  "I assure you that I can sleep like a marmot anywhere and any time."
  "What's all this?" inquired Stepan Arkadyevich, coming out of his
room and addressing his wife.
  From his tone both Kitty and Anna at once gathered that a
reconciliation had taken place.
  "I want to move Anna downstairs, but we must hang up blinds. No
one knows how to do it; I must see to it myself," answered Dolly
addressing him.
  "God knows whether they are fully reconciled," thought Anna, hearing
her tone, cold and composed.
  "Come, Dolly, why be always making difficulties," answered her
husband. "There, I'll do it all, if you like..."
  "I know how you do everything," answered Dolly. "You tell Matvei
to do what can't be done, and go away yourself, leaving him to make
a muddle of everything," and her habitual, mocking smile curved the
corners of Dolly's lips as she spoke.
  "Full, full reconciliation- full," thought Anna, "thank God!" and
rejoicing that she was the cause of it, she went up to Dolly and
kissed her.
  "Not at all. Why do you always look down on me and Matvei?" said
Stepan Arkadyevich, smiling hardly perceptibly, and addressing his
wife.
  The whole evening Dolly was, as always, a little mocking in her tone
to her husband, while Stepan Arkadyevich was happy and cheerful, yet
not so as to seem as if, having been forgiven, he had forgotten his
fault.
  At half-past nine o'clock a particularly joyful and pleasant
family conversation over the tea table at the Oblonskys' was broken up
by an apparently simple incident. But this simple incident for some
reason struck everyone as strange. Having begun talking about common
acquaintances in Peterburg, Anna got up quickly.
  "She is in my album," she said; "and, by the way, I'll show you my
Seriozha," she added, with a mother's smile of pride.
  Toward ten o'clock, when she usually said good night to her son, and
often, before going to a ball put him to bed herself, she felt
depressed at being so far from him; and whatever she was talking
about, she kept coming back in thought to her curly-headed Seriozha.
She longed to look at his photograph and talk of him. Seizing the
first pretext, she got up, and with her light, resolute step went
for her album. The stairs up to her room came out on the landing of
the great warm main staircase.
  Just as she was leaving the drawing room, a ring was heard in the
hall.
  "Who can that be?" said Dolly.
  "It's too early for me to be fetched, and for anyone else it's too
late," observed Kitty.
  "It's sure to be someone with papers for me," put in Stepan
Arkadyevich. When Anna was passing the top of the staircase, a servant
was running up to announce the visitor, while the visitor himself
was standing under a lamp. Anna, glancing down, at once recognized
Vronsky, and a strange feeling of pleasure and, at the same time, of
some dread, stirred in her heart. He stood there, without taking off
his coat, and pulling something out of his pocket. At the instant when
she was just halfway up the stairs he raised his eyes, caught sight of
her, and the expression of his face changed to embarrassment and
dismay. With a slight inclination of her head she passed, hearing
behind her Stepan Arkadyevich's loud voice calling him to come up, and
the quiet, soft, and calm voice of Vronsky refusing.
  When Anna returned with the album he was already gone, and Stepan
Arkadyevich was telling them that he had called to inquire about the
dinner they were giving next day to a foreign celebrity.
  "And nothing would induce him to come up. What a queer fellow he
is!" added Stepan Arkadyevich.
  Kitty blushed. She thought that she was the only person who knew why
he had come, and why he would not come up. "He has been at home,"
she thought, "and didn't find me, and thought I should be here, but he
did not come up because he thought it late, and Anna's here."
  All of them looked at each other, saying nothing, and began to
look at Anna's album.
  There was nothing either exceptional or strange in a man's calling
at half-past nine on a friend to inquire details of a proposed
dinner party and not coming in, yet it seemed strange to all of
them. And to Anna it seemed stranger and more unpleasant than to any
of the others.
                             XXII.

  The ball was only just beginning as Kitty and her mother walked up
the great staircase, flooded with light, and lined with flowers and
footmen in powder and red coats. From the rooms came a constant,
steady noise, like that of a hive aswarm; and as they were giving
the final little touches to hair and dresses before a mirror on the
landing between potted trees, they heard, coming from the ballroom,
the gently distinct notes of the fiddles of the orchestra, beginning
the first waltz. A little ancient in civilian dress, arranging his
gray curls before another mirror, and diffusing an odor of scent,
stumbled against them on the stairs, and stood aside, evidently
admiring Kitty, whom he did not know. A beardless youth, one of
those society youths whom the old Prince Shcherbatsky called whelps,
in an exceedingly open waistcoat, straightening his white tie as he
went, bowed to them and after running by, came back to ask Kitty for a
quadrille. As the first quadrille had already been given to Vronsky,
she had to promise this youth the second. An officer, buttoning his
glove, stood aside in the doorway, and, stroking his mustache, admired
the rosy Kitty.
  Although her dress, her coiffure, and all the preparations for the
ball had cost Kitty much trouble and planning, at this moment she
walked into the ballroom in the elaborate tulle dress over a pink slip
as unconcernedly and simply as though all the rosettes and lace, all
the minute details of her attire, had not cost her or her family a
moment's attention, as though she had been born in this tulle and
lace, with this towering coiffure, surmounted by a rose and two
small leaves.
  When, just before entering the ballroom, the old Princess tried to
adjust a sash ribbon that had become twisted, Kitty had drawn back a
little. She felt that everything must be right of itself, and
graceful, and that nothing could need setting straight.
  Kitty had one of her good days. Her dress was not uncomfortable
anywhere; her lace bertha did not droop anywhere; her rosettes were
neither crushed nor torn off; her pink slippers with high, curving
heels did not pinch, but gladdened her tiny feet; and the thick
bandeaux of fair hair kept up on her head. All the three buttons
buttoned up without tearing on the long glove that covered her hand
without concealing its lines. The black velvet ribbon of her locket
nestled with special tenderness round her neck. This velvet ribbon was
a darling; at home, regarding her neck in the looking glass, Kitty had
felt that that velvet was speaking. About all the rest there might
be a doubt, but the velvet ribbon was a darling. Kitty smiled here
too, at the ball, when she glanced at it in the glass. Her bare
shoulders and arms gave Kitty a sensation of chill marble- a sensation
she particularly liked. Her eyes sparkled, and her rosy lips could not
help but smile from the consciousness of their own attractiveness. She
had scarcely entered the ballroom and reached the
tulle-ribbon-lace-colored throng of ladies, waiting to be asked to
dance- Kitty was never one of that throng- when she was asked for a
waltz, and asked by the best partner, the first star in the
hierarchy of the ballroom, a renowned conductor of the dances and
master of ceremonies, married man, handsome and well built, Iegorushka
Korsunsky. He had only just left the Countess Banina, with whom he had
danced the first turn of the waltz, and, scanning his demesne- that is
to say, a few couples who had started dancing- he caught sight of
Kitty entering, and flew up to her with that peculiar, easy amble
which is confined to conductors of the dances. Bowing and without even
asking her if she cared to dance, he put out his arm to encircle her
slender waist. She looked round for someone to give her fan to, and
their hostess, smiling to her, took it.
  "How good of you to come in good time," he said to her, embracing
her waist; "such a bad habit to be late."
  Bending her left arm, she laid it on his shoulder, and her little
feet in their pink slippers began swiftly, lightly, and rhythmically
moving over the slippery floor in time to the music.
  "It's a rest to waltz with you," he said to her, as they fell into
the first slow steps of the waltz. "It's charming- such lightness,
precision." He said to her the same thing he said to almost all his
partners whom he knew well.
  She smiled at his praise, and continued to look about the room
over his shoulder. She was not like a girl at her first ball, for whom
all faces in the ballroom melt into one vision of fairyland. And she
was not a girl who had gone the stale round of balls till every face
in the ballroom was familiar and tiresome. But she was in the middle
stage between these two; she was excited, and at the same time she had
sufficient self-possession to be able to observe. In the left corner
of the ballroom she saw the very flower of society grouped together.
There- impossibly naked- was the beauty Liddy, Korsunsky's wife; there
was the lady of the house; there shone the bald pate of Krivin, always
to be found wherever the best people were; in that direction gazed the
young men, not venturing to approach; there, too, she descried
Stiva, and there she saw the charming figure and head of Anna in a
black velvet gown. And he was there. Kitty had not seen him since
the evening she refused Levin. With her farsighted eyes, knew him at
once, and was even aware that he was looking at her.
  "Another turn, eh? You're not tired?" said Korsunsky, a little out
of breath.
  "No, thank you!"
  "Where shall I take you?"
  "Madame Karenina's here, I think.... Take me to her."
  "Wherever you command."
  And Korsunsky began waltzing with measured steps straight toward the
group in the left corner, continually saying, "Pardon, mesdames,
pardon, pardon, mesdames," and steering his course through the sea
of lace, tulle and ribbon, and not disarranging a feather, he turned
his partner sharply round, so that her slim ankles, in light,
transparent stockings, were exposed to view, and her train floated out
in fan shape and covered Krivin's knees. Korsunsky bowed, set straight
his open shirt front, and gave her his arm to conduct her to Anna
Arkadyevna. Kitty, flushed, took her train from Krivin's knees, and, a
little giddy, looked round, seeking Anna. Anna was not in lilac, as
Kitty had so urgently wished, but in a black, low-cut, velvet gown,
showing her full shoulders and bosom, that looked as though carved
in old ivory, and her rounded arms, with tiny, slender hands. The
whole gown was trimmed with Venetian guipure. On her head, among her
black hair- her own, with no false additions- was a little wreath of
pansies, and a similar one on the black ribbon of her sash, among
white lace. Her coiffure was not striking. All that was noticeable was
the little willful tendrils of her curly hair that persisted in
escaping on the nape of her neck, and on her temples. Encircling her
sculptured, strong neck was a thread of pearls.
  Kitty had been seeing Anna every day; she adored her, and had
pictured her invariably in lilac. But now, seeing her in black, she
felt that she had not fully perceived her charm. She saw her now as
someone quite new and surprising to her. Now she understood that
Anna could not have been in lilac, and that her charm was precisely in
that she always stood out against her attire, that her dress could
never be noticeable on her. And her black dress, with its sumptuous
lace, was not noticeable on her; it was only the frame and all that
was seen was she- simple, natural, elegant, and at the same time gay
and animated.
  She was standing, as always, very erect, and when Kitty drew near
the group she was speaking to the master of the house, her head
slightly turned toward him.
  "No, I won't cast a stone," she was saying, in answer to
something, "though I can't understand it she went on, shrugging her
shoulders, and she turned at once with a soft smile of protection
toward Kitty. With a cursory feminine glance she scanned her attire,
and made a movement of her head, hardly perceptible, but understood by
Kitty, signifying approval of her dress and her looks. "You came
into the room dancing," she added.
  "This is one of my most faithful supporters," said Korsunsky, bowing
to Anna Arkadyevna, whom he had not yet seen. "The Princess helps to
make any ball festive and successful. Anna Arkadyevna, a waltz?" he
said, bending down to her.
  "Why, have you met?" inquired their host.
  "Is there anyone we have not met? My wife and I are like white
wolves- everyone knows us," answered Korsunsky. "A waltz, Anna
Arkadyevna?"
  "I don't dance whenever it's possible not to," she said.
  "But tonight it's impossible," answered Korsunsky.
  During the conversation Vronsky was approaching them.
  "Well, since it's impossible tonight, let us start," she said, not
noticing Vronsky's bow, and hastily put her hand on Korsunsky's
shoulder.
  "What is she vexed with him about?" thought Kitty, discerning that
Anna had intentionally not responded to Vronsky's bow. Vronsky went up
to Kitty, reminding her of the first quadrille, and expressing his
regret at not having seen her all this time. Kitty gazed in admiration
at Anna waltzing, as she listened to him. She expected him to ask
her for a waltz, but he did not, and she glanced wonderingly at him.
He flushed, and hurriedly asked her to waltz, but he had barely put
his arm round her slender waist and taken the first step when the
music suddenly stopped. Kitty looked into his face, which was so close
to her own, and long afterward- for several years- this look, full
of love, to which he made no response, cut her to the heart with an
agony of shame.
  "Pardon! Pardon! Waltz! Waltz!" shouted Korsunsky from the other
side of the room, and, seizing the first young lady he came across
he began dancing.
                             XXIII.

  Vronsky and Kitty waltzed several times round the room. After the
waltz Kitty went to her mother, and she had hardly time to say a few
words to Countess Nordstone when Vronsky came up again for the first
quadrille. During the quadrille nothing of any significance was
said: there was disjointed talk between them of the Korsunskys,
husband and wife, whom he described very amusingly, as delightful
children at forty, and of the future popular theater; and only once
did the conversation touch her to the quick- when he asked her whether
Levin were here, and added that he liked him very much. But Kitty
did not expect much from the quadrille. She looked forward with a
sinking heart to the mazurka. She fancied that the mazurka would
decide everything. The fact that he did not during the quadrille ask
her for the mazurka did not trouble her. She felt sure she would dance
it with him, as she had done at former balls, and refused five young
men, saying she was engaged for the mazurka. The whole ball up to
the last quadrille was for Kitty an enchanted vision of delightful
colors, sounds and motions. She only sat down when she felt too
tired and begged for a rest. But as she was dancing the last quadrille
with one of the tiresome young men whom she could not refuse, she
chanced to be vis-a-vis with Vronsky and Anna. She had not been near
Anna since the beginning of the evening, and now she again suddenly
saw her as quite new and surprising. She saw in her the signs of
that excitement of success she knew so well in herself; she saw that
she was intoxicated with the delighted admiration she was exciting.
She knew that feeling and knew its signs, and saw them in Anna; saw
the quivering, flashing light in her eyes, and the smile of
happiness and excitement unconsciously curving her lips, and the
distinct grace, precision and lightness of her movements.
  "Who is it?" she asked herself. "All- or one?" And without keeping
up her end of the conversation, the thread of which the harassed young
man she was dancing with lost and could not pick up again, she
obeyed with external liveliness the peremptory shouts of Korsunsky
starting them all into the grand rond, and then into the chaine, and
at the same time she kept watch with a growing pang at her heart. "No,
it's not admiration of the crowd that has intoxicated her, but the
adoration of one. And that one? Can it be he?" Every time he spoke
to Anna the joyous light flashed into her eyes, and the smile of
happiness curved her red lips. She seemed to make an effort to control
herself, in order not to show these signs of delight, but they
appeared on her face of themselves. "But what of him?" Kitty looked at
him and was horrified. What was pictured so clearly to Kitty in the
mirror of Anna's face she saw in him. What had become of his always
calm, firm manner, and the carelessly calm expression of his face? Now
every time he turned to her he bent his head, as though he would
have fallen at her feet, and in his eyes there was nothing but
humble submission and dread. "I would not offend you," his eyes seemed
to be saying each time, "but I want to save myself, and I don't know
how." On his face was a look such as Kitty had never seen before.
  They were speaking of common acquaintances, keeping up the
smallest of small talk, but to Kitty it seemed that every word they
said was determining their fate and hers. And strangely enough,
although they were actually talking of how absurd Ivan Ivanovich was
with his French, and how the Eletsky girl might have made a better
match, these words were yet fraught with significance for them, and
they sensed this as much as Kitty did. The whole ball, the whole
world, everything seemed screened by a fog within Kitty's soul.
Nothing but the stern discipline of her bringing-up supported her
and forced her to do what was expected of her- that is, to dance, to
answer questions, to talk, even to smile. But before the mazurka, when
they were beginning to rearrange the chairs and a few couples moved
out of the smaller rooms into the big room, a moment of despair and
horror came for Kitty. She had refused five partners, and now she
was not dancing the mazurka. She had not even a hope of being asked
for it, because she was so successful in society that the idea would
never occur to anyone that she had remained disengaged till now. She
would have to tell her mother she felt ill and go home, yet she had
not the strength to do this. She felt crushed.
  She went to the farthest end of the second drawing room and sank
into a low chair. Her light, transparent skirts rose like a cloud
about her slender waist; one bare, thin, soft, girlish arm, hanging
listlessly, was lost in the folds of her pink tunic; in the other
she held her fan and with rapid, short strokes fanned her burning
face. Yet, while she looked like a butterfly clinging to a blade of
grass, and just about to open its rainbow wings for fresh flight,
her heart ached with a horrible despair.
  "But perhaps I am wrong- perhaps it was not so?" And again she
recalled all she had seen.
  "Kitty, what is it?" said Countess Nordstone, stepping noiselessly
over the carpet toward her. "I don't understand it."
  Kitty's lower lip began to quiver; she got up quickly.
  "Kitty, you're not dancing the mazurka?"
  "No, no," said Kitty in a voice shaking with tears.
  "He asked her for the mazurka in my presence," said Countess
Nordstone, knowing Kitty would understand who he and her were. "She
said: 'Why, aren't you going to dance it with Princess
Shcherbatskaia?'"
  "Oh, it doesn't matter to me!" answered Kitty.
  No one but she herself understood her position; no one knew that she
had refused yesterday the man whom perhaps she loved, and refused
him because she had put her faith in another.
  Countess Nordstone found Korsunsky, with whom she was to dance the
mazurka, and told him to ask Kitty.
  Kitty danced in the first couple, and luckily for her she had not to
talk because Korsunsky was all the time running about, overseeing
his demesne. Vronsky and Anna were sitting almost opposite her. She
saw them with her farsighted eyes, and saw them, too, close by when
they met in the figures, and the more she saw of them the more
convinced was she that her unhappiness was consummated. She saw that
they felt themselves alone in this crowded room. And on Vronsky's
face, always so firm and independent, she saw the look that had struck
her, of bewilderment and humble submissiveness, like the expression of
an intelligent dog when it has done wrong.
  Anna smiled- and her smile was reflected by him. She grew
thoughtful- and he became serious. Some supernatural force drew
Kitty's eyes to Anna's face. She was charming in her simple black
dress; charming were her round arms with their bracelets; charming was
her firm neck with its thread of pearls; charming the straying curls
of her loose hair; charming the graceful, light movements of her
little feet and hands, charming was that lovely face in its animation-
yet there was something terrible and cruel in her charm.
  Kitty admired her more than ever, and more and more acute did her
suffering grow. Kitty felt crushed, and her face showed it. When
Vronsky caught sight of her, coming upon her in the mazurka, he did
not at once recognize her, so changed was she.
  "Delightful ball!" he said to her, merely for the sake of saying
something.
  "Yes," she answered.
  In the middle of the mazurka, repeating a complicated figure,
newly invented by Korsunsky, Anna came forward into the center of
the circle, chose two gentlemen, and summoned Kitty and another
lady. Kitty gazed at her in dismay as she went up. Anna looked at
her with drooping eyelids, and smiled, pressing her hand. But,
noticing that Kitty only responded to her smile by a look of despair
and amazement, she turned away from her, and began gaily talking to
the other lady.
  "Yes, there is something uncanny, devilish and charming about
her," said Kitty to herself.
  Anna did not want to stay for supper, but the master of the house
began urging her.
  "Nonsense, Anna Arkadyevna," said Korsunsky placing her bare hand
upon his coat sleeve. "I've such an idea for a cotillon! Un bijou!"
  And he moved gradually on, trying to draw her along with him.
Their host smiled approvingly.
  "No, I'm not going to stay," answered Anna, smiling, but, in spite
of her smile, both Korsunsky and the master of the house saw from
her resolute tone that she would not stay.
  "No; why, as it is, I have danced more at your ball in Moscow than I
have all the winter in Peterburg," said Anna, looking round at
Vronsky, who stood near her. "I must rest a little before my journey."
  "Are you definitely going tomorrow then?" asked Vronsky.
  "Yes, I suppose so," answered Anna, as though wondering at the
boldness of his question; but the irrepressible, quivering
brilliance of her eyes and her smile set him on fire as she said it.
  Anna Arkadyevna did not stay to supper, but went home.
                             XXIV.

  "Yes, there must be something disgusting, repulsive about me,"
reflected Levin, as he left the Shcherbatskys', and set out on foot
for his brother's lodgings. "And I don't get on with other people.
Pride, they say. No, I haven't even pride. If I had any pride, I
should not have put myself in such a position." And he pictured to
himself Vronsky, happy, good-natured, clever and calm- certainly never
placed in the awful position in which he had been that evening.
"Yes, she was bound to choose him. It must be so, and I cannot
complain of anyone or anything. I am myself to blame. What right had I
to imagine she would care to join her life to mine? Who am I, and what
am I? A nobody, not wanted by anyone, nor of use to anybody." And he
recalled his brother Nikolai, and dwelt with pleasure on the thought
of him. "Isn't he right in saying that everything in the world is
bad and vile? And are we fair in our judgment, present and past, of
brother Nikolai? Of course, from the point of view of Procophii,
seeing him in a torn cloak and tipsy, he's a despicable person. But
I know him differently. I know his soul, and know that we are alike.
And I, instead of going to seek him out, went out to dinner, and
then came here." Levin walked up to a lamppost, read his brother's
address, which was in his pocketbook, and called a cabby. All the long
way to his brother's Levin vividly recalled all the facts, familiar to
him, of his brother Nikolai's life. He remembered how his brother,
while at the university, and for a year afterward, had, in spite of
the jeers of his companions, lived like a monk, strictly observing all
religious rites, services and fasts, and avoiding every sort of
pleasure- especially women. And now, afterward, he had all at once
broken out: had associated with the most horrible people, and rushed
into the most senseless debauchery. He remembered later the scandal
over a boy, whom he had taken from the country to bring up, and, in
a fit of rage, had so violently beaten that proceedings were brought
against him for personal injury. Then he remembered the scandal with a
sharper, to whom he had lost money, and given a promissory note, and
against whom he had himself lodged a complaint, asserting that he
had cheated him. (This was the money Sergei Ivanovich had paid.)
Then he remembered how he had spent a night in a police station for
disorderly conduct in the street. He remembered the shameful
proceedings he had instituted against his brother Sergei Ivanovich,
accusing him of not having paid him, apparently, his share of his
mother's estate; and the last scandal, when he had gone to a Western
province in an official capacity, and there had got into trouble for
assaulting a village elder.... It was all horribly vile, yet to
Levin it appeared not at all as vile as it inevitably would to those
who did not know Nikolai, did not know all his story, did not know his
heart.
  Levin remembered that when Nikolai had been in the devout stage, the
period of fasts and monks and church services, when he was seeking
in religion a support and a curb for his passionate temperament,
everyone, far from encouraging him, had jeered at him- and Levin
had, too, with the others. They had teased him, calling him Noah and
Monk; yet, when he had broken out, no one had helped him, but had
all turned away from him, with horror and loathing.
  Levin felt that brother Nikolai, in spite of all the ugliness of his
life, in his soul, in the very depths of his soul, was no more in
the wrong than the people who despised him. He was not to blame for
having been born with his unbridled character and some pressure upon
his intellect. For he had always wanted to be good. "I will tell him
everything, without reserve, and I will make him speak without
reserve, too, and I'll show him that I love him, and therefore
understand him," Levin resolved to himself, as, toward eleven o'clock,
he reached the hotel of which he had the address.
  "At the top, twelve and thirteen," the porter answered Levin's
inquiry.
  "At home?"
  "Probably he is at home."
  The door of No. 12 was half open, and, together with a streak of
light, there issued thick fumes of cheap, poor tobacco, and the
sound of a voice, unknown to Levin; but he knew at once that his
brother was there: he recognized his cough.
  As he went in at the door, the unknown voice was saying:
  "It all depends with how much judgment and knowledge the thing's
done."
  Konstantin Levin looked in at the door, and saw that the speaker was
a young man with an immense shock of hair, wearing a Russian coat, and
that a pock-marked young woman in a woolen gown, without collar or
cuffs, was sitting on the sofa. His brother was not to be seen.
Konstantin felt a sharp pang at his heart at the thought of the
strange company in which his brother spent his life. No one had
heard him, and Konstantin, taking off his galoshes, listened to what
the gentleman in the Russian coat was saying. He was speaking of
some enterprise.
  "Well, the devil flay them, these privileged classes," his brother's
voice responded, with a cough. "Masha! get us some supper, and serve
up some wine, if there's any left; or else send for some."
  The woman rose, came out from behind the partition, and saw
Konstantin.
  "There's some gentleman here, Nikolai Dmitrievich," she said.
  "Whom do you want?" said the voice of Nikolai Levin, angrily.
  "It's I," answered Konstantin Levin, coming forward into the light.
  "Who's I?" Nikolai's voice said again, still more angrily. He
could be heard getting up hurriedly, stumbling against something,
and Levin saw, facing him in the doorway, the big scared eyes, and the
huge, gaunt, stooping figure of his brother, so familiar, and yet
astonishing in its oddity and sickliness.
  He was even thinner than three years before, when Konstantin Levin
had seen him last. He was wearing a short coat, and his hands and
big bones seemed huger than ever. His hair had grown thinner, the same
straight mustache hid his lips, the same eyes gazed strangely and
naively at his visitor.
  "Ah, Kostia!" he exclaimed suddenly, recognizing his brother, and
his eyes lighted up with joy. But the same second he looked round at
the young man, and gave the nervous jerk of his head and neck that
Konstantin knew so well, as if his cravat were choking him; and a
quite different expression- wild, suffering and cruel- rested on his
emaciated face.
  "I wrote to you and Sergei Ivanovich both that I don't know you, and
don't want to know you. What is it you want?"
  He was not at all the same as Konstantin had been fancying him.
The worst and most oppressive part of his character, which made all
relations with him so difficult, had been forgotten by Konstantin
Levin when he thought of him; and now, when he saw his face, and
especially that nervous twitching of his head, he remembered it all.
  "I didn't want to see you for anything," he answered timidly.
"I've simply come to see you."
  His brother's timidity obviously softened Nikolai. His lips
twitched.
  "Oh, so that's it?" he said. "Well, come in; sit down. Like some
supper? Masha, bring supper for three. No, stop a minute. Do you
know who this is?" he said, addressing his brother, and indicating the
gentleman in the Russian coat: "This is Mr. Kritsky, a friend of my
Kiev days- a very remarkable man. He's persecuted by the police, of
course, since he's not a scoundrel."
  And he surveyed, as it was a habit of his, everyone in the room.
Seeing that the woman standing in the doorway was starting to go, he
shouted to her. "Wait a minute, I said." And with that inability to
express himself, the incoherence that Konstantin knew so well, he
began, with another look round at everyone, to tell Kritsky's story to
his brother: how he had been expelled from the university for starting
a benevolent society for the poor students, and classes on Sunday, and
how he had afterward been a teacher in a rural school, and had been
driven out of that, too; and had afterward been on trial for something
or other.
  "You're of the Kiev University?" said Konstantin Levin to Kritsky,
to break the awkward silence that followed.
  "Yes- I was in Kiev," Kritsky replied angrily, his face darkening.
  "And this woman," Nikolai Levin interrupted him, pointing to her,
"is my lifemate, Marya Nikolaevna. I took her out of a dive, and he
jerked his neck as he said it. "But I love her and respect her, and
anyone who wants to know me," he added, raising his voice and knitting
his brows, "is requested to love her and respect her. She's
precisely the same as a wife to me- precisely. So now you know whom
you've got to do with. And if you think you're lowering yourself-
well, there's the door, and God speed thee!"
  And again his eyes traveled inquiringly over all of them.
  "But how will I lower myself? I don't understand."
  "Then, Masha, tell them to bring supper; three portions, and vodka
and wine... No, wait a minute... No, it doesn't matter... Go ahead."
                             XXV.

  "So you see," pursued Nikolai Levin, painfully wrinkling his
forehead and twitching.
  It was obviously difficult for him to think of what to say and do.
  "Here, do you see?... He pointed to some sort of short iron bars,
fastened together with twine, lying in a corner of the room. "Do you
see that? That's the beginning of a new enterprise we're going into.
This enterprise will be an industrial association...."
  Konstantin scarcely heard him. He looked into his sickly,
consumptive face, and he was more and more sorry for him, and he could
not force himself to listen to what his brother was telling him
about the association. He saw that this association was a mere
anchor to save him from self-contempt. Nikolai Levin went on talking:
  "You know that capital oppresses the worker. Our workers, the
mouzhiks, bear all the burden of labor, and are so placed that, no
matter how much they work, they can't escape from their position of
beasts of burden. All the profits of labor, on which they might
improve their position, and gain leisure for themselves, and after
that education- all the surplus values, are taken from them by the
capitalists. And society is so constituted that the harder they
work, the greater the profit of the merchants and landowners, while
they stay beasts of burden to the end. And that state of things must
be changed," he finished up, and looked questioningly at his brother.
  "Yes, of course," said Konstantin, looking at the patch of red
that had come out on his brother's projecting cheekbones.
  "And so we're founding a locksmiths' association, where all the
production and profit, and the chief instruments of production-
everything- will be in common."
  "Where is the association to be?" asked Konstantin Levin.
  "In the village of Vozdrem, government of Kazan."
  "But why in a village? In the villages, I think, there is plenty
of work as it is. Why a locksmiths' association in a village?"
  "Why? Because the peasants are just as much slaves as they ever
were, and that's why you and Sergei Ivanovich don't like people to try
and get them out of their slavery," said Nikolai Levin, exasperated by
the objection.
  Konstantin Levin sighed, looking meanwhile about the cheerless and
dirty room. This sigh seemed to exasperate Nikolai still more.
  "I know Sergei Ivanovich's, and your, aristocratic views. I know
that he applies all the power of his intellect to justify existing
evils."
  "I say, why do you talk of Sergei Ivanovich?" Levin let drop,
smiling.
  "Sergei Ivanovich? I'll tell you why!" Nikolai Levin shrieked
suddenly at the name of Sergei Ivanovich. "I'll tell you why... But
what's the use of talking? There's only one thing... What did you come
to me for? You look down on all this; very well, then; but go away, in
God's name- go away!" he shrieked, getting up from his chair. "Go
away- go away!"
  "I don't look down on it at all," said Konstantin Levin timidly.
"I don't even dispute it."
  At that instant Marya Nikolaevna came back. Nikolai Levin looked
round angrily at her. She went quickly to him, and whispered
something.
  "I'm not well; I've grown irritable," said Nikolai Levin, getting
calmer and breathing painfully; "and then you talk to me of Sergei
Ivanovich and his essay. It's such rubbish, such lying, such
self-deception! What can a man write about justice who knows nothing
of it? Have you read his essay?" he turned to Kritsky, sitting down
again at the table, and clearing a space for himself by pushing back
some half-made cigarettes.
  "I haven't," Kritsky responded gloomily, obviously not desiring to
enter into the conversation.
  "Why not?" said Nikolai Levin, now turning with exasperation upon
Kritsky.
  "Because I didn't see the use of wasting my time over it."
  "Oh, if you please- how did you know it would be wasting your
time? That essay's too deep for many people- that is to say, it's over
their heads. But it's different with me, I see through his ideas,
and I know wherein the essay's weakness lies."
  They all fell silent. Kritsky got up sluggishly and reached for
his cap.
  "Won't you have supper? All right, good-by! Come round tomorrow with
the locksmith."
  Kritsky had hardly gone out when Nikolai Levin smiled and winked.
  "He, too, is poor stuff," he said. "For I can see..."
  But at that instant Kritsky, at the door, called him.
  "What do you want now?" he said, and went out to him in the passage.
Left alone with Marya Nikolaevna, Levin turned to her.
  "Have you been long with my brother?" he said to her.
  "Yes, more than a year. His health has become very poor. He drinks a
great deal," she said.
  "Just how?"
  "He drinks vodka, and it's bad for him."
  "And a great deal?" whispered Levin.
  "Yes," she said, looking timidly toward the doorway, where Nikolai
Levin had reappeared.
  "What were you talking about?" he said, knitting his brows, and
turning his scared eyes from one to the other. "What was it?"
  "Oh, nothing," Konstantin answered in confusion.
  "Oh, if you don't want to say, don't. Only it's no good your talking
to her. She's a wench, and you're a gentleman," he said, with a jerk
of the neck. "You understand everything, I see, and have taken stock
of everything, and look with commiseration on my transgressions," he
began again, raising his voice.
  "Nikolai Dmitrich, Nikolai Dmitrich," whispered Marya Nikolaevna,
again going up to him.
  "Oh, very well, very well!... But where's the supper? Ah, here it
is," he said, seeing a waiter with a tray. "Here, set it here," he
added angrily, and promptly seizing the vodka, he poured out a pony
and drank it greedily. "Like a drink?" he turned to his brother, and
at once became better-humored. "Well, enough of Sergei Ivanovich.
I'm glad to see you, anyway. After all's said and done, we're not
strangers. Come, have a drink. Tell me what you're doing," he went on,
greedily munching a piece of bread, and pouring out another pony. "How
are things with you?"
  "I live alone in the country, as I always have. I'm busy looking
after the land," answered Konstantin, watching with horror the
greediness with which his brother ate and drank, and trying to conceal
that he noticed it.
  "Why don't you get married?"
  "No opportunity has presented itself," Konstantin answered,
reddening.
  "Why not? For me now, everything's at an end! I've made a mess of my
life. But this I've said, and I say still, that if my share had been
given me when I needed it, my whole life would have been different."
  Konstantin made haste to change the conversation.
  "Do you know your little Vania's with me- a clerk in the
countinghouse at Pokrovskoe?"
  Nikolai jerked his neck, and sank into thought.
  "Yes, tell me what's going on at Pokrovskoe. Is the house still
standing, and the birch trees, and our schoolroom? And Philip the
gardener- is he living? How I remember the summerhouse and the sofa!
Now mind and don't alter anything in the house, but make haste and get
married, and make everything as it used to be again. Then I'll come
and see you, if your wife is a fine woman."
  "Why, come to me now," said Levin. "How snugly we could settle
down!"
  "I'd come and see you if I were sure I shouldn't find Sergei
Ivanovich."
  "You wouldn't find him there. I live quite independently of him."
  "Yes, but say what you like, you have to choose between me and him,"
he said, looking timidly into his brother's face.
  This timidity touched Konstantin.
  "If you want to hear my confession of faith on the subject, I tell
you that in your quarrel with Sergei Ivanovich I take neither side.
You're both wrong. You're rather wrong outwardly, and he, rather
inwardly."
  "Ah, ah! You see that, you see that!" Nikolai shouted joyfully.
  "But I personally value friendly relations with you more because..."
  "Why, why?"
  Konstantin could not say that he valued it more because Nikolai
was unhappy, and needed affection. But Nikolai knew that this was just
what he meant to say, and scowling he took to the vodka again.
  "Enough, Nikolai Dmitrich!" said Marya Nikolaevna, stretching out
her plump, bare arm toward the decanter.
  "Let it be! Don't annoy me! I'll beat you!" he shouted.
  Marya Nikolaevna smiled a sweet and good-humored smile, which was at
once reflected on Nikolai's face, and whisked the decanter off.
  "And do you suppose she understands nothing?" said Nikolai. "She
understands everything better than all of us. Tell the truth- isn't
there something good and sweet about her?"
  "Were you never before in Moscow?" Konstantin said to her, for the
sake of saying something.
  "Only you mustn't be formal with her. It frightens her. No one
ever spoke to her so but the justice of the peace who tried her for
trying to get out of a house of ill fame. My God, what senselessness
there is in this world!" he cried suddenly. "These new institutions,
these justices of the peace, these Zemstvo- what hideousness it all
is!"
  And he began to enlarge on his encounters with the new institutions.
  Konstantin Levin listened to him, and that disbelief in the sense of
all public institutions, which he shared with him, and often
expressed, was now distasteful to him, coming from his brother's lips.
  "In the other world we shall understand it all," he said lightly.
  "In the other world? Ah, I don't like that other world! I don't like
it," he said, letting his scared wild eyes rest on his brother's face.
"Here one would think that to get out of all the baseness and the
mess, one's own and other people's, would be a good thing, and yet I'm
afraid of death, awfully afraid of death." He shuddered. "But do drink
something. Would you like some champagne? Or shall we go somewhere?
Let's go to the gypsies! Do you know, I've gotten very fond of the
gypsies, and of Russian songs."
  His speech had begun to falter, and he skipped at random from one
subject to another. Konstantin, with the help of Masha, persuaded
him not to go out anywhere, and got him to bed hopelessly drunk.
  Masha promised to write to Konstantin in case of need, and to
persuade Nikolai to go and stay with his brother.
                             XXVI.

  In the morning Konstantin Levin left Moscow, and toward evening he
reached home. On the journey in the train he talked to his fellow
travelers about politics and the new railways, and, just as in Moscow,
he was overcome by a sense of confusion of ideas, by dissatisfaction
with himself, and shame of something or other. But when he got out
at his own station, when he saw his one-eyed coachman Ignat, with
the collar of his coat turned up; when, in the dim light falling
through the station windows, he saw his own carpeted sledge, his own
horses with their tails up, in their harness trimmed with rings and
tassels; when the coachman Ignat, as he put in his luggage, told him
the village news- that the contractor had arrived, and that Pava had
calved- he felt that little by little the confusion was clearing up,
and the shame and self-dissatisfaction were passing away. He felt this
at the mere sight of Ignat and the horses; but he began to see what
had happened to him in quite a different light, when he had put on the
sheepskin coat brought for him, and, all muffled up, had taken his
seat in the sleigh and started off, pondering on the work that lay
before him in the village, and staring at the off horse, that had been
formerly his saddle horse, overridden, but a spirited animal from
the Don. He felt himself, and did not want to be anyone else. All he
wanted now was to be better than before. In the first place, he
resolved that from that day on he would give up hoping for the
extraordinary happiness which the marriage was to afford him, and
consequently he would not disdain the present so. In the second place,
he would never again let himself give way to low passion, the memory
of which had so tortured him when he had been making up his mind to
propose. Then, remembering his brother Nikolai, he resolved that he
would never allow himself to forget him, that he would watch him,
and not lose sight of him, so as to be ready to help should things
go ill with him. And that would be soon, he felt. Then, too, his
brother's talk of communism, which he had treated so lightly at the
time, now made him reflect. He considered an alteration in economic
conditions nonsense; yet he had always felt the injustice of his own
abundance in comparison with the poverty of the common folk, and he
now determined that, in order to feel quite in the right, though he
had worked hard and lived by no means luxuriously before, he would now
work still harder, and would allow himself even less luxury. And all
this seemed to him so easy a conquest over himself that he spent the
whole drive in most pleasant reveries. With a lively feeling of hope
in a new, better life, he drove up to his house about nine o'clock
at night.
  The snow of the little quadrangle before the house was lit up by
light falling from the windows in the room of his old nurse, Agathya
Mikhailovna, who performed the duties of housekeeper in his house. She
was not yet asleep. Kouzma, awakened by her, sleepy and barefooted,
ran out onto the steps. A setter bitch, Laska, leaped out too,
almost upsetting Kouzma, and whining, rubbed against Levin's knees,
jumping up and longing, yet not daring, to put her forepaws on his
chest.
  "You're soon returned, my dear," said Agathya Mikhailovna.
  "I grew homesick, Agathya Mikhailovna. East or West, home is
best," he answered, and went into his study.
  The study was gradually lit up as the candle was brought in. The
familiar details came out: the stag's horns; the bookshelves; the
plain stove with its warm-hole, which had long wanted mending; his
father's sofa, a large table, and, on the table, an open book, a
broken ash tray, a notebook with his handwriting. As he saw all
this, there came over him for an instant a doubt of the possibility of
arranging the new life, of which he had been dreaming on the road. All
these traces of his life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him: "No,
you're not going to get away from us, and you're not going to be
different- but you're going to be the same as you've always been: with
doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to
amend, and lapses, and everlasting expectation of a happiness which
you won't get, and which isn't possible for you."
  But it was his things that said this to him, while another voice
in his heart was telling him that he must not fall under the sway of
the past, and that one can do anything with oneself. And hearing
that voice, he went into the corner where stood his two dumbbells,
of one pood each, and began jerking and pushing them up, trying to
induce a state of well-being. There was a creak of steps at the
door. He hastily put down the dumbbells.
  The bailiff came in, and said that everything, thank God, was
well, but also informed him that the buckwheat in the new drying
machine had been a little scorched. This piece of news irritated
Levin. The new drying machine had been constructed and partly invented
by Levin. The bailiff had always been against this drying machine, and
now it was with suppressed triumph that he announced that the
buckwheat had been scorched. Levin was firmly convinced that if the
buckwheat had been scorched it was only because precautions had not
been taken, for which he had hundreds of times given orders. He was
annoyed, and reprimanded the bailiff. But there had been an
important and joyful event: Pava, his best cow, an expensive beast,
bought at a show, had calved.
  "Kouzma, give me my sheepskin coat. And you, do tell them to fetch a
lantern- I'm going to have a look at her," he said to the bailiff.
  The cowhouse for the more valuable cows was just behind the house.
Walking across the yard, passing a snowdrift by the lilac tree, he
went into the cowhouse. There came a warm, steamy smell of dung when
the frozen door was opened, and the cows, astonished at the unfamiliar
light of the lantern, stirred on their fresh straw. He caught a
glimpse of the broad, smooth, black and piebald back of a Dutch cow.
Berkoot, the bull, was lying down with his ring in his lip, and seemed
about to get up, but thought better of it, and only gave two snorts as
they passed by him. Pava, the reddish beauty, huge as a
hippopotamus, with her back turned to them, screened her calf from the
arrivals and sniffed it all over.
  Levin went into the stall, looked Pava over, and hefted the
reddish and red-dappled calf up on its unsteady, spindly legs. Pava,
uneasy, began lowing, but when Levin put the calf close to her she was
soothed, and, sighing heavily, began licking her with her rough
tongue. The calf fumbling, poked its nose under its mother's groin,
and twirled its tiny tail.
  "Bring the light here, Fiodor- bring the lantern here," said
Levin, examining the heifer. "Like the dam! though the color takes
after the sire. A perfect beauty! Long, and broad in the haunch. Isn't
she a beauty now, Vassilii Fiodorovich?" he addressed the bailiff,
quite forgiving him for the buckwheat under the influence of his
delight in the heifer.
  "What bad blood could she take after?- Semion the contractor came
the day after you left. You must settle with him, Konstantin
Dmitrich," said the bailiff. "And I have already told you about the
machine."
  This matter alone was enough to bring Levin back to all the
details of his estate, which was on a large scale, and complicated. He
went straight from the cowhouse to the countinghouse, and, after a
short talk with the bailiff and Semion the contractor, he went back to
the house and straight upstairs to the drawing room.
                             XXVII.

  The house was big and old-fashioned, and Levin, though he lived
alone, heated and used the whole house. He knew that this was
stupid, he knew that it was even wrong, and contrary to his present
new plans, but this house was a whole world to Levin. It was the world
in which his father and mother had lived and died. They had lived just
the life that to Levin seemed the ideal of perfection, and that he had
dreamed of renewing with his wife, with his family.
  Levin scarcely remembered his mother. His conception of her was
for him a sacred memory, and his future wife was bound to be, in his
imagination, a repetition of that exquisite, holy ideal of a woman
that his mother had been.
  He was so far from conceiving of love for woman apart from
marriage that he positively pictured to himself first the family,
and only secondarily the woman who would give him a family. His
ideas of marriage were, consequently, quite unlike those of the
great majority of his acquaintances, for whom getting married was
merely one of the many affairs of everyday life. For Levin it was
the chief affair of life, on which its whole happiness turned. And now
he had to give up that!
  When he had gone into the second drawing room, where he always had
tea, and had settled himself in his armchair with a book, and
Agathya Mikhailovna had brought him tea, and with her usual, "Well,
I'll stay a while, my dear," had taken a chair at the window, he
felt that, however strange it might be, he had not parted from his
daydreams, and that he could not live without them. Whether with
her, or with another- it was still bound to be. He was reading his
book, pondering on what he was reading, and pausing to listen to
Agathya Mikhailovna, who gossiped away without flagging, and yet, with
all that, all sorts of pictures of his work and a future family life
rose disconnectedly before his imagination. He felt that in the
depth of his soul something was steadying, settling down, and abating.
  He heard Agathya Mikhailovna talking of how Prokhor had forgotten
his duty to God, and, with the money Levin had given him to buy a
horse, had been drinking without a letup, and had beaten his wife till
he'd half-killed her. He listened, and read his book, and recalled the
whole train of ideas suggested by his reading. It was Tyndall's
Treatise on Heat. He recalled his own criticisms of Tyndall for his
self-complacency in the cleverness of his experiments, and for his
lack of philosophic insight. And suddenly there floated into his
mind the joyful thought: "In two years' time I shall have two Dutch
cows in my herd; Pava herself will perhaps still be alive; a dozen
young daughters of Berkoot, and these three added for show- it would
be marvelous!" He took up his book again. "Now well, electricity and
heat are the same thing; but is it possible to substitute one quantity
for the other in an equation for the solution of any problem? No.
Well, then what of it? The connection between all the forces of nature
is felt instinctively, anyway.... It'll be particularly pleasant
when Pava's daughter will be a red-dappled cow like all the herd, to
which the other three should be added! Splendid! I'll go out with my
wife and visitors to meet the herd.... My wife says, 'Kostia and I
looked after that heifer like a child.' 'How can it interest you so
much?' says a visitor. 'Everything that interests him, interests
me.' But who will she be?" And he remembered what had happened at
Moscow.... "Well, there's nothing to be done.... It's not my fault.
But now everything shall go on in a new way. It's nonsense to
pretend that life won't let one, that the past won't let one. One must
struggle to live better- far better...." He raised his head, and
sank into thought. Old Laska, who had not yet fully digested her
delight at his return, and had run out into the yard to bark, came
back wagging her tail, and crept up to him, bringing in the scent of
the fresh air, put her head under his hand, and yelped plaintively,
asking to be stroked.
  "If she could but speak," said Agathya Mikhailovna. "Even though
it's a dog... Yet she understands that her master's come home, and
that he's low-spirited."
  "Why low-spirited?"
  "Do you suppose I don't see it, my dear? It's high time I should
know the gentlefolk. Why, I've grown up from a little thing with them.
Never mind, sir, so long as one has health and a clear conscience."
  Levin looked intently at her, surprised at how well she had fathomed
his thoughts.
  "Shall I fetch you another cup?" she asked and, taking his cup, went
out.
  Laska kept poking her head under his hand. He stroked her, and she
promptly curled up at his feet, laying her head on a protruding
hand-paw. And in token of all now being well and satisfactory, she
opened her mouth a little, smacked her lips, and settling her sticky
lips more comfortably about her old teeth, she sank into blissful
respose. Levin watched her last movements attentively.
  "That's what I'll do," he said to himself; "that's what I'll do!
Never mind.... All's well."
                             XXVIII.

  After the ball, early next morning, Anna Arkadyevna sent her husband
a telegram that she was leaving Moscow the same day.
  "No, I must go, I must go"; she explained the change in her plans to
her sister-in-law, in a tone that suggested that she had to remember
so many things that there was no enumerating them: "no, really, it had
better be today!"
  Stepan Arkadyevich was not dining at home, but he promised to come
and see his sister off at seven o'clock.
  Kitty, too, did not come, sending a note that she had a headache.
Dolly and Anna dined alone with the children and the English
governess. Whether it was because children are fickle, or because they
have acute senses, and they felt that Anna was quite different that
day from what she had been when they had taken such a fancy to her,
that she was not now interested in them- they had abruptly dropped
their play with their aunt, and their love for her, and were quite
indifferent to her leaving. Anna was absorbed the whole morning in
preparations for her departure. She wrote notes to her Moscow
acquaintances, jotted down her accounts, and packed. Altogether
Dolly fancied she was not in a placid state of mind, but in that
worried mood which Dolly knew so well in her own case, and which
does not come without cause, and for the most part covers
dissatisfaction with oneself. After dinner, Anna went up to her room
to dress, and Dolly followed her.
  "How queer you are today!" Dolly said to her.
  "I? Do you think so? I'm not queer, but I'm nasty. I am like that
sometimes. I keep feeling as if I could cry. It's very stupid, but
it'll pass off," said Anna quickly, and she bent her flushed face over
a tiny bag in which she was packing a nightcap and some cambric
handkerchiefs. Her eyes were particularly bright, and were continually
dimmed with tears. "In the same way I didn't want to leave
Peterburg- and now I don't want to go away from here."
  "You came here and did a good deed," said Dolly, looking intently at
her.
  Anna's eyes were wet with tears as she looked at her.
  "Don't say that, Dolly. I've done nothing, and could do nothing. I
often wonder why people are all in league to spoil me. What have I
done, and what could I do? In your heart there was found love enough
to forgive...."
  If it had not been for you, God knows what would have happened!
How happy you are, Anna!" said Dolly. "Everything is clear and good in
your heart."
  "Every heart has its own skeleton, as the English say."
  "You have no sort of skeleton, have you? Everything is so clear in
you."
  "I have!" said Anna suddenly, and, unexpectedly after her tears, a
sly, mocking smile puckered her lips.
  "Come, he's amusing, anyway, your skeleton, and not depressing,"
said Dolly, smiling.
  "No, he is depressing. Do you know why I'm going today instead of
tomorrow? This is a confession that weighs on me; I want to make you
its recipient," said Anna resolutely letting herself drop into an
armchair, and looking straight into Dolly's face.
  And to her surprise Dolly saw that Anna was blushing up to her ears,
up to the curly black ringlets on her neck.
  "Yes," Anna went on. "Do you know why Kitty didn't come to dinner?
She's jealous of me. I have spoiled... I've been the cause of that
ball being a torture to her instead of a pleasure. But truly, truly,
it's not my fault, or only my fault a little bit," she said,
daintily drawling the words "a little bit."
  "Oh, how like Stiva you said that!" said Dolly, laughing.
  Anna was hurt.
  "Oh no, oh no! I'm not Stiva," she said, knitting her brows. "That's
why I'm telling you, just because I do not even for an instant
permit myself to doubt about myself," said Anna.
  But at the very moment she was uttering the words, she felt that
they were not true. She was not merely doubting about herself- she
felt emotion at the thought of Vronsky, and was going away sooner than
she had meant, solely to avoid meeting him.
  "Yes, Stiva told me you danced the mazurka with him, and that he..."
  "You can't imagine how absurdly it all came about. I only meant to
be matchmaking, and all at once it turned out quite differently.
Possibly against my own will..."
  She flushed and stopped.
  "Oh, they feel it immediately!" said Dolly.
  "But I should be in despair if there were anything serious in it
on his side," Anna interrupted her. "And I'm certain it will all be
forgotten, and Kitty will leave off hating me."
  "All the same, Anna, to tell you the truth, I'm not very anxious for
this marriage for Kitty. And it's better it should come to nothing, if
he, Vronsky, is capable of falling in love with you in a single day."
  "Oh, heavens, that would be too silly!" said Anna, and again a
deep flush of pleasure appeared on her face, as she heard the idea
that absorbed her put into words. "And so here I am, going away,
having made an enemy of Kitty, whom I liked so much! Ah, how sweet she
is! But you'll make it right, Dolly? Eh?"
  Dolly could scarcely suppress a smile. She loved Anna, but she was
pleased to see that she, too, had her weaknesses.
  "An enemy? That can't be."
  "I did so want you all to care for me, as I do for you, and now I
care for you more than ever," said Anna, with tears in her eyes.
"Ah, how silly I am today!"
  She passed her handkerchief over her face and began dressing.
  At the very moment of starting Stepan Arkadyevich arrived, late,
rosy and good-humored, smelling of wine and cigars.
  Anna's emotionalism infected Dolly, and when she embraced her
sister-in-law for the last time, she whispered:
  "Remember, Anna, what you've done for me- I shall never forget.
And remember that I love you, and shall always love you as my
dearest friend!"
  "I don't know why," said Anna, kissing her and hiding her tears.
  "You understand me, and still understand. Good-by, my darling!"
                             XXIX.

  "Now, it's all over- God be praised!" was the first thought that
came to Anna Arkadyevna, when she had said good-by for the last time
to her brother, who had stood blocking up the entrance to the carriage
till the third bell rang. She sat down on her lounge beside
Annushka, and looked about her in the twilight of the sleeping
carriage. "Thank God! tomorrow I shall see Seriozha and Alexei
Alexandrovich, and my life, good and familiar, will go on in the old
way."
  Still in the same anxious frame of mind in which she had been all
that day, Anna took a meticulous pleasure in making herself
comfortable for the journey. With her tiny, deft hands she opened
and shut her little red bag, took out a cushion, laid it on her knees,
and, carefully wrapping up her feet, settled herself comfortably. An
invalid lady had already lain down to sleep. Two other ladies began
talking to Anna, and a stout elderly lady tucked up her feet, and made
observations about the heating of the train. Anna answered the
ladies in a few words, but not foreseeing any entertainment from the
conversation, she asked Annushka to get a small lantern, hooked it
on the arm of her seat, and took from her bag a paper knife and an
English novel. At first she could not get interested in her reading.
The fuss and stir were disturbing; then, when the train had started,
she could not help listening to the noises; then the snow beating on
the left window and sticking to the pane, and the sight of the muffled
guard passing by, covered with snow on one side, and the conversations
about the terrible blizzard raging outside, distracted her
attention. And after that everything was the same and the same: the
same jouncing and rattling, the same snow lashing the window, the same
rapid transitions from steaming heat to cold, and back again to
heat, the same flitting of the same faces in the half-murk, and the
same voices; and then Anna began to read, and to grasp what she
read. Annushka was already dozing, the red bag on her lap, clutched by
her broad hands, in gloves, of which one was torn. Anna Arkadyevna
read and grasped the sense, yet it was annoying to her to read- that
is, to follow the reflection of other people's lives. She had too
great a desire to live herself. If she read that the heroine of the
novel were nursing a sick man, she longed to move with noiseless steps
about his sickroom; if she read of a member of Parliament delivering a
speech, she longed to deliver it; if she read of how Lady Mary had
ridden after the hounds, and had provoked her sister-in-law, and had
surprised everyone by her daring- she, too, longed to be doing the
same. But there was no chance of doing anything; and, her little hands
toying with the smooth paper knife, she forced herself to read.
  The hero of the novel was already beginning to attain his English
happiness, a baronetcy, and an estate, and Anna was feeling a desire
to go with him to his estate, when she suddenly felt that he ought
to feel ashamed, and that she was ashamed of the same thing. But
what was it he was ashamed of? "What have I to be ashamed of?" she
asked herself in injured surprise. She abandoned the book and sank
against the back of her chair, tightly gripping the paper knife in
both hands. There was nothing to be ashamed of. She went over all
her Moscow recollections. All were fine, pleasant. She recalled the
ball, recalled Vronsky and his enamored, submissive face; she recalled
all her conduct with him- there was nothing shameful. Yet, with all
that, at this very point in her reminiscences, the feeling of shame
was intensified, as though some inner voice, precisely here, when
she recalled Vronsky, were saying to her: "Warm, very warm- hot!"
"Well, what is it?" she said to herself resolutely, shifting on her
seat. "What does it mean? Am I afraid to look at this without
blinking? Well, what is it? Can it be that between me and this
boy-officer there exist, or can exist, any other relations than such
as are common with every acquaintance?" She laughed contemptuously and
took up her book again; but now she was absolutely unable to make
sense of what she read. She passed the paper knife over the
windowpane, then laid its smooth, cool surface to her cheek, and
almost laughed aloud at the unreasoning joy that all at once possessed
her. She felt that her nerves, like strings, were being tautened
more and more upon some kind of tightening peg. She felt her eyes
opening wider and wider, her fingers and toes twitching nervously,
something within stopping her breathing, while all images and sounds
seemed in the swaying half-murk to strike her with extraordinary
vividness. Moments of doubt were continually besetting her: was the
car going forward, or back, or was it standing absolutely still? Was
it really Annushka at her side, or a stranger? "What's that on the arm
of the chair- a fur cloak or some beast? And what am I myself: is it
I, or some other woman?" She was afraid of yielding to this trance-
but something was drawing her into it, and, at will, she could yield
to it or resist it. She got up to rouse herself, and slipped off her
plaid and the cape of warm dress. For a moment she regained her
self-possession, and realized that the thin peasant who had come in
wearing a long nankeen overcoat, with a button missing from it, was
the fireman, that he was looking at the thermometer, that the wind and
snow had burst in after him through the door; but then everything grew
confused again.... That peasant with the long waist took to gnawing
something within the wall; the little crone started stretching her
legs the whole length of the car and filled it with a black cloud;
then there was a dreadful screeching and banging, as though someone
were being rent into pieces; then a red blaze blinded her eyes, and,
at last, everything was screened by a wall. Anna felt that she had
plunged downward. Yet all this was not terrible, but joyful. The voice
of a man muffled up and covered with snow shouted something in her
very ear. She arose and came to, realizing that they had come to a
station, and that this was the conductor. She requested Annushka to
hand her the cape she had taken off, and her shawl, put them on, and
went toward the door.
  "Do you wish to get out?" asked Annushka.
  "Yes, I want to get a breath of air. It's very hot in here."
  And she opened the door. The blizzard and the wind rushed to meet
her and began to contend with her for the door. And even this seemed
joyful to her. She opened the door and stepped out. This seemed to
be all that the wind had been lying in wait for; it set up a gleeful
whistle and was about to snatch her up and whirl her away, but she
clutched the cold doorpost and, holding on to her shawl, descended
to the platform and the shelter of the car. The wind had been mighty
on the steps, but on the platform, in the lee of the train, there
was a lull. With enjoyment she drew deep breaths of the snowy,
frosty air and, standing near the car, looked about the platform and
the lighted station.
                             XXX.

  The frightful storm raged and whistled between the wheels of the
cars, along the posts, around the corner of the station. The cars,
posts, people- everything in sight- were covered with snow on one
side, and were getting more and more snowed under. For a moment
there would come a lull in the storm, but then it would again swoop
down with such gusts that it seemed impossible to withstand it.
Meanwhile some men or other were dashing about, gaily talking to one
another, making the boards of the platform creak and ceaselessly
opening and shutting the big doors. A stooping human shadow glided
by at her feet, and she heard a hammer tapping upon iron. "Let's
have the telegram!" came an angry voice out of the stormy murk on
the other side. "This way! No. 28!" other voices were also shouting,
and muffled figures scurried by, plastered with snow. Two gentlemen
passed by her, cigarettes glowing in their mouths. She drew in one
more deep breath, and had just taken her hand out of her muff to grasp
the doorpost and enter the car, when still another man in a military
overcoat, quite close beside her, stepped between her and the
flickering light of a lantern. She looked round, and the same
instant recognized Vronsky's face. Putting his hand to the peak of his
cap, he bowed to her and asked if there weren't anything she wanted,
whether he could not be of some service to her? She gazed rather
long at him, without any answer, and, in spite of the shadow in
which he was standing, she saw (or fancied she saw) the expression
both of his face and his eyes. It was again that expression of
reverent rapture which had affected her so yesterday. More than once
she had told herself during the past few days, and only just now, that
Vronsky was for her only one of the hundreds of young men, forever
exactly the same, that one meets everywhere; that she would never
permit herself even to think of him; yet now at the first flush of
meeting him, she was seized by an emotion of joyous pride. She had
no need to ask why he was here. She knew, as surely as if he had
told her, that he was here only to be where she was.
  "I didn't know you were going. And why are you going?" she said,
letting fall the hand which had grasped the doorpost. And
irrepressible joy and animation shone in her face.
  "Why am I going?" he repeated, looking straight into her eyes.
"You know that I am going to be where you are," he said; "I cannot
do otherwise."
  And at this very point, as though it had overcome all obstacles, the
wind scattered the snow from the car roofs, and began to flutter
some sheet of iron it had torn off, while the low-pitched whistle of
the engine set up a roar in front, dismal and lamenting. All the
awesomeness of the blizzard now seemed still more splendid to her.
He had uttered precisely what her soul yearned for, but which her
reason dreaded. She made no answer, and in her face he beheld a
struggle.
  "Forgive me, if what I have said displeases you," he said humbly.
  He had spoken courteously, deferentially, yet so firmly, so
obdurately that, for long, she could find no answer.
  "What you say is wrong, and I beg of you, if you are a good man,
to forget what you have said, even as I shall forget it," she said
at last.
  "Not a single word of yours, nor a single gesture, shall I ever
forget- nor could I forget...."
  "Enough, enough!" she cried, vainly attempting to give a stern
expression to her face, which he was avidly scrutinizing. Clutching at
the cold doorpost, she clambered up the steps and quickly entered
the corridor of the car. But in this little corridor she paused,
reviewing in her imagination all that had occurred. Without
recalling her own words or his, she realized instinctively that that
conversation had brought them fearfully closer; and she was both
frightened and made happy thereby. After standing thus a few
seconds, she went into the car and sat down in her place. That
tensed state which had tormented her at first was not only renewed,
but grew greater and reached such a pitch that she was afraid that, at
any moment, something would snap within her from the excessive
tension. She did not sleep all night. But in that nervous tension, and
in the reveries that filled her imagination, there was nothing
unpleasant or gloomy; on the contrary, there was something joyous,
glowing and exhilarating. Toward morning Anna dozed off as she sat,
and when she awoke it was already light, and the train was nearing
Peterburg. At once thoughts of home, of her husband and son, and the
details of the day ahead, and days to follow, came thronging upon her.
  At Peterburg, as soon as the train stopped and she got out, the
first face that attracted her attention was that of her husband.
"Oh, my God! What has happened to his ears?" she thought looking at
his frigid and imposing figure, and especially the ears, that struck
her so now, as they propped up the brim of his round hat. Catching
sight of her he went to meet her, pursing his lips into their habitual
mocking smile, and fixing her with his big, tired eyes. Some
unpleasant sensation contracted her heart as she met his obdurate
and tired glance, as though she had expected to see him a different
man. She was particularly struck by that feeling of dissatisfaction
with herself which she experienced on meeting him. This was an
intimate, familiar feeling, like that state of dissimulation which she
experienced in her relations with her husband; but hitherto she had
not taken note of the feeling; now she was clearly and painfully aware
of it.
  "Yes, as you see, your tender spouse, as devoted as he was during
the second year after marriage, was consumed by the desire of seeing
you," he said in his dilatory, high-pitched voice, and in that tone
which he almost always used to her- a tone of bantering at anyone
who should speak thus in earnest.
  "Is Seriozha quite well?" she asked.
  "And is this all the reward," said he, "for my ardor? He's well-
quite well...."
                             XXXI.

  Vronsky had not even attempted to fall asleep all that night. He sat
in his armchair, his eyes fixed before him or scanning the people
who got in and out, and if he had indeed, on previous occasions,
struck and aroused people who did not know him by his air of
unshakable calmness, he now seemed prouder and more self-sufficient
than ever. He regarded people as if they were things. A nervous
young man, a clerk in a law court, who had the seat opposite his,
conceived a hatred for him because of this air. The young man asked
him for a light, and entered into conversation with him, and even
jostled him, to make him feel that he was not a thing, but a man.
But Vronsky kept on regarding him as if he were a lamppost, and the
young man grimaced, feeling that he was losing his self-possession
under the oppressiveness of this refusal to recognize him as a human
being.
  Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself a king, not
because he believed that he had made any impression on Anna- he did
not yet believe that- but because the impression she had made on him
afforded him happiness and pride.
  What would come of it all he did not know, or even think. He felt
that all his forces, hitherto dissolute, scattered, were centered on
one thing, and bent with fearful energy toward one blissful goal.
And therein lay his happiness. He did but know that he had told her
the truth, that he had come where she was, that all the happiness of
life, the sole meaning in life for him, now lay in seeing her and
hearing her voice. And when he got out of his car at Bologovo to get
some seltzer water, and had caught sight of Anna, his very first
word had involuntarily told her his very thoughts. And he was glad
he had told her, that she knew now, and was thinking of it. He did not
sleep all night. Back in his compartment, he incessantly kept
ruminating upon every posture in which he had seen her, every word she
had uttered; and, in his imagination, making his heart swoon,
floated pictures of a possible future.
  When he got out of the train at Peterburg, he felt after his
sleepless night as lively and fresh as after a cold bath. He paused
near his car, waiting for her to emerge. "Once more," he said to
himself, smiling unconsciously, "once more I shall see her walk, her
face; she may say something, turn her head, glance, smile, perhaps."
But before he caught sight of her, he saw her husband, whom the
stationmaster was deferentially escorting through the crowd. "Ah, yes.
The husband." Only now, for the first time, did Vronsky realize
clearly the fact that there was someone attached to her- a husband. He
had known that she had a husband, but had hardly believed in his
existence, and only now, when he saw him, did he fully believe in him,
with his head, and shoulders, and his black-trousered legs; especially
when he saw this husband placidly take her arm, with a consciousness
of proprietorship.
  Seeing Alexei Alexandrovich with his spick-and-span Peterburg face
and austerely self-confident figure, in his round hat, with his rather
prominent spine, he believed in him, and was aware of a disagreeable
sensation, such as might be felt by a man who, tortured by thirst,
finds, on reaching a spring, a dog, a sheep or a pig therein that
has not only drunk of it, but also muddied the water. Alexei
Alexandrovich's manner of walking, gyrating his whole pelvis and his
flat feet, was especially offensive to Vronsky. He could recognize
in no one but himself an indubitable right to love her. But she was
still the same, and the sight of her affected him the same way,
physically reviving him, stirring him, and filling his soul with
happiness. He told his German valet, who ran up to him from the second
class, to take his things and go on, he himself went up to her. He saw
the first meeting between the husband and wife, and noted, with a
lover's insight, the sign of the slight embarrassment with which she
spoke to her husband. "No, she does not love him, and cannot love
him," he decided to himself.
  At the very moment that he was approaching Anna Arkadyevna from
the back, he noticed with joy that she was conscious of his drawing
near, and that she looked round; after which, seeing him, she turned
again to her husband.
  "Have you had a good night?" he said, bowing both to her and to
her husband, and leaving it to Alexei Alexandrovich to accept the
bow on his own account, and to return it or not, as he might see fit.
  "Thank you- a very good one," she answered.
  Her face seemed tired, and lacking in that play of animation which
usually hovered between her smile and her eyes; but for a single
instant, as she glanced at him, something flashed in her eyes, and
although this flash died away at once, he was made happy by that
moment. She glanced at her husband, to find out whether he knew
Vronsky. Alexei Alexandrovich was regarding Vronsky with
displeasure, absent-mindedly trying to recall who he was. Vronsky's
calmness and self-confidence had here run up, like a scythe against
a stone, on the frigid self-confidence of Alexei Alexandrovich.
  "Count Vronsky," said Anna.
  "Ah! We are acquainted, I believe," said Alexei Alexandrovich
apathetically, proffering his hand. "You set out with the mother and
return with the son," he said to Anna, articulating distinctly, as
though each word were a coin of high value bestowed by him on his
hearers.- "You're back from leave, I suppose?" he said, and without
waiting for a reply, he addressed his wife in his bantering tone:
"Well, were a great many tears shed in Moscow at parting?"
  By addressing his wife thus he meant Vronsky to perceive that he
wished to be left alone, and, turning slightly toward him, he
touched his hat; but Vronsky turned to Anna Arkadyevna:
  "I hope to have the honor of calling on you," he said.
  Alexei Alexandrovich glanced with his weary eyes at Vronsky.
  "Delighted," he said coldly. "We're at home Mondays." Then,
dismissing Vronsky entirely, he said to his wife: "I am rather lucky
to have just half an hour to meet you, so that I can prove to you my
fondness," he went on, in the same bantering tone.
  "You lay too great a stress on your fondness for me to value it very
much," she responded in the same bantering tone, involuntarily
listening to the sound of Vronsky's steps behind them. "But what
have I to do with that?" she said to herself, and began questioning
her husband as to how Seriozha had got on without her.
  "Oh, capitally! Mariette says he has been a very darling boy, and...
I must disappoint you... But he has not languished for you as your
husband has. But once more merci, my dear, for bestowing a whole day
upon me. Our dear Samovar will be enraptured." (He called the Countess
Lidia Ivanovna, well known in society, a samovar, because she was
bubbling over with excitement on any and every occasion.) "She has
been asking for you. And, d'you know, if I may venture to advise
you, you ought to go to see her today. You know how she takes
everything to heart. Just now, with all her own cares, she's anxious
about the reconciliation of the Oblonskys."
  The Countess Lidia Ivanovna was a friend of her husband's, and the
center of that one of the coteries of the Peterburg beau monde with
which Anna was, through her husband, in the closest rapport.
  "But I wrote to her."
  "Yes, but she must have full details. Go to see her, if you're not
too tired, my dear. Well, Kondratii will take you in the carriage,
while I go to my committee. Once more I shall not be alone at dinner,"
Alexei Alexandrovich continued, but no longer in a jesting tone.
"You wouldn't believe how I've grown used to you...."
  And, with a prolonged pressure of her hand, and a particular
smile, he helped her into her carriage.
                             XXXII.

  The first person to meet Anna at home was her son. He dashed down
the stairs to her, in spite of the governess's call, and with frenzied
rapture shrieked: "Mother! mother!" Running up to her, he hung on
her neck.
  "I told you it was mother!" he shouted to the governess. "I knew
it!"
  And her son, like her husband, aroused in Anna a feeling akin to
disappointment. In her imagination he had been better than he was in
reality. She had to descend to reality to enjoy him as he was. But,
even so, he was charming, with his fair curls, his blue eyes and his
chubby, graceful little legs in tightly pulled-up stockings. Anna
experienced an almost physical delight in the sensation of his
nearness, and his caresses; and a moral reassurance, when she met
his ingenuous, trusting and loving glance, and heard his naive
questions. Anna took out the presents Dolly's children had sent him,
and told her son about Tania, a little girl in Moscow, and how Tania
could read, and even taught the other children.
  "Why, am I not as good as she?" asked Seriozha.
  "To me you're better than anyone else in the whole world."
  "I know that," said Seriozha, smiling.
  Anna had scarcely drunk her coffee when the Countess Lidia
Ivanovna was announced. The Countess Lidia Ivanovna was a tall, fleshy
woman, with an unwholesomely yellow complexion and beautiful,
pensive black eyes. Anna liked her, but today she seemed, for the
first time, to see her with all her shortcomings.
  "Well, my friend, were you the bearer of the olive branch?" asked
Countess Lidia Ivanovna, the minute she entered the room.
  "Yes, it's all over, but it was not at all as serious as we
thought," answered Anna. "My belle-soeur is, in general, much too
categorical."
  But Countess Lidia Ivanovna, who was interested in everything that
did not concern her, had a habit of never listening to what interested
her; she interrupted Anna:
  "Yes, there's plenty of sorrow and evil in the world- and I am so
fatigued today!"
  "Oh, why?" asked Anna, trying to repress a smile.
  "I'm beginning to weary of vainly breaking lances for the truth, and
at times I'm altogether unstrung. The affair with our Dear Sisters
[this was a religiously patriotic, philanthropic institution]
started off splendidly, but it's impossible to do anything with such
people," added Countess Lidia Ivanovna, with a mocking
submissiveness to fate. "They pounced on the idea, and mangled it, and
afterward they thrash it out so pettily and trivially. Two or three
people, your husband among them, grasp all the significance of this
affair but the others merely degrade it. Yesterday Pravdin wrote to
me..."
  Pravdin was a well-known Pan-Slavist abroad, and Countess Lidia
Ivanovna told the gist of his letter.
  Next the Countess spoke of other unpleasantnesses and intrigues
against the work of the unification of the churches, and departed in
haste, since that day she had to attend the meeting of another
society, and also a Slavonic committee.
  "All this is as it has always been; but how is it I didn't notice it
before?" Anna asked herself. "Or has she been very much irritated
today? It's really ludicrous: her object is to do good; she's a
Christian; yet she's forever angry, and forever having enemies- and
always enemies in the name of Christianity and doing good."
  After Countess Lidia Ivanovna another friend came, the wife of a
director of the Department, who told her all the news of the town.
At three o'clock she too went away, promising to come to dinner.
Alexei Alexandrovich was at the Ministry. Anna, left alone, spent
the time till dinner in lending her presence to her son's dinner (he
dined apart from his parents), in putting her things in order, and
in reading and answering the notes and letters which had accumulated
on her escritoire.
  The feeling of unreasoning shame, which she had felt during the
journey, and her agitation, had completely vanished. In the accustomed
conditions of her life she again felt herself firm and irreproachable.
  She recalled with wonder her state of mind only yesterday. "What was
it? Nothing. Vronsky said something silly, which it was easy to put an
end to, and I answered just as I should have. To speak of it to my
husband would be unnecessary and impermissible. To speak of it would
be to attach importance to that which has none." She remembered how
she had told her husband of what was almost declaration made her in
Peterburg by a young man, a subordinate of her husband's, and how
Alexei Alexandrovich had answered that every woman of the world was
exposed to this sort of thing, but that he had the fullest
confidence in her tact, and would never permit himself to degrade
her and himself by jealousy. "So then, there's no reason to say
anything? And, thank God, there isn't anything to say," she told
herself.
                             XXXIII.

  Alexei Alexandrovich came back from the Ministry at four o'clock,
but as often happened, had no chance to drop in at her room. He went
into his study to see the people waiting for him with petitions, and
to sign certain papers brought him by his head clerk. At dinnertime
(there were always at least three people dining with the Karenins)
there arrived an old lady, a cousin of Alexei Alexandrovich; the
director of the Department and his wife; and a young man who had
been recommended to Alexei Alexandrovich for a post. Anna went into
the drawing room to entertain these guests. Precisely at five o'clock,
before the bronze Peter the First clock had finished the fifth stroke,
Alexei Alexandrovich made his entry, in white tie and evening coat
with two stars, as he had to go out directly after dinner. Every
minute of Alexei Alexandrovich's life was taken up and apportioned.
And in order to accomplish all that each day held for him, he
adhered to the strictest orderliness. "Nor haste nor rest," was his
device. He entered the dining hall, bowed to all, and hurriedly sat
down, smiling to his wife:
  "Yes, my solitude is over. You wouldn't believe how uncomfortable
[he laid stress on the word uncomfortable] it is to dine alone."
  At dinner he chatted with his wife about things at Moscow, and
asked, with his mocking smile, about Stepan Arkadyevich; but the
conversation was for the most part general, dealing with the
official and public news of Peterburg. After dinner he spent half an
hour with his guests, and, again with a smile, pressed his wife's
hand, withdrew, and drove off to the Council. Anna went that evening
neither to the Princess Betsy Tverskaia, who, hearing of her return,
had invited her, nor to the theater, where she had a box for that
evening. Her principal reason for not going out was because the
dress she had expected to wear was not ready. All in all, Anna was
exceedingly annoyed when she started to dress for the evening after
the departure of her guests. Before her departure for Moscow she,
who was generally a mistress of the art of dressing well yet
inexpensively, had given her dressmaker three dresses to make over.
The dresses were to be made over so that their old selves would be
unrecognizable, and they should have been ready three days ago. It
turned out that two dresses were nowhere near ready, while the other
one had not been made over to Anna's liking. The dressmaker came to
explain, asserting that her way was best, and Anna had become so
heated that she blushed at the recollection. To regain her composure
fully she went into the nursery and spent the whole evening with her
son, putting him to bed herself, making the sign of the cross over
him, and tucking him in. She was glad she had not gone out anywhere,
and had spent the evening so well. She felt so lighthearted and
calm, she saw so clearly that all that had seemed to her so
significant on her railway journey was merely one of the ordinary
trivial incidents of fashionable life, and that she had no cause to
feel ashamed before anyone else or before herself. Anna sat down
near the fireplace with an English novel and waited for her husband.
Exactly at half-past nine she heard his ring, and he entered the room.
  "Here you are at last!" she observed, extending her hand to him.
  He kissed her hand and sat down beside her.
  "All in all, I can see your trip was a success," he said to her.
  "Yes, very much so," said she, and she began telling him
everything from the beginning: her journey with Countess Vronskaia,
her arrival, the accident at the station. Then she described the
pity she had felt, first for her brother, and, afterward, for Dolly.
  "I do not suppose there is any excuse for such a man, even though he
is your brother," said Alexei Alexandrovich sternly.
  Anna smiled. She knew that he said this precisely to show that
family considerations could not prevent him from expressing his
sincere opinion. She knew this trait in her husband and liked it.
  "I am glad everything has ended so well, and that you have
returned," he went on. "Well, and what do they say there about the new
bill I have got passed in the Council?"
  Anna had heard nothing of this bill, and she felt
conscience-stricken that she could so readily forget what was to him
of such importance.
  "Here, on the other hand, this has created a great deal of talk,"
said he, with a self-satisfied smile.
  She saw that Alexei Alexandrovich wanted to tell her something
that pleased him about it, and she brought him by questions to telling
it. With the same self-satisfied smile he told her of the ovations
he had received as a consequence of the bill he had passed.
  "I was very, very happy. It shows that at last an intelligent and
firm view of the matter is forming among us."
  After his second cup of tea, with cream and bread, Alexei
Alexandrovich got up, and went toward his study.
  "And you went nowhere this evening? Weren't You really bored?" he
said.
  "Oh, no!" she answered, getting up after him and accompanying him
across the room to his study. "What are you reading now?" she asked.
  "Just now I'm reading Duc de Lille- Poisie des enfers," he answered.
"A most remarkable book."
  Anna smiled, as people smile at the weaknesses of those they love,
and, putting her hand in his, she kept him company to the door of
his study. She knew his habit, now become a necessity, of reading in
the evening. She knew, too, that in spite of his official duties,
which engrossed almost all his time, he deemed it his duty to keep
up with everything of note that appeared in the intellectual sphere.
She knew, too, that his actual interest lay in books dealing with
politics, philosophy and theology, that art was utterly foreign to his
nature; but, in spite of this- or rather, in consequence of it- Alexei
Alexandrovich never missed anything which created a sensation in the
world of art, but made it his duty to read everything. She knew that
in politics, in philosophy, in theology, Alexei Alexandrovich was a
doubter and a seeker; yet in matters of art and poetry- and, above
all, of music, of which he was totally devoid of understanding- he had
the most definite and decided opinions. He was fond of discoursing
on Shakespeare, Raphael, Beethoven, on the significance of new schools
of poetry and music, all of which were classified by him with most
obvious consistency.
  "Well, God be with you," she said at the door of the study, where
a shaded candle and a decanter of water were already placed near his
armchair. "As for me, I'm going to write to Moscow."
  He squeezed her hand, and again kissed it.
  "Still, he's a good man; truthful, kindhearted, and remarkable in
his own sphere," Anna said to herself, back in her room, as though
defending him before someone who accused him, saying that one could
not love him. "But why is it his ears stick out so queerly? Or has
he had his hair cut?..."
  Exactly at twelve, as Anna was still sitting at her desk finishing a
letter to Dolly, she heard the sound of measured, slippered steps, and
Alexei Alexandrovich, washed and combed, a book under his arm,
approached her.
  "Come, come," said he, with a particular smile, and passed on into
their bedroom.
  "And what right had he to look at him like that?" reflected Anna,
recalling how Vronsky had looked at Alexei Alexandrovich.
  Having disrobed, she went into the bedroom; but her face had none of
the animation which, during her stay at Moscow, had fairly spurted
from her eyes and her smile; on the contrary, now the fire seemed
extinct in her, or hidden somewhere far away.
                             XXXIV.

  Upon his departure from Peterburg Vronsky had left his large
apartments on Morskaia to his friend and favorite comrade Petritsky.
  Petritsky was a young lieutenant, not particularly well-connected,
and not merely not wealthy, but in debt all around. Toward evening
he was always drunk, and he had often found himself in the
guardhouse because of sorts of ludicrous and disgraceful scrapes,
but he was a favorite both of his comrades and his superior
officers. At twelve o'clock, as Vronsky was driving up from the
station to his quarters, he saw, near the entrance of the house, a
hired carriage familiar to him. Even as he rang he heard, beyond the
door, masculine laughter, the twitter of a feminine voice, and
Petritsky's shout: "If that's one of the villains, don't let him
in!" Vronsky told the servant not to announce him, and slipped
noiselessly into the first room. Baroness Shilton, a friend of
Petritsky's, with a rosy little face and flaxen-fair, resplendent in a
lilac satin gown, and filling the whole room, like a canary, with
her Parisian accents, sat at a round table, brewing coffee. Petritsky,
in his overcoat, and the cavalry captain Kamerovsky, in full
uniform, probably just come from duty, were sitting near her.
  "Bravo! Vronsky!" shouted Petritsky, jumping up, scraping his chair.
"Our host himself! Baroness, some coffee for him out of the new
coffeepot. There, we didn't expect you! I Hope you're satisfied with
the adornment of your study," he said, indicating the Baroness. "You
know each other, of course?"
  "I should say so!" said Vronsky, with a bright smile, squeezing
the Baroness's little hand. "Why, we're old friends."
  "You've just returned after traveling," said the Baroness, "so
I'll run along. Oh, I'll be off this minute, if I'm in the way!"
  "You're home, wherever you are, Baroness," said Vronsky. "How do you
do, Kamerovsky?" he added, coldly shaking hands with Kamerovsky.
  "There, you can never say such charming things," said the
Baroness, turning to Petritsky.
  "No- why not? After dinner even I can say things quite as good."
  "After dinner there's no merit in them! Well, then, I'll give you
some coffee; go wash and tidy up," said the Baroness, sitting down
again, and anxiously turning a gadget in the new coffee urn.
"Pierre, give me the coffee," she said, addressing Petritsky, whom she
called Pierre, playing on his surname, making no secret of her
relations with him. "I want to put some more in."
  "You'll spoil it!"
  "No, I won't spoil it! Well, and how is your wife?" said the
Baroness suddenly, interrupting Vronsky's conversation with his
comrade. "We've been marrying you off here. Have you brought your wife
along?"
  "No, Baroness. I was born a gypsy, and a gypsy I'll die."
  "So much the better- so much the better. Shake hands on it."
  And the Baroness, detaining Vronsky, began telling him,
interspersing her story with many jokes, about her latest plans of
life, and seeking his counsel.
  "He persists in refusing to give me a divorce! Well, what am I to
do?" (He was her husband.) "Now I want to begin a suit against him.
What would you advise? Kamerovsky, look after the coffee- it's
boiled out; you can see I'm taken up with business! I want a
lawsuit, because I must have my property. You can understand the
stupidity of his saying that I am unfaithful to him," she said
contemptuously, "yet through it he wants to get the benefit of my
fortune."
  Vronsky heard with pleasure this lighthearted prattle of a pretty
woman, said yes to everything, gave her half-joking counsel, and
altogether dropped at once into the tone habitual to him in talking to
such women. In his Peterburg world all people were divided into two
utterly opposed kinds. One, the lower, consisted of vulgar, stupid
and, above all, ridiculous people, who believe that one husband
ought to live with the one wife whom he has lawfully wedded; that a
girl should be innocent, a woman modest, and a man manly,
self-controlled, and strong; that one ought to bring up one's
children, earn one's bread and pay one's debts; and various similar
absurdities. Those people were of an old-fashioned and ridiculous
kind. But there was another kind of people- real people, to which they
all belonged, and here the chief thing was to be elegant, magnanimous,
daring, gay, and to abandon oneself without a blush to every
passion, and to laugh at everything else.
  For the first moment only, Vronsky was startled, after the
impressions of a quite different world that he had brought with him
from Moscow; but immediately, as though he had thrust his feet into
old slippers, he stepped into his former lighthearted, pleasant world.
  The coffee was really never made, but spluttered over everyone and
boiled away, doing just what was required of it- that is, providing
cause for much noise and laughter, and spoiling a costly rug and the
Baroness's gown.
  "Well, good-by now- or else you'll never get washed, and I shall
have on my conscience the worst offense any decent person can
commit- uncleanliness. So you would advise a knife at his throat?"
  "Absolutely- and in such a way that your little hand may not be
far from his lips. He'll kiss it, and all will end well," answered
Vronsky.
  "So, the Francais tonight!" and, with a rustle of her skirts, she
vanished.
  Kamerovsky got up too, and Vronsky, without waiting for him to go,
shook hands and went off to his dressing room. While he was washing,
Petritsky briefly outlined to him his position, as far as it had
changed since Vronsky's departure from Peterburg. No money whatsoever.
His father said he wouldn't give him any, nor pay his debts. His
tailor was trying to get him locked up, and another fellow, too, was
threatening to do so without fail. The colonel of his regiment had
announced that if these scandals did not cease a resignation would
be inevitable. As for the Baroness, he was fed up with her,
particularly because she was forever wanting to give him money. But
there was another girl- he intended showing her to Vronsky- a
marvel, exquisite, in the strict Oriental style, "genre of the slave
Rebecca, you see." He had had a row, too, with Berkoshev, and the
latter intended sending seconds, but, of course, it would all come
to nothing. Altogether everything was going splendidly and was most
jolly. And, without letting his comrade enter into further details
of his position, Petritsky proceeded to tell him all the interesting
news. As he listened to Petritsky's familiar stories, in the
familiar setting of the rooms he had spent the last three years in,
Vronsky felt the delightful sensation of coming back to the insouciant
and customary life of Peterburg.
  "Impossible!" he cried, releasing the pedal of the wash basin in
which he had been sousing his stalwart red neck. "Impossible!" he
cried, at the news that Laura had dropped Fertinghof and had tied up
with Mileev. "And is he as stupid and satisfied as ever? Well, and
what's Buzulukov doing?"
  "Oh, Buzulukov got into a scrape- simply lovely!" cried Petritsky.
"You know his passion for balls- and he never misses a single one at
court. He went to a big ball in a new casque. Have you seen the new
casques? Very good, and lighter. Well, he's standing... No- do
listen."
  "I am listening," answered Vronsky, rubbing himself with a rough
towel.
  "The Grand Duchess passes by with some ambassador or other, and,
as ill luck would have it, their talk veers to the new casques. And so
the Grand Duchess wanted to show the new casque to the
ambassador.... Just then they catch sight of our dear boy standing
there." (Petritsky mimicked him, standing with his casque.) "The Grand
Duchess requested him to give her the casque- he doesn't do so. What's
up? Well, they all wink at him, and nod and frown- give it to her, do!
He still doesn't. Just stands there, stock-still. You can picture it
to yourself!... Well, this... what's his name... tries to take the
casque from him... He won't give it up!... This chap tore it from him,
and hands it to the Grand Duchess. "This is the new casque," says
the Grand Duchess. She turned the casque over, and- just picture
it!- bang went a pear and candy out of it- two pounds of candy!...
He'd collected all that- our dear boy!"
  Vronsky rolled with laughter. And, long afterward, even when he
was talking of other things, he would go off into peals of his
hearty laughter baring his strong, closely set teeth, whenever he
thought of the casque.
  Having learned all the news, Vronsky, with the assistance of his
valet, got into his uniform, and went off to report himself. He
intended, afterward, to go to his brother and to Betsy, and to pay
several visits, as an entering wedge into that society where he
might meet Madame Karenina. As always in Peterburg, he left home
without any intention of returning before very late at night.
                          PART TWO

                             I.

  Toward the end of winter, in the house of the Shcherbatskys, a
consultation was being held, which was to determine the state of
Kitty's health, and what was to be done to restore her failing
strength. She had been ill, and, as spring came on, she grew worse.
The family doctor gave her cod-liver oil, then iron, then lunar
caustic; but since neither the first, nor the second, nor the third
availed, and since his advice was to go abroad before the beginning of
the spring, a celebrated doctor was called in. The celebrated
doctor, not yet old and a very handsome man, demanded an examination
of the patient. He maintained, with special satisfaction, it seemed,
that maiden modesty is merely a relic of barbarism, and that nothing
could be more natural than for a man who was not yet old to handle a
young girl in the nude. He deemed this natural, because he did it
every day, and neither felt nor thought, as it seemed to him, anything
evil as he did it and, consequently, he considered girlish modesty not
merely as a relic of barbarism, but, as well, an insult to himself.
  It was necessary to submit, for, although all the doctors studied in
the same school, all using the same textbooks, and all learned in
the same science, and though some people said this celebrated doctor
was but a poor doctor, in the Princess's household and circle it was
for some reason held that this celebrated doctor alone had some
peculiar knowledge, and that he alone could save Kitty. After thorough
examination and tapping of the patient, distraught and dazed with
shame, the celebrated doctor, having painstakingly washed his hands,
was standing in the drawing room talking to the Prince. The Prince
frowned and coughed as he listened to the doctor. As a man who had
seen something of life, and neither a fool nor an invalid, he had no
faith in medicine, and at soul was wrought up with all this comedy,
especially as he was probably the only one who fully understood the
cause of Kitty's illness. "You're barking up the wrong tree," he
mentally applied this phrase from the hunter's vocabulary to the
celebrated doctor, as he listened to the latter's patter about the
symptoms of his daughter's complaint. The doctor, for his part,
found difficulty in restraining the expression of his contempt for
this old grandee, as well as in condescending to the low level of
his comprehension. He perceived that it was useless to talk to the old
man, and that the head of this house was the mother- and she it was
before whom he intended to scatter his pearls. It was at this point
that the Princess entered the drawing room with the family doctor. The
Prince retreated, doing his best not to betray how ridiculous he
regarded the whole comedy. The Princess was distraught, and did not
know what to do. She felt herself at fault before Kitty.
  "Well, doctor, decide our fate," said the Princess. "Tell me
everything."- "Is there any hope?" was what she had wanted to say, but
her lips quivered, and she could not utter this question. "Well,
doctor?"
  "Immediately, Princess- I will discuss the matter with my colleague,
and then have the honor of laying my opinion before you."
  "Then we had better leave you?"
  "As you please."
  The Princess, with a sigh, stepped outside.
  When the doctors were left alone, the family doctor began timidly
explaining his opinion, that there was an incipient tubercular
process, but... and so on. The celebrated doctor listened to him,
and in the middle of the other's speech looked at his big gold watch.
  "That is so," said he. "But..."
  The family doctor respectfully ceased in the middle of his speech.
  "As you know, we cannot determine the incipience of the tubercular
process; until the appearance of vomicae there is nothing determinate.
But we may suspect it. And there are indications: malnutrition,
nervous excitability, and so on. The question stands thus: if we
suspect a tubercular process, what must we do to maintain nutrition?"
  "But then, you know, there are always moral, spiritual causes at the
back of these cases," the family doctor permitted himself to
interpolate with a subtle smile.
  "Yes, that's to be taken for granted," retorted the celebrated
doctor, again glancing at his watch. "Beg pardon- but is the Iauzsky
bridge finished yet, or must one still make a detour?" he asked.
"Ah! It is finished. Well, in that case I can make it in twenty
minutes. As we were saying, the question may be posited thus: the
nutrition must be maintained and the nerves improved. The one is bound
with the other; one must work upon both sides of this circle."
  "But what about the trip abroad?" asked the family doctor.
  "I am a foe to trips abroad. And take notice: if there is any
incipient tubercular process, which we cannot know, a trip abroad will
not help. We must have a remedy that would improve nutrition, and do
no harm."
  And the celebrated doctor expounded his plan of treatment with Soden
waters, in designating which his main end was evidently their
harmlessness.
  The family doctor heard him out attentively and respectfully.
  "But in favor of foreign travel I would urge the change of habits,
the removal from conditions which evoke memories. And then- the mother
wishes it," he added.
  "Ah! Well, in that case, one might go; well, let them go; but
those German charlatans may do harm.... Our instructions ought to be
followed.... Well, let them go then."
  He again glanced at his watch.
  "Oh! it's time to go," and he went to the door.
  The celebrated doctor informed the Princess (prompted by a feeling
of propriety) that he must see the patient once more.
  "What! Another examination!" the mother exclaimed in horror.
  "Oh, no- I merely need certain details, Princess."
  "Come this way."
  And the mother, followed by the doctor, went into the drawing room
to Kitty. Wasted and blushing, with a peculiar glitter in her eyes-
a consequence of the shame she had gone through, Kitty was standing in
the middle of the room. When the doctor came in she turned crimson,
and her eyes filled with tears. All her illness and its treatment
seemed to her a thing so stupid- even funny! Treatment seemed to her
as funny as reconstructing the pieces of a broken vase. It was her
heart that was broken. Why, then, did they want to cure her with pills
and powders? But she could not hurt her mother- all the more so
since her mother considered herself to blame.
  "May I trouble you to sit down, Princess?" the celebrated doctor
said to her.
  Smiling, he, sat down facing her, felt her pulse, and again
started in with his tiresome questions. She answered him, and
suddenly, becoming angry, got up.
  "You must pardon me, doctor- but really, this will lead us
nowhere. You ask me the same things, three times running."
  The celebrated doctor did not take umbrage.
  "Sickly irritability," said he to the Princess, when Kitty had
left the room. "However, I had finished...."
  And the doctor scientifically defined to the Princess, as to an
exceptionally clever woman, the condition of the young Princess, and
concluded by explaining the mode of drinking the unnecessary waters.
When the question of going abroad came up, the doctor was plunged into
profound considerations, as though deciding a weighty problem. Finally
his decision was given: they might go abroad, but must put no faith in
charlatans, but turn to him in everything.
  It seemed as though some cheerful influence had sprung up after
the doctor's departure. The mother grew more cheerful when she
returned to her daughter, while Kitty too pretended to be more
cheerful. She had frequent, almost constant, occasions to be
pretending now.
  "Really, I'm quite well, maman. But if you want to go abroad,
let's!" she said, and, trying to show that she was interested in the
proposed trip, she began talking of the preparations for the
departure.
                             II.

  Right after the doctor Dolly arrived. She knew that the consultation
was scheduled for that day, and, despite the fact that she had only
recently gotten up from her lying-in (she had had another little
girl at the end of the winter), despite her having enough trouble
and cares of her own, she had left her breast baby and an ailing
girl to come and learn Kitty's fate, which was being decided that day.
  "Well, what's what?" said she, entering into the drawing room,
without taking off her hat. "You're all in good spirits. That means
good news, then?"
  An attempt was made to tell her what the doctor had said, but it
proved that, even though the doctor had talked coherently and long, it
was utterly impossible to convey what he had said. The only point of
interest was that going abroad was definitely decided upon.
  Dolly could not help sighing. Her dearest friend, her sister, was
going away. And her life was far from gay. Her relations with Stepan
Arkadyevich after their reconciliation had become humiliating. The
welding Anna had made proved not at all solid, and family concord
had broken down again at the same point. There was nothing definite,
but Stepan Arkadyevich was hardly ever at home; also, there was hardly
ever any money, and Dolly was constantly being tortured by
suspicions of infidelities, and by now she drove them away from her,
dreading the agony of jealousy she had already experienced. The
first explosion of jealousy, once lived through, could never return,
and even the discovery of infidelities could never affect her now as
it had the first time. Such a discovery now would only mean breaking
up her family habits, and she permitted him to deceive her,
despising him- and still more herself- for this weakness. Besides
this, the cares of her large family were a constant torment to her:
now the nursing of her breast baby did not go well; now the nurse
would leave, now (as at the present time) one of the children would
fall ill.
  "Well, how's everybody in your family?" asked her mother.
  "Ah, maman, we have enough trouble of our own. Lili has taken ill,
and I'm afraid it's scarlatina. I have come here now to find out about
Kitty, and then I shall shut myself up entirely, if- God forbid- it
really be scarlatina."
  The old Prince too had come in from his study after the doctor's
departure, and, after offering his cheek to Dolly, and chatting awhile
with her, he turned to his wife:
  "What have you decided- are you going? Well, and what do you want to
do with me?"
  "I think you had better stay here, Alexandre," said his wife.
  "Just as you wish."
  "Maman, why shouldn't father come with us?" said Kitty. "He'll
feel better, and so will we."
  The old Prince got up and stroked Kitty's hair. She lifted her
head and looked at him with a forced smile. It always seemed to her
that he understood her better than anyone else in the family did,
though he spoke but little with her. Being the youngest, she was her
father's favorite, and she fancied that his love for her gave him
insight. When now her gaze met his blue, kindly eyes, scrutinizing her
intently, it seemed to her that he saw right through her, and
understood all the evil things that were at work within her.
Reddening, she was drawn toward him, expecting a kiss; but he merely
patted her hair and said:
  "These silly chignons! One can't as much as get near one's real
daughter, but simply stroke the hair of defunct females. Well
Dolinka," he turned to his elder daughter, "what's your ace up to
now?"
  "Nothing, papa," answered Dolly, who knew that this referred to
her husband. "He's always out; I hardly ever see him," she could not
resist adding with a mocking smile.
  "Why, hasn't he gone into the country yet- about the sale of the
forest?"
  "No; he's still getting ready."
  "Oh, that's it!" said the Prince. "And so I'm to be getting ready,
too? At your service," he said to his wife, sitting down. "And as
for you, Katia," he went on, addressing his younger daughter, "you
must wake up one fine day and say to yourself: Why, I'm quite well,
and merry, and I'm going out again with papa for an early morning
stroll in the frost. Eh?"
  What her father said seemed simple enough, yet at these words
Kitty grew confused and upset, like a criminal caught red-handed.
"Yes, he knows all, he understands all, and in these words he's
telling me that though I'm ashamed, I must live through my shame." She
could not pluck up spirit enough to make any answer. She made an
attempt but suddenly burst into tears, and ran out of the room.
  "See what comes of your jokes!" the Princess pounced on her husband.
"You're always..." she launched into her reproachful speech.
  The Prince listened to the Princess's reproaches rather a long while
and kept silent, but his face grew more and more glowering.
  "She's so much to be pitied, poor thing, so much to be pitied, yet
you don't feel how it pains her to hear the least hint as to the cause
of it all. Ah! to be so mistaken in people!" said the Princess, and by
the change in her tone both Dolly and the Prince knew she meant
Vronsky. "I don't know why there aren't laws against such vile,
dishonorable people."
  "Ah, I oughtn't to listen to you!" said the Prince glumly, getting
up from his chair, as if to go, yet pausing in the doorway. "There are
laws, my dear, and since you've challenged me to it, I'll tell you
who's to blame for it all: you- you, you alone. Laws against such
young gallants have always existed, and still exist! Yes, if there
weren't anything that ought not to have been, I, old as I am, would
have called him out to the barrier, this swell. Yes, and now go
ahead and physic her, and call in these charlatans."
  The Prince, it seemed, had plenty more to say, but no sooner had the
Princess caught his tone than she subsided at once, and became
penitent, as was always the case in serious matters.
  "Alexandre, Alexandre," she whispered, approaching him and
bursting into tears.
  As soon as she began to weep the Prince, too, calmed down. He went
up to her.
  "There, that's enough, that's enough! You feel badly too, I know.
Nothing can be done about it! It's not so very bad. God is merciful...
thanks..." he said, without knowing himself what he was saying now,
responding to the moist kiss of the Princess that he felt on his hand.
And the Prince went out of the room.
  No sooner had Kitty gone out of the room, in tears, than Dolly, with
her motherly, domestic habit, had promptly perceived that here a
woman's work lay before her, and got ready for it. She took off her
hat, and, morally speaking, tucked up her sleeves and got ready for
action. While her mother was attacking her father, she tried to
restrain her mother, so far as daughterly reverence would allow.
During the Prince's outburst she was silent; she felt ashamed for
her mother and tender toward her father for so quickly being kind
again. But when her father left, she made ready for what was most
necessary- to go to Kitty and compose her.
  "I've intended long since to tell you something, maman: did you know
that Levin meant to propose to Kitty when he was here last? He told
Stiva so."
  "Well, what of it? I don't understand..."
  "Why, perhaps Kitty refused him?... Did she say nothing to you?"
  "No, she said nothing to me either of the one or the other; she's
too proud. But I know it's all on account of this..."
  "Yes, but suppose she has refused Levin- and she wouldn't have
refused him if it hadn't been for the other, I know. And then, this
fellow has deceived her so horribly."
  It was too frightful for the Princess to think how much at fault she
was before her daughter, and she grew angry.
  "Oh, now I really understand nothing! Nowadays everybody thinks to
live after his own way; a mother isn't told a thing, and then you
have..."
  "Maman, I'll go to her."
  "Do. Am I forbidding you?"
                             III.

  When she went into Kitty's little sanctum, a pretty, rosy little
room, full of knickknacks in vieux saxe, as youthful and rosy and
gay as Kitty herself had been only two months ago, Dolly recalled
how they had together decorated the room the year before, with what
gaiety and love. Her heart turned cold when she beheld Kitty sitting
on the low chair nearest the door, her eyes fixed immovably on a
corner of the rug. Kitty glanced at her sister, and the cold, rather
austere expression of her face did not change.
  "I'm going now, and shall entrench myself at home, and you won't
be able to come to see me," said Darya Alexandrovna sitting down
beside her. "I want to talk to you."
  "What about?" Kitty asked swiftly, lifting her head in fright.
  "What should it be, save what's grieving you?"
  "I have no grief."
  "Come, Kitty. Do you possibly think I cannot know? I know all.
And, believe me, this is so insignificant... We've all been through
it."
  Kitty did not speak, and her face had a stern expression.
  "He's not worth your suffering on his account," pursued Darya
Alexandrovna, coming straight to the point.
  "Yes- because he has disdained me," said Kitty, in a jarring
voice. "Don't say anything! Please, don't say anything!"
  "But whoever told you that? No one has said that. I'm certain he was
in love with you, and remained in love with you, but..."
  "Oh, the most awful thing of all for me are these condolences!"
cried out Kitty, in a sudden fit of anger. She turned round on her
chair, turned red, and her fingers moved quickly, as she pinched the
buckle of the belt she held, now with one hand, now with the other.
Dolly knew this trick her sister had of grasping something in turn
with each of her hands, when in excitement; she knew that, in a moment
of excitement Kitty was capable of forgetting herself and saying a
great deal too much and much that was unpleasant, and Dolly would have
calmed her; but it was already too late.
  "What- what is it you want to make me feel, eh?" said Kitty quickly.
"That I've been in love with a man who didn't even care to know me,
and that I'm dying for love of him? And this is said to me by my own
sister, who imagines that... that... that she's sympathizing with
me!... I don't want these condolences and hypocrisies!"
  "Kitty, you're unjust."
  "Why do you torment me?"
  "But I... On the contrary... I can see you're hurt...."
  But Kitty in her heat did not hear her.
  "I've nothing to despair over and be comforted about. I'm
sufficiently proud never to allow myself to care for a man who does
not love me."
  "Why, I don't say anything of the kind... Only, tell me the
truth," said Darya Alexandrovna, taking her by the hand, "tell me- did
Levin speak to you?..."
  The mention of Levin seemed to deprive Kitty of the last vestige
of self-control. She leaped up from her chair, and, flinging the
buckle to the ground, gesticulating rapidly with her hands, she said:
  "Why bring Levin in too? I can't understand- what you want to
torture me for? I've told you, and I repeat it- I have some pride, and
never, never would I do what you're doing- going back to a man who's
deceived you, who has come to love another woman. I can't understand
this! You may- but I can't do it!"
  And, having said these words, she glanced at her sister, and
seeing that Dolly sat silent, her head mournfully bowed, Kitty,
instead of leaving the room, as she had intended, sat down near the
door, and, hiding her face in her shawl, let her head drop.
  The silence lasted for two minutes. Dolly's thoughts were of
herself. That humiliation of which she was always conscious came
back to her with special pain when her sister reminded her of it.
She had not expected such cruelty from her sister, and was
resentful. But suddenly she heard the rustle of a skirt, and,
simultaneously, an outburst of smothered sobbing, and felt arms
clasping her neck from below. Kitty was on her knees before her.
  "Dolinka, I am so, so unhappy!" she whispered penitently.
  And the endearing face, covered with tears, hid itself in Darya
Alexandrovna's skirt.
  It was as if tears were the indispensable oil without which the
machinery of mutual communion could not run smoothly between the two
sisters; the sisters, after their tears, discussed everything but that
which engrossed them; but, even in talking of outside matters, they
understood one another. Kitty knew that what she had uttered in
anger about her husband's infidelity and her humiliating position
had struck her poor sister to the very depths of her heart, but she
also knew that the latter had forgiven her. Dolly for her part had
comprehended all she had wanted to find out. She had become
convinced that her surmises were correct; that Kitty's misery, her
incurable misery, was due precisely to the fact that Levin had
proposed to her and she had refused him, while Vronsky had deceived
her, and that she stood ready to love Levin and to hate Vronsky. Kitty
said no word of this; she spoke of nothing save her own spiritual
state.
  "I have nothing to grieve over," she said, calming down, "but you
could understand that everything has become loathsome, hateful, coarse
to me- and I myself most of all. You can't imagine what loathsome
thoughts I have about everything."
  "Why, whatever loathsome thoughts can you have?" asked Dolly,
smiling.
  "Most, most loathsome and coarse: I couldn't tell you. This is not
melancholy, nor boredom, but far worse. As if everything of good
that I had were gone out of sight, while only that which was most
loathsome were left. Well, how shall I put it to you?" she went on,
seeing incomprehension in her sister's eyes. "Papa began saying
something to me just now... It seems to me he thinks all I need is
to marry. If mamma takes me to a ball- it seems to me she takes me
only to marry me off as fast as possible, and get me off her hands.
I know this isn't so, but I can't drive away such thoughts. These
suitors so called- I can't bear the sight of them. It seems to me as
if they're always taking stock of me. Formerly, to go anywhere in a
ball dress was a downright joy to me; I used to admire myself; now I
feel ashamed, in at ease. Well, take any example you like... This
doctor... Now..."
  Kitty hesitated; she wanted to say further that ever since this
change had taken place in her, Stepan Arkadyevich had become
unbearably repulsive to her, and that she could not see him without
imagining the grossest and most hideous things.
  "Well now, everything appears to me, in the coarsest, most loathsome
aspect," she went on. "That is my ailment. Perhaps all this will
pass..."
  "Try not to think of such things..."
  "I can't help it. I feel well only when I am with the children, at
your house."
  "What a pity you can't visit me!"
  "Oh, yes, I'll come.- I've had scarlatina, and I'll persuade maman
to let me come."
  Kitty insisted on having her way, and went to stay at her sister's
and nursed the children all through the scarlatina- for it really
proved to be scarlatina. The two sisters brought all the six
children successfully through it; Kitty's health, however, did not
improve, and in Lent the Shcherbatskys went abroad.
                             IV.

  There is really only one circle of Peterburg upper society: everyone
knows everyone else, even visits each other. But this great circle has
subdivisions of its own. Anna Arkadyevna Karenina had friends and
close ties in three different circles. One circle was her husband's
set of civil servants and officials, consisting of his colleagues
and subordinates, brought together in a most diversified and
capricious manner, yet separated by social conditions. Anna could
now recall only with difficulty the feeling of almost pious
reverence which she had at first borne for these persons. Now she knew
all of them, as people know one another in a provincial town; she knew
their habits and weaknesses, and where the shoe pinched each one of
them. She knew their attitudes toward one another and to the chief
center; knew who backed whom, and how and wherewithal each one
maintained his position, and who agreed or disagreed with whom; but
this circle of political, masculine interests could not interest
her, and, in spite of Countess Lidia Ivanovna's suggestions, she
avoided it.
  Another small circle, with which Anna was intimate, was the one by
means of which Alexei Alexandrovich had made his career. The center of
this circle was the Countess Lidia Ivanovna. This was a circle of
elderly, homely, virtuous and pious women, and clever, learned and
ambitious men. One of the clever people belonging to this small circle
had called it "the conscience of Peterburg society." Alexei
Alexandrovich appreciated this circle very much, and Anna, who knew so
well how to get on with all, had in the early days of her life in
Peterburg found friends even in this circle. But now, upon her
return from Moscow, this set had become unbearable to her. It seemed
to her that both she and all of them were dissimulating, and she
experienced such boredom and lack of ease in their society that she
tried to visit the Countess Lidia Ivanovna as infrequently as
possible.
  And, finally, the third circle with which Anna had ties was the
really fashionable world- the world of balls, of dinners, of sumptuous
dresses; the world that hung on to the court with one hand, in order
not to sink to the level of the demimonde, which the members of the
fashionable world believed they despised- yet the tastes of both
were not only similar, but precisely the same. Her connection with
this circle was maintained through Princess Betsy Tverskaia, her
cousin's wife, who had an income of a hundred and twenty thousand
roubles, and who had taken a great liking to Anna ever since she first
came out, looking after her and drawing her into her own circle,
poking fun at that of Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
  "When I'm old and shall have lost my looks, I'll be the same," Betsy
used to say; "but for a young and pretty woman like you it's much
too early to join that Old Ladies' Home."
  Anna had at first avoided, as much as she could, Princess
Tverskaia's world, because it necessitated expenditures above her
means- and, besides, at soul she preferred the first circle; but after
her trip to Moscow, things fell out quite the other way. She avoided
her moral friends, and went out into the fashionable world. There
she would meet Vronsky, and experienced an agitating joy at such
meetings. Especially often did she meet Vronsky at Betsy's, for
Betsy was a Vronsky by birth, and his cousin. Vronsky went
everywhere where he might meet Anna, and, at every chance he had,
spoke to her of his love. She offered him no encouragement, yet
every time she met him there was kindled in her soul that same feeling
of animation which had come upon her that day in the railway
carriage when she had seen him for the first time. She felt herself
that her delight shone in her eyes and puckered her lips into a smile-
and she could not quench the expression of this delight.
  At first Anna had sincerely believed that she was displeased with
him for daring to pursue her; but not long after her return from
Moscow, on arriving at a soiree where she had anticipated meeting him,
yet not finding him there, she realized clearly, from the feeling of
sadness which overcame her, that she had been deceiving herself, and
that this pursuit was not merely not distasteful to her, but that it
constituted all the interest of her life.

  It was the second performance of a celebrated cantatrice, and all
the fashionable world was in the theater. Vronsky, seeing his cousin
from his seat in the front row, did not wait till the entr'acte, but
went to her box.
  "Why didn't you come to dinner?" she said to him. "I marvel at
this clairvoyance of lovers," she added with a smile, so that no one
but he could hear, "she wasn't there. But do come after the opera."
  Vronsky looked inquiringly at her. She nodded. He thanked her by a
smile, and sat down beside her.
  "But how I remember your jeers!" continued Princess Betsy, who
took special delight in following up the progress of this passion.
"What's become of all that? You're caught, my dear fellow."
  "That's my one desire- to be caught," answered Vronsky, with his
calm, good-natured smile. "If I complain at all, it's only that I'm
not caught enough, if the truth were told. I begin to lose hope."
  "Why, whatever hope can you expect?" said Betsy, offended on
behalf of her friend. "Entendons nous...." But in her eyes flitted
gleams of light, which proclaimed that she understood very well,
even as much as he did, what hope he might entertain.
  "None whatever," said Vronsky, laughing and showing his closely
set teeth. "Excuse me," he added, taking the binoculars out of her
hand, and proceeding to scrutinize, over her bare shoulder, the row of
boxes opposite them. "I'm afraid I'm becoming ridiculous."
  He was very well aware that he ran no risk of being ridiculous in
the eyes of Betsy and all other fashionable people. He was very well
aware that in the eyes of these people the role of the hapless lover
of a girl, or in general, of any woman free to marry, might be
ridiculous; but the role of a man pursuing a married woman, and,
regardless of everything, staking his life on drawing her into
adultery- that role has something beautiful and majestic about it, and
can never be ridiculous, and so it was with a proud and gay smile
under his mustaches that he lowered the binoculars and looked at his
cousin.
  "But why didn't you come to dinner?" she said, admiring him.
  "I must tell you about that. I was busy- and with what, do you
suppose? I'll give you a hundred guesses, a thousand... you'd never
guess. I've been reconciling a husband with a man who'd insulted his
wife. Yes, really!"
  "Well, did you reconcile them?"
  "Almost."
  "You really must tell me about it," she said, getting up. "Come to
me in the next entr'acte."
  "I can't; I'm going to the French theater."
  "Leaving Nilsson?" Betsy queried in horror, though she could not
herself have distinguished Nilsson from any chorus girl.
  "What can I do? I've an appointment there, all because of my mission
of peace."
  "'Blessed are the peacemakers;' 'they shall be saved'," said
Betsy, recalling something of that sort she had heard from somebody or
other. "Very well, then, sit down, and tell me what it's all about."
  And she resumed her seat.
                             V.

  "This is rather indiscreet, but it's so charming that one is awfully
tempted to tell the story," said Vronsky, looking at her with laughing
eyes. "I don't intend to mention any names."
  "But I shall guess them- so much the better."
  "Listen, then: two festive young men were driving along..."
  "Officers of your regiment, of course?"
  "I didn't say they were officers- just two young men who had been
lunching."
  "In other words, drinking."
  "Possibly. They were driving on their way to dinner with a friend in
the gayest of moods. And they catch sight of a pretty woman in a hired
sleigh, who overtakes them, looks back at them, and- so it seemed to
them, at any rate- nods to them and laughs. They, of course, follow
her- galloping at full speed. To their amazement, the fair one alights
at the entrance of the very house to which they were going. The fair
one darts upstairs to the top floor. All they got was a glimpse of
rosebud lips under a short veil, and of exquisite little feet."
  "You tell this with such feeling that it seems to me you yourself
must have been one of the two."
  "But what did you tell me just now?... Well, the young men enter
their comrade's apartment- he was giving a farewell dinner. There they
certainly did take a drop too much, as is always the case at
farewell dinners. And at dinner they inquire who lives at the top in
that house. No one knows; only their host's valet, in answer to
their inquiry whether any 'young ladies' are living on the top
floor, answered that there were a great many of them. After dinner the
two young men go into their host's study, and write a letter to the
fair unknown. They composed a passionate epistle, really a
declaration, and then carry the letter upstairs themselves, so as to
explain whatever might prove not altogether clear in the letter."
  "Why do you tell me such nasty things? And then?"
  "They ring. A maidservant opens the door, they hand her the
letter, and assure her that they're both so enamored that they'll
die on the spot at the door. The maid, stupefied, carries on the
negotiations. Suddenly a gentleman appears- with side whiskers like
country sausages, he is as red as a lobster and, informing them that
there is no one living in that flat except his wife, he sends them
both packing."
  "How do you know he had side whiskers like sausages, as you put it?"
  "Ah, do but listen. Recently I went to make peace between them."
  "Well, and what was the upshot?"
  "That's the most interesting part. This couple turned out to be a
most happy one- a government clerk and his lady. The government
clerk lodges a complaint, whereupon I become a mediator- and what a
mediator!... I assure you Talleyrand was a nobody compared to me."
  "Just what was the difficulty?"
  "Ah, do but listen.... We make fitting apologies: 'We are in
despair; we entreat forgiveness for the unfortunate misunderstanding.'
The government clerk with the country sausages begins to melt, and he,
too, desires to express his sentiments, but no sooner does he begin to
express them than he gets heated and says nasty things, and again
I'm obliged to trot out all my diplomatic talents. 'I agree that their
action was bad, but I beg of you to take into consideration the
misunderstanding, and their youth; besides, the young men had just
come from their lunch. You understand. Their repentance is heartfelt
and they beg you to forgive their misbehavior.' The government clerk
was softened once more. 'I consent, Count, and am ready to forgive but
you must understand that my wife- my wife!- a respectable woman is
subjected to annoyances, and insults, and impertinences by certain
milksops, scou-...' Yet, you understand, the milksop is present, and
it is up to me to make peace between them. Again I trot out all my
diplomacy, and again, just as the matter is about to be concluded, our
friend the government clerk gets heated and turns red while his
country sausages bristle up, and I once more exert diplomatic
finesse."
  "Ah, you must hear this story!" said Betsy, laughing, to a lady
who was entering the box. "He has made me laugh so much... Well, bonne
chance!" she added, giving Vronsky the one finger free from holding
her fan, and with a shrug of her shoulders letting down the bodice
of her gown, that had worked up, so as to be fittingly and fully
nude as she moved forward, toward the footlights, into the lights of
the gas, and within the ken of all.
  Vronsky drove to the French theater, where he really had to see
the colonel of his regiment, who never missed a single performance
there; he wanted to talk over his peacemaking, which had been
occupying and amusing him for the last three days. Petritsky, whom
he liked, was implicated in the affair, as well as another fine fellow
and excellent comrade, who had lately joined the regiment- the young
Prince Kedrov. But, mainly, the interests of the regiment were
involved as well.
  Both culprits were in Vronsky's squadron. The colonel of the
regiment had received a call from the government clerk, Venden, with a
complaint against his officers, who had insulted his wife. His young
wife, as Venden told the story- he had been married half a year- had
been at church with her mother, and, suddenly feeling indisposed,
due to her interesting condition, found that she could not remain
standing and drove home in the first sleigh with the mettlesome
coachman she came across. It was then that the officers set off in
pursuit of her; she was alarmed, and, feeling still worse, ran home up
the staircase. Venden himself, on returning from his office, had heard
a ring at their bell and voices, had stepped out, and seeing the
intoxicated officers with a letter, he had pushed them out. He was
asking that the culprits be severely punished.
  "You may say what you will," said the colonel to Vronsky, whom he
had invited to come and see him. "Petritsky is becoming impossible.
Not a week goes by without some scrape. This clerk chap won't let
matters drop- he'll go on with the thing."
  Vronsky saw all the thanklessness of the business, and that a duel
was out of the question here; that everything must be done to soften
this government clerk, and hush the matter up. The colonel had
called in Vronsky precisely because he knew him to be an honorable and
intelligent man, but, above all, one to whom the honor of the regiment
was dear. They talked it over, and decided that Petritsky and Kedrov
must go with Vronsky to this government clerk and apologize. The
colonel and Vronsky were both fully aware that Vronsky's name and
insignia of aide-de-camp were bound to go a long way toward
softening the government clerk. And these two influences proved in
fact not without effect; though the result of the mediation
remained, as Vronsky had described, uncertain.
  On reaching the French theater, Vronsky retired to the foyer with
the colonel, and reported to him his success- or lack of it. The
colonel, thinking it all over, decided not to go on with the matter;
but then, for his own delectation, proceeded to question Vronsky about
the details of his interview and for a long while could not restrain
his laughter as he listened to Vronsky's story of how the government
clerk, after subsiding for a while, would suddenly flare up again,
as he recalled the details, and how Vronsky, at the last half-word
of conciliation, had skillfully maneuvered a retreat, shoving
Petritsky out before him.
  "It's a disgraceful scrape, but a killing one. Kedrov really can't
fight this gentleman! So he was awfully wrought up?" he asked again,
laughing. "But what do you think of Claire today? She's a wonder!"
he went on, speaking of a new French actress. "No matter how often you
see her, she's different each time. It's only the French who can do
that."
                             VI.

  Princess Betsy drove home from the theater without waiting for the
end of the last act. She had just time enough to go into her
dressing room, sprinkle her long, pale face with powder, rub it off,
set her dress to rights, and order tea in the big drawing room, when
one after another carriages drove up to her huge house on the Bolshaia
Morskaia. Her guests dismounted at the wide entrance, and the stout
porter, who used to read newspapers mornings behind the glass door, to
the edification of the passers-by, noiselessly opened the immense
door, letting the visitors pass by him into the house.
  Almost at the same instant that the hostess, with freshly arranged
coiffure and freshened face, entered at one door, her guests entered
at the other, into the drawing room, a large room with dark walls,
downy rugs and a brightly lighted table, gleaming with the light of
candles, the whiteness of napery, the silver of the samovar and the
tea service of transparent porcelain.
  The hostess sat down at the samovar and took off her gloves.
Chairs were set with the aid of footmen, moving almost imperceptibly
about the room; the party settled itself, divided into two groups: one
round the samovar near the hostess, the other at the opposite end of
the drawing room, round the handsome wife of an ambassador, in black
velvet, with sharply defined black eyebrows. In both groups
conversation wavered, as it always does, for the first few minutes,
broken up by meetings, salutations, offers of tea, and, as it were,
seeking for some point in common.
  "She's exceptionally fine as an actress; one can see she's studied
Kaulbach," said a diplomatist in the circle of the ambassador's
wife. "Did you notice how she fell down?..."
  "Oh, please, don't let us talk about Nilsson! No one can possibly
say anything new about her," said a fat, red-faced, flaxen-headed
lady, without eyebrows and without chignon, wearing an old silk dress.
This was Princess Miaghkaia, noted for her simplicity and the
roughness of her manners, and nicknamed enfant terrible. Princess
Miaghkaia was seated halfway between the two groups, and, listening to
both, took part in the conversation first of one and then of the
other. "Three people have used that very phrase about Kaulbach to me
today, just as though they had conspired. And I don't know why that
phrase should be so much to their liking."
  The conversation was cut short by this observation, and again a
new subject had to be thought of.
  "Do tell us something amusing, yet not spiteful," said the
ambassador's wife, a great proficient in the art of that elegant
conversation called by the English small talk. She addressed the
diplomatist, who was now at a loss just what to begin upon.
  "That is said to be a difficult task- only that which is spiteful is
supposed to be amusing," he began with a smile. "However, I'll make
the attempt. Give me a theme. it's all a matter of the theme. If the
theme be but given, it's easy enough to embroider it. I often think
that the celebrated conversationalists of the last century would
find it difficult to talk cleverly now. Everything clever has become
such a bore...."
  "That has been said long ago," the ambassador's wife interrupted
him, laughing.
  The conversation had begun amiably, but just because it was too
amiable, it came to a stop again. They had to have recourse to the
sure, never-failing remedy- malicious gossip.
  "Don't you think there's something Louis Quinze about Tushkevich?"
he said, glancing toward a handsome, fair-haired young man, standing
at the table.
  "Oh, yes! He's in the same style as the drawing room, and that's why
it is he's so often here."
  This conversation was kept up, since it depended on allusions to
what could not be talked of in that room- that is to say, of the
relations of Tushkevich with their hostess.
  Round the samovar and the hostess the conversation having, in the
meanwhile, vacillated in precisely the same way between the three
inevitable topics- the latest piece of public news, the theater, and
censuring the fellow creature- had finally come to rest on the last
topic- that is, malicious gossip.
  "Have you heard that even the Maltishcheva- the mother, not the
daughter- has ordered a costume in diable rose color?"
  "Impossible! No, that's just charming!"
  "I wonder that with her sense- for after all she's no fool- she
doesn't see how funny she is."
  Every one had something to say in censure or ridicule of the hapless
Maltishcheva, and the conversation crackled merrily, like a blazing
bonfire.
  The husband of Princess Betsy, a good-natured corpulent man, an
ardent collector of engravings, hearing that his wife had visitors,
had come into the drawing room before leaving for his club. Stepping
noiselessly over the thick rugs, he approached Princess Miaghkaia.
  "How did you like Nilsson?" he asked.
  "Oh, how can you steal up on anyone like that! How you startled me!"
she responded. "Please don't talk to me about the opera; you know
nothing about music. I'd rather come down to your own level, and
discuss with you your majolica and engravings. Come, now, what
treasure have you been buying lately at the rag fair?"
  "Would you like me to show you? But you don't understand such
things."
  "Yes, show me. I've been learning about them at those- what's
their names?... those bankers... They have some splendid engravings.
They showed them to us."
  "Why, have you been at the Schutzburgs?" asked the hostess from
behind the samovar.
  "Yes, ma chere. They asked my husband and myself to dinner, and I
was told that the sauce at that dinner cost a thousand roubles,"
Princess Miaghkaia said, speaking loudly, conscious that all were
listening; "and very nasty sauce it was- some green mess. We had to
ask them, and I made a sauce for eighty-five kopecks, and everybody
was very much pleased with it. I can't afford thousand-rouble sauces."
  "She's unique!" said the lady of the house.
  "Amazing!" somebody else added.
  The effect produced by Princess Miaghkaia's speeches was always
the same, and the secret of the effect she produced lay in the fact
that though she spoke not always appropriately, as now, she said
homely truths, not devoid of sense. In the society in which she
lived such utterances had the same result as the most pungent wit.
Princess Miaghkaia could never see why it had that result, but she
knew it had, and took advantage of it.
  Since everyone had been listening while Princess Miaghkaia spoke,
and the conversation around the ambassador's wife had dropped,
Princess Betsy tried to bring the whole party together, and she
addressed the ambassador's wife.
  "Really won't you have tea? Do come and join us."
  "No, we're very comfortable here," the ambassador's wife responded
with a smile, and went on with the interrupted conversation.
  It was a most agreeable conversation. They were censuring the
Karenins, husband and wife.
  "Anna is quite changed since her stay in Moscow. There's something
strange about her," said one of her feminine friends.
  "The great change is that she has brought back with her the shadow
of Alexei Vronsky," said the ambassador's wife.
  "Well, what of it? There's a fable of Grimm's about a man without
a shadow- a man deprived of his shadow. As a punishment for
something or other. I never could understand just how this was a
punishment. Yet a woman must probably feel uncomfortable without a
shadow."
  "Yes, but women followed by a shadow usually come to a bad end,"
said Anna's friend.
  "Bite your tongue!" said Princess Miaghkaia suddenly. "Karenina is a
splendid woman. I don't like her husband- but her I like very much."
  "Why don't you like her husband? He's such a remarkable man," said
the ambassador's wife. "My husband says there are few statesmen like
him in Europe."
  "And my husband tells me just the same, but I don't believe it,"
said Princess Miaghkaia. "If our husbands didn't talk to us, we should
see the facts as they are. Alexei Alexandrovich, to my thinking, is
simply a fool. I say it in a whisper.... But doesn't it really make
everything clear? Before, when I was told to consider him clever, I
kept looking for his ability, and thought myself a fool for not seeing
it; but directly I said, he's a fool, though only in a whisper,
everything became clear- isn't that so?"
  "How spiteful you are today!"
  "Not a bit. I'd no other way out of it. One of us two had to be
the fool. And, as you know, one could never say that of oneself."
  "No one is satisfied with his fortune, and everyone is satisfied
with his wit," the diplomatist repeated the French saying.
  "That's it- that's just it," Princess Miaghkaia turned to him
promptly. "But the point is that I won't abandon Anna to your mercies.
She's such a dear, so charming. How can she help it if they're all
in love with her, and follow her about like shadows?"
  "Oh, I had no idea of censuring her," Anna's friend said in
self-defense.
  "If we have no shadows following us, it does not prove that we've
any right to blame her."
  And, having duly disposed of Anna's friend, the Princess Miaghkaia
got up, and, together with the ambassador's wife, joined the group
at the table, where the general conversation had to do with the king
of Prussia.
  "What were you gossiping so maliciously about?" asked Betsy.
  "About the Karenins. The Princess gave us a character sketch of
Alexei Alexandrovich," said the ambassador's wife with a smile, as she
sat down at the table.
  "Pity we didn't hear it!" said Princess Betsy, glancing toward the
door. "Ah, here you are at last!" she said, turning with a smile to
Vronsky who was entering.
  Vronsky was not merely acquainted with all the persons whom he was
meeting here; he saw them all every day; and so he came in with the
quiet manner with which one enters a room full of people whom one
had left only a short while ago.
  "Where do I come from?" he repeated the question of the ambassador's
wife. "Well, there's no help for it- I must confess. From the opera
bouffe. I do believe I've seen it a hundred times, and always with
fresh enjoyment. It's exquisite! I know it's disgraceful, but I go
to sleep at the opera, yet I sit out the opera bouffe to the last
minute, and enjoy it. This evening..."
  He mentioned a French actress, and was about to tell something about
her; but the ambassador's wife, with playful trepidation, cut him
short.
  "Please, don't tell us about that horror."
  "Very well, I won't- especially as everyone knows those horrors."
  "And we should all go to see them if it were accepted as the correct
thing, like the opera," chimed in Princess Miaghkaia.
                             VII.

  Steps were heard at the door, and Princess Betsy, knowing it was
Madame Karenina, glanced at Vronsky. He was looking toward the door,
and his face wore a strange new expression. Joyfully, intently, and at
the same time timidly, he gazed at the approaching figure, and
slowly he rose to his feet. Anna walked into the drawing room. Holding
herself extremely erect, as always, looking straight before her, and
moving with her swift, resolute and light step, that distinguished her
walk from that of other society women, she crossed the few paces
that separated her from her hostess, shook hands with her, smiled, and
with the same smile looked around at Vronsky. Vronsky bowed low and
pushed a chair up for her.
  She acknowledged this only by a slight nod, flushed, and frowned.
But immediately, while rapidly greeting her acquaintances, and shaking
the hands proffered to her, she addressed Princess Betsy:
  "I have been at Countess Lidia's, and meant to have come here
earlier, but I stayed on. Sir John was there. A most interesting man."
  "Oh, that's this missionary?"
  "Yes; he told us about life in India, most interestingly."
  The conversation, interrupted by her coming in, flickered up again
like the light of a lamp being blown out.
  "Sir John! Yes, Sir John. I've seen him. He speaks well. Vlassieva
is altogether in love with him."
  "And is it true that the younger Vlassieva is to marry Topov?"
  "Yes- they say it's quite settled."
  "I wonder at the parents! They say it's a marriage of passion."
  "Of passion? What antediluvian notions you have! Whoever talks of
passion nowadays?" said the ambassador's wife.
  "What would you do? This silly old fashion is still far from
dead," said Vronsky.
  "So much the worse for those who keep up the fashion. The only happy
marriages I know are marriages of prudence."
  "Yes,- but then, how often the happiness of these prudent
marriages is scattered like dust, precisely because that passion to
which recognition has been denied appears on the scene," said Vronsky.
  "But by marriages of prudence we mean those in which both parties
have sown their wild oats already. That's like scarlatina- one has
to go through with it and get it over with."
  "In that case we must learn how to vaccinate for love, like
small-pox."
  "I was in love in my young days- with a church clerk," said the
Princess Miaghkaia. "I don't know that it did me any good."
  "No; I think- all jokes aside- that to know love, one must first
make a fault, and then mend it," said Princess Betsy.
  "Even after marriage?" said the ambassador's wife playfully.
  "It's never too late to mend," the diplomatist repeated the
English proverb.
  "Just so," Betsy agreed; "one must make a mistake and rectify it.
What do you think about it?" She turned to Anna, who, with a barely
perceptible resolute smile on her lips, was listening to the
conversation.
  "I think" said Anna, playing with the glove she had taken off, "I
think... if there are as many minds as there are heads, then surely
there must be as many kinds of love as there are hearts."
  Vronsky was gazing at Anna, and with a heart sinking was waiting for
what she would say. He sighed as after a danger escaped when she had
uttered these words.
  Anna suddenly turned to him.
  "Oh, I have had a letter from Moscow. They write me that Kitty
Shcherbatskaia's very ill."
  "Really?" said Vronsky, knitting his brows.
  Anna looked sternly at him.
  "That doesn't interest you?"
  "On the contrary, it does- very much. What is it, exactly, that they
write you, if may know?" he asked.
  Anna got up and went to Betsy.
  "Give me a cup of tea," she said, pausing behind her chair.
  While Betsy was pouring out the tea, Vronsky walked up to Anna.
  "What is it they write you?" he repeated.
  "I often think men have no understanding of what is dishonorable,
though they're forever talking of it," said Anna, without answering
him. "I've wanted to tell you something for a long while," she
added, and, moving a few steps away, she sat down at a corner table
which held albums.
  "I don't quite understand the significance of your words," he
said, handing her the cup.
  She glanced towards the sofa beside her, and he instantly sat down.
  "Yes, I've wanted to tell you," she said, without looking at him.
"Your action was wrong- wrong, very wrong."
  "Do you suppose I don't know that I've acted wrongly? But who was
the cause of my doing so?"
  "Why do you say that to me?" she said looking at him sternly.
  "You know why," he answered, boldly and joyously, meeting her glance
and without dropping his eyes.
  It was not he, but she, who became confused.
  "That merely proves you have no heart," she said. But her eyes
said that she knew he had a heart, and that was why she was afraid
of him.
  "What you spoke of just now was a mistake, and not love."
  "Remember that I have forbidden you to utter that word, that
detestable word," said Anna, with a shudder. But at once she felt that
by that very word "forbidden" she had shown that she acknowledged
certain rights over him, and by that very fact was encouraging him
to speak of love. "I have long meant to tell you this," she went on,
looking resolutely into his eyes, and all aflame from the burning
flush on her cheeks. "I've come here purposely this evening, knowing I
should meet you. I have come to tell you that this must end. I have
never blushed before anyone, and you force me to feel guilty of
something."
  He looked at her and was struck by a new spiritual beauty in her
face.
  "What do you wish of me?" he said, simply and gravely.
  "I want you to go to Moscow and ask for Kitty's forgiveness," she
said.
  "That is not your wish," he said.
  He saw she was saying what she was forcing herself to say, not
what she wanted to say.
  "If you love me, as you say," she whispered, "you will do this, so
that I may be at peace."
  His face grew radiant.
  "Don't you know that you're all my life to me? But I know no
peace, and I can't give it to you; all of myself, and love- yes. I
can't think of you and myself apart. You and I are one to me. And I
see no possibility before us of peace- either for me or for you. I see
a possibility of despair, of wretchedness.... Or else I see a
possibility of happiness- and what a happiness!... Can it be
impossible?" he added, his lips barely moving- yet she heard.
  She strained every effort of her mind to say what ought to be
said. But instead of that she let her eyes rest on him, full of
love, and made no answer.
  "It's come!" he thought in ecstasy. "When I was beginning to
despair, and it seemed there would be no end- it's come! She loves me!
She owns it!"
  "Then do this for me: never say such things to me, and let us be
friends," she said in words; but her eyes spoke quite differently.
  "Friends we shall never be- that you know yourself. Whether we shall
be the happiest or the most wretched of people- that lies within
your power."
  She would have said something, but he interrupted her.
  "For I ask but one thing: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer-
even as I am doing now. But if even that cannot be, command me to
disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is
painful to you."
  "I don't want to drive you away."
  "Only don't change anything- leave everything as it is," said he, in
a shaky voice. "Here's your husband."
  At that instant Alexei Alexandrovich did in fact walk into the
room with his calm, ungainly gait.
  Glancing at his wife and Vronsky, he went up to the lady of the
house, and, sitting down for a cup of tea, began talking in his
unhasty, always audible voice, in his habitual tone of banter, as if
he were teasing someone.
  "Your Rambouillet is in full conclave," he said looking round at all
the party; "the graces and the muses."
  But Princess Betsy could not endure that tone of his- sneering, as
she called it, using the English word, and like a clever hostess she
at once brought him around to a serious conversation on the subject of
universal conscription. Alexei Alexandrovich was immediately carried
away by the subject, and began seriously defending the new imperial
decree before Princess Betsy, who had attacked it.
  Vronsky and Anna still sat at the little table.
  "This is getting indecorous," whispered one lady, with an expressive
glance at Madame Karenina, her husband and Vronsky.
  "What did I tell you?" said Anna's friend.
  But it was not only these ladies who watched them- almost everyone
in the room, even the Princess Miaghkaia and Betsy herself, looked
several times in the direction of the two who had withdrawn from the
general circle, as though they found it a hindrance. Alexei
Alexandrovich was the only person who did not once look in their
direction, and was not diverted from the interesting discussion he had
entered upon.
  Noticing the disagreeable impression that was being made on
everyone, Princess Betsy slipped someone else into her place to listen
to Alexei Alexandrovich, and walked over to Anna.
  "I'm always amazed at the clearness and precision of your
husband's language," she said. "The most transcendent ideas seem to be
within my grasp when he's speaking."
  "Oh, yes!" said Anna, radiant with a smile of happiness, and not
understanding a word of what Betsy had said. She crossed over to the
big table and took part in the general conversation.
  Alexei Alexandrovich, after staying half an hour, walked up to his
wife and suggested that they go home together. But she answered,
without looking at him, that she was staying to supper. Alexei
Alexandrovich bowed himself out.

  The fat old Tatar, Madame Karenina's coachman, in a glistening
leather coat, was with difficulty bridling the left of her pair of
grays, chilled with the cold and rearing at the entrance. A footman
stood by the carriage door he had opened. The hall porter stood
holding open the great door of the house. Anna Arkadyevna, with her
quick little hand, was unfastening the lace of her sleeve, caught in
the hook of her fur cloak, and with bent head was listening
rapturously to the words Vronsky murmured as he saw her down to her
carriage.
  "You've said nothing, of course, and I ask nothing," he was
saying; "but you know that friendship is not what I want: that there's
only one happiness in life for me- that word you dislike so... yes,
love!..."
  "Love..." she repeated slowly, in an inner voice, and suddenly, at
the very instant she unhooked the lace, she added, "I don't like the
word precisely because it means too much to me, far more than you
can understand," and she glanced into his face. "Good-by."
  She gave him her hand, and with her rapid, springy step she passed
by the porter and vanished into the carriage.
  Her glance, the touch of her hand, had seared him. He kissed the
palm of his hand where she had touched it, and went home, happy in the
realization that he had got nearer to the attainment of his aims
that evening than during the two last months.
                             VIII.

  Alexei Alexandrovich had seen nothing striking or improper in the
fact that his wife was sitting with Vronsky at a table apart, in eager
conversation with him about something. But he noticed that to the rest
of the party this appeared as something striking and improper, and for
that reason it seemed to him, too, to be improper. He made up his mind
that he must speak of it to his wife.
  On reaching home Alexei Alexandrovich went to his study, as he
usually did, seated himself in his low chair, opened a book on the
Papacy at the place he had marked by inserting the paper knife, read
till one o'clock, just as he usually did. But from time to time he
would rub his high forehead and shake his head, as though to drive
away something. At his usual time he got up and made his toilet for
the night. Anna Arkadyevna had not yet come in. With a book under
his arm he went upstairs. But this evening, instead of his usual
thoughts and meditations upon official details, his thoughts were
absorbed by his wife and something disagreeable connected with her.
Contrary to his usual habit, he did not get into bed, but fell to
walking up and down the rooms with his hands clasped behind his
back. He could not go to bed, feeling that it was absolutely needful
for him first to think thoroughly over the situation that had just
arisen.
  When Alexei Alexandrovich had made up his mind that he must have a
talk with his wife, it had seemed a very easy and simple matter. But
now, when he began to think over the question that had just
presented itself, it seemed to him very complicated and difficult.
  Alexei Alexandrovich was not jealous. Jealousy, according to his
notions, was an insult to one's wife, and one ought to have confidence
in one's wife. Why one ought to have that confidence- that is to
say, a complete conviction that his young wife would always love
him- he did not ask himself. But he had never experienced such a
lack of confidence, because he had confidence in her, and told himself
that he ought to have it. Now, though his conviction that jealousy was
a shameful feeling, and that one ought to feel confidence, had not
broken down, he still felt that he was standing face to face with
something illogical and fatuous, and did not know what ought to be
done. Alexei Alexandrovich was standing face to face with life, with
the possibility of his wife's loving someone other than himself, and
this seemed to him very fatuous and incomprehensible, because it was
of the very stuff of life. All his life Alexei Alexandrovich had lived
and worked in official spheres, having to do merely with the
reflections of life. And every time he had stumbled against life
itself he had shrunk away from it. Now he experienced a feeling akin
to that of a man who, while calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge,
should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there
is a chasm below. That chasm was life itself- the bridge, that
artificial life in which Alexei Alexandrovich had lived. For the first
time the question presented itself to him of the possibility of his
wife's loving someone else, and he was horrified at it.
  He did not undress, but walked up and down with his regular tread
over the resounding parquet of the dining room, where one lamp was
burning; over the carpet of the dark drawing room, in which the
light was reflected merely on the big new portrait of himself
hanging over the sofa; and across her boudoir, where two candles
burned, lighting up the portraits of her parents and feminine friends,
and the pretty knickknacks of her writing table, every one of which he
knew so well. He walked across her boudoir to the bedroom door and
turned back again.
  At each turn in his walk, especially on the parquet of the
well-lit dining room, he halted and said to himself, "Yes, this I must
decide and put a stop to; I must express my view of it and my
decision." And he turned back again. "But just what shall I express?
And what decision?" he would say to himself in the drawing room- and
found no answer. "But, after all," he asked himself before turning
into the boudoir," what has occurred? Nothing. She was talking a
long while with him. But what of that? Surely women in society can
talk to whom they please. And then, jealousy means debasing both her
and myself," he soliloquized as he entered her boudoir; but this
dictum, which had always had such weight with him before, had now no
weight and no meaning whatsoever. And from the bedroom door he
turned back again; but as he entered the dark drawing room some
inner voice told him that it was not so, and that if others had
noticed, it meant that there was something. And he said to himself
again in the dining room: "Yes, I must decide and put a stop to it,
and express my views...." And again at the turn in the drawing room he
asked himself: "Decide how?" And again he asked inwardly: "What has
occurred?" And answered: "Nothing," and recollected that jealousy
was a feeling insulting to his wife; but again in the drawing room
he was convinced that something had happened. His thoughts, like his
body, were describing a complete circle, without alighting upon
anything new. He noticed this, rubbed his forehead, and sat down in
her boudoir.
  There, looking at her table, with the malachite blotting case
lying at the top, and an unfinished letter, his thoughts suddenly
changed. He began to think of her, of what her thoughts and emotions
must be. For the first time he pictured vividly to himself her
personal life, her ideas, her desires, and the thought that she
could and must have a separate life of her own seemed to him so
appalling that he made haste to drive it away. It was the chasm
which he was afraid to peep into. To put himself in thought and
feeling in another person's place was a spiritual action foreign to
Alexei Alexandrovich. He looked on this spiritual action as a
harmful and dangerous abuse of the fancy.
  "And the worst of it all," thought he, "is that just now, at the
very moment when my great work is approaching completion" (he was
thinking of the project he was bringing forward at the time), "when
I stand in need of all my mental peace and all my energies- just now
this stupid worry has to come falling about my ears. But what's to
be done? I'm not one of those men who submit to uneasiness and worry
without having the force of character to face them."
  "I must think this over, come to a decision, and put it out of my
mind," he said aloud.
  "The question of her feelings, of what has passed and may be passing
in her soul- that's not my affair; that's the affair of her
conscience, and falls under the head of religion," he said to himself,
feeling consolation in the sense that he had found to which division
of regulating principles this new circumstance could be properly
referred.
  "And so," Alexei Alexandrovich said to himself, "questions as to her
feelings, and so on, are questions for her conscience, with which I
can have nothing to do. My duty is clearly defined. As the head of the
family, I am a person bound in duty to guide her, and, consequently,
in part the person responsible; I am bound to point out the danger I
perceive, to warn her, even to use my authority. I ought to speak
plainly to her."
  And everything that he would say tonight to his wife took clear
shape in Alexei Alexandrovich's head. Thinking over what he would say,
he somewhat regretted that he should have to use his time and mental
powers for domestic consumption, with so little to show for it, but,
in spite of that, the form and consistency of the speech before him
shaped itself as clearly and distinctly in his head as a ministerial
report. "I must speak on, and express fully, the following points:
first, an explanation of the value to be attached to public opinion
and to decorum; secondly, an explanation of the religious significance
of marriage; thirdly, if need be, a reference to the calamity possibly
ensuing to our son; fourthly, a reference to the unhappiness likely to
result to herself." And, interlacing his fingers, the palms
downward, Alexei Alexandrovich stretched his hands, and the joints
of the fingers cracked.
  This gesture, this bad habit- the joining of his hands cracking
his fingers, always soothed him, and gave precision to his thoughts,
so needful to him now. There was the sound of a carriage driving up to
the front door. Alexei Alexandrovich halted in the middle of the room.
  A woman's step was heard mounting the stairs. Alexei
Alexandrovich, ready for his speech, stood squeezing his crossed
fingers, waiting for their crack to come again. One joint cracked.
  Already, from the sound of light steps on the stairs, he was aware
that she was close, and though he was satisfied with his speech, he
felt frightened because of the explanation confronting him.
                             IX.

  Anna came in with her head bent, playing with the tassels of her
hood. Her face was glowing with a vivid glow; but this glow was not
one of joyousness- it recalled the fearful glow of a conflagration
in the midst of a dark night. On seeing her husband, Anna raised her
head and smiled, as though she had just waked up.
  "You're not in bed? What a miracle!" she said throwing off her
hood and, without stopping, she went on into the dressing room.
"It's late, Alexei Alexandrovich," she said, from behind the door.
  "Anna, I must have a talk with you."
  "With me?" she said, wonderingly. She came out from the door, and
looked at him. "Why, what is it? What about?" she asked, sitting down.
"Well, let's talk, if it's so necessary. But it would be better to
go to sleep."
  Anna was saying whatever came to her tongue, and marveled, hearing
herself, at her own capacity for lying. How simple and natural were
her words, and how likely that she was simply sleepy She felt
herself clad in an impenetrable armor of falsehood. She felt that some
unseen force had come to her aid and was supporting her.
  "Anna, I must warn you," he began.
  "Warn me? she said. "Of what?
  She looked at him so simply, so brightly, that anyone who did not
know her as her husband knew her could not have noticed anything
unnatural, either in the sound or the sense of her words. But to
him, knowing her, knowing that whenever he went to bed five minutes
later than usual, she noticed it, and asked him the reason- to him,
knowing that every joy, every pleasure and pain that she felt she
communicated to him at once- to him it meant a great deal to see now
that she did not care to notice his state of mind, that she did not
care to say a word about herself. He saw that the inmost recesses of
her soul, that had always hitherto lain open before him, were now
closed against him. More than that, he saw from her tone that she
was not even perturbed at that, but seemed to be saying
straightforwardly to him: "Yes, it is closed now, which is as it
should be, and will be so in future." Now he experienced a feeling
such as a man might have who, returning home, finds his own house
locked up. "But perhaps the key may yet be found," thought Alexei
Alexandrovich.
  "I want to warn you," he said in a low voice, "that through
thoughtlessness and lack of caution you may cause yourself to be
talked about in society. Your too animated conversation this evening
with Count Vronsky" (he enunciated the name firmly and with quiet
intervals) "attracted attention."
  He talked and looked at her laughing eyes, which frightened him
now with their impenetrable look, and, as he talked, he felt all the
uselessness and futility of his words.
  "You're always like that," she answered as though completely
misapprehending him, and of all he had said only taking in the last
phrase. "One time you don't like my being dull, and another time you
don't like my being lively. I wasn't dull. Does that offend you?"
  Alexei Alexandrovich shivered, and bent his hands to make the joints
crack.
  "Oh, please, don't do that- I dislike it so," she said.
  "Anna, is this you?" said Alexei Alexandrovich quietly, making an
effort over himself, and restraining the motion of his hands.
  "But what is it all about?" she said, with such genuine and droll
wonder. "What do you want of me?"
  Alexei Alexandrovich paused, and rubbed his forehead and his eyes.
He saw that instead of doing as he had intended- that is to say,
warning his wife against a mistake in the eyes of the world- he had
unconsciously become agitated over what was the affair of her
conscience, and was struggling against some imaginary barrier.
  "This is what I meant to say to you," he went on coldly and
composedly, "and I beg you to hear me to the end. I consider jealousy,
as you know, a humiliating and degrading feeling, and I shall never
allow myself to be guided by it; but there are certain rules of
decency which cannot be disregarded with impunity. This evening it was
not I who observed it- but, judging by the impression made on the
company, everyone observed that your conduct and deportment were not
altogether what one would desire."
  "I positively don't understand," said Anna, shrugging her shoulders.
"He doesn't care," she thought. "But other people noticed it and
that's what upsets him."- "You're not well, Alexei Alexandrovich," she
added, and, getting up, was about to pass through the door; but he
moved forward as though he would stop her.
  His face was gloomy and forbidding, as Anna had never seen it
before. She stopped, and bending her head back and to one side,
began taking out her hairpins with her quick-darting hand.
  "Well, I'm listening- what does follow?" she said, calmly and
ironically; "and, indeed, I am listening even with interest, for I
should like to understand what it is all about."
  She spoke, and marveled at the confident, calm and natural tone in
which she spoke, and at the choice of the words she used.
  "To enter into all the details of your feelings I have no right,
and, besides, I regard that as useless and even harmful," began Alexei
Alexandrovich. "Rummaging in our souls, we often bring up something
that might have otherwise lain there unnoticed. Your feelings are an
affair of your own conscience; but I am in duty bound to you, to
myself and to God, to point out to you your duties. Our life has
been joined, not by man, but by God. That union can only be severed by
a crime, and a crime of that nature brings its own chastisement."
  "I don't understand a word. And, oh dear! how sleepy I am,
unluckily," she said, rapidly passing her hand through her hair,
feeling for the remaining hairpins.
  "Anna, for God's sake don't speak like that!" he said gently.
"Perhaps I am mistaken, but believe me, that which I am saying I say
as much for myself as for you. I am your husband, and I love you."
  For an instant her face fell, and the mocking gleam in her eyes died
away; but the phrase "I love" threw her into revolt again. She
thought: "Love? Can he love? If he hadn't heard there was such a thing
as love, he would never have used the word. He doesn't even know
what love is."
  "Alexei Alexandrovich, I really do not understand," she said.
"Define what it is you consider..."
  "Pardon, let me say all I have to say. I love you. But I am not
speaking of myself; the most important persons in this matter are
our son and yourself. It may very well be, I repeat, that my words
seem to you utterly unnecessary and out of place; it may be that
they are called forth by my mistaken impression. In that case, I beg
you to forgive me. But if you are conscious yourself of even the
smallest foundation for them, then I beg you to think a little, and if
your heart prompts you, to speak out to me..."
  Alexei Alexandrovich was unconsciously saying something utterly
unlike what he had prepared.
  "I have nothing to say. And besides she said suddenly, with
difficulty repressing a smile, "it's really time to be in bed."
  Alexei Alexandrovich sighed, and, without saying more, went into the
bedroom.
  When she came into the bedroom, he was already in bed. His lips were
sternly compressed, and his eyes looked away from her. Anna got into
her bed, and lay expecting every minute that he would begin to speak
to her again. She both feared his speaking and wished for it. But he
was silent. She waited for a long while without moving, and forgot
about him. She thought of that other; she pictured him, and felt how
her heart was flooded with emotion and guilty delight at the thought
of him. Suddenly she heard an even, tranquil snore. For the first
instant Alexei Alexandrovich seemed, as it were, appalled at his own
snoring, and ceased; but after a pause of one or two breaths, the
snore sounded again, with a new tranquil rhythm.
  "It's late, it's late," she whispered with a smile. A long while she
lay, without moving, and with open eyes, whose brilliance she almost
fancied she could herself see in the darkness.
                             X.

  From that time a new life began for Alexei Alexandrovich and for his
wife. Nothing special happened. Anna went out into society, as she had
always done, was particularly often at Princess Betsy's, and met
Vronsky everywhere. Alexei Alexandrovich saw this, but was powerless
to do anything. All his efforts to draw her into open discussion she
confronted with a barrier which he could not penetrate, made up of a
sort of amused perplexity. Outwardly everything was the same, but
their inner relations were completely changed. Alexei Alexandrovich, a
man of great power in the world of politics, felt himself helpless
in this matter. Like an ox with head bent submissively, he waited
the fall of the poleax which he felt was lifted over him. Every time
he began to think about it, he felt that he must try once more; that
by kindness, tenderness and persuasion there was still hope of
saving her, of bringing her back to herself, and every day he was on
the verge of talking to her. But every time he began he felt that
the spirit of evil and deceit, which had taken possession of her,
had possession of him too, and he talked to her in a tone quite unlike
that which he had meant to use. Involuntarily he talked to her in
his habitual tone of bantering at anyone who should say what he was
saying. And in that tone it was impossible to say to her what the
occasion demanded.
                             XI.

  That which to Vronsky had been for almost a whole year the one
absorbing desire of his life, replacing all his old desires; that
which to Anna had been an impossible, terrible, and, for that very
reason, a more entrancing dream of happiness- that desire had been
fulfilled. He stood before her, pale, his lower jaw quivering, and
besought her to be calm, without himself knowing how or why.
  "Anna! Anna!" he said with a quivering voice, "Anna, for God's
sake!..."
  But the louder he spoke, the lower she cast down her once proud
and gay, but now shame-stricken head, and she bowed down and sank from
the sofa where she was sitting- down on the floor, at his feet; she
would have fallen on the carpet if he had not held her.
  "My God!" Forgive me!" she said, sobbing, pressing his hands to
her bosom.
  She felt so sinful, so guilty, that nothing was left her but to
humiliate herself and beg forgiveness, and as now there was no one
in her life but him, to him, too, she addressed her prayer for
forgiveness. Looking at him, she had a physical sense of her
humiliation, and she could say nothing more. And he felt as a murderer
must feel when he beholds the body he has robbed of life. That body,
robbed by him of life, was their love, the first stage of their
love. There was something awful and revolting in the memory of what
had been bought at this fearful price of shame. Shame at her spiritual
nakedness crushed her and infected him. But in spite of all the
murderer's horror before the body of his victim, he must hack it to
pieces, hide the body, must use what the murderer had gained by his
murder.
  And as the murderer, with fury, and, as it were, with passion, falls
on the body, and drags it, and hacks at it- so he covered her face and
shoulders with kisses. She held his hand, and did not stir. Yes, these
kisses- that is what has been bought by this shame. Yes, and this
one hand, which will always be mine- the hand of my accomplice. She
lifted up that hand and kissed it. He sank on his knees and tried to
see her face; but she hid it, and said nothing. At last, as though
making an effort over herself, she got up and pushed him away. Her
face was still as beautiful, but it was only the more pitiful for
that.
  "All is over," she said; "I have nothing but you. Remember that."
  "I can never forget what is my whole life. For one instant of this
happiness..."
  "Happiness!" she said with horror and loathing and her horror
unconsciously infected him. "For God's sake, not a word, not a word
more."
  She rose quickly and moved away from him.
  "Not a word more," she repeated, and with a look of chill despair,
incomprehensible to him, she parted from him. She felt that at that
moment she could not put into words the sense of shame, of rapture,
and of horror at this stepping into a new life, and she did not want
to speak of it, to vulgarize this feeling by inappropriate words.
But later too, and the next day, and the day after, she still found no
words in which she could express the complexity of those feelings;
indeed, she could not even find thoughts in which she could clearly
think out all that was in her soul.
  She said to herself. "No, just now I can't think of it- later on,
when I am calmer." But this calm for thoughts never came; every time
the thought rose of what she had done and what would happen to her,
and what she ought to do, a horror came over her and she drove those
thoughts away.
  "Later, later," she said, "when I am calmer."
  But in her dreams, when she had no control over her thoughts, her
position presented itself to her in all its hideous nakedness. One
dream haunted her almost every night. She dreamed that both were
husbands at once, that both were lavishing caresses on her. Alexei
Alexandrovich was weeping, kissing her hands, and saying, "How happy
we are now!" And Alexei Vronsky was there too, and he, too, was her
husband. And she was marveling that it had once seemed impossible to
her, was explaining to them, laughing, that this was ever so much
simpler, and that now both of them were happy and contented. But
this dream weighed on her like a nightmare, and she would awake from
it in terror.
                             XII.

  In the early days, after his return from Moscow, whenever Levin
shuddered and grew red, remembering the disgrace of his rejection,
he would say to himself: "This was just how I used to shudder and
blush, thinking everything utterly lost, when I was flunked in physics
and did not get promoted; and this is also how I thought myself
utterly ruined after I had mismanaged that affair of my sister's
with which I had been entrusted. And yet, now that the years have
passed, I recall it and wonder that it could distress me so much. It
will be the same thing with this trouble as well. Time will go by, and
I shall not mind this either."
  But three months had passed and he had not left off minding about
it; and it was as painful for him to think of it now as it had been
during those first days. He could not be at peace because, after
dreaming so long of family life, and feeling himself so ripe for it,
he was still not married, and was farther than ever from marriage.
He was painfully conscious himself, as were all about him, that at his
years it is not good that man should be alone. He remembered how
before starting for Moscow he had once said to his cowherd Nicolai,
a simplehearted peasant, to whom he liked to talk: "Well, Nicolai! I
mean to get married," and how Nicolai had promptly answered, as of a
matter on which there could be no possible doubt: "And high time
too, Konstantin Dmitrich." But marriage had now become farther off
than ever. The place was taken, and whenever he tried to imagine any
of the girls he knew in that place, he felt that it was utterly
impossible. Moreover, the recollection of the rejection and the part
he had played in the affair tortured him with shame. However often
he told himself that he was in no wise to blame in it, that
recollection, like other similarly humiliating recollections, made him
wince and blush. There had been in his past, as in every man's,
actions, recognized by him as bad, for which his conscience ought to
have tormented him; but the recollection of these evil actions was far
from causing him as much suffering as these trivial but humiliating
recollections. These wounds never healed. And with these recollections
was now ranged his rejection and the sorry plight in which he must
have appeared to others that evening. Yet time and labor were doing
their work. Bitter recollections were more and more being covered up
by the incidents- inconspicuous ones, but important- of his country
life. Every week he thought less often of Kitty. He was impatiently
looking forward to the news that she was married, or just going to
be married, hoping that such news would, like having a tooth out,
completely cure him.
  Meanwhile spring came on, beautiful and kindly, without the delays
and treacheries incident to spring- one of those rare springs in which
plants, beasts and man rejoice alike. This lovely spring roused
Levin still more, and strengthened him in his resolution of renouncing
all his past and building up his lonely life firmly and independently.
Though many of the plans with which he had returned to the country had
not been carried out, his most important resolution- that of purity of
life- had nevertheless been kept by him. He was free from that shame
which had usually harassed him after a fall; and he could look
everyone straight in the face. In February he had received a letter
from Marya Nikolaevna telling him that his brother Nikolai's health
was getting worse, but that he would not take advice, and in
consequence of this letter Levin went to Moscow to his brother's,
and succeeded in persuading him to see a doctor and to go to a
watering place abroad. He succeeded so well in persuading his brother,
and in lending him money for the journey without irritating him,
that he was satisfied with himself on that score. In addition to his
farming, which called for special attention in spring, in addition
to reading Levin had begun that winter a work on agriculture, the plan
of which turned on taking into account the character of the laborer on
the land as one of the unalterable data of the question, like the
climate and the soil, and consequently deducing all the principles
of scientific culture, not simply from the data of soil and climate,
but from the data of soil, climate and a certain unalterable character
of the laborer. Thus, in spite of his solitude, or in consequence of
his solitude, life was exceedingly full, save that, on rare occasions,
he suffered from an unsatisfied desire to communicate his stray
ideas to someone besides Agathya Mikhailovna. With her indeed he not
infrequently fell into discussions upon physics, the theory of
agriculture, and, especially, philosophy: philosophy was Agathya
Mikhailovna's favorite subject.
  Spring was slow in unfolding. For the last few weeks of Lent it
had been steadily fine and frosty weather. In the daytime there was
a thaw in the sun, but at night there were as many as seven degrees of
frost. The snow was so packed and frozen that loads could be carried
along anywhere, regardless of roads. Easter came in snow. Then all
of a sudden, on Easter Monday, a warm wind sprang up, storm clouds
swooped down, and for three days and three nights the warm,
tempestuous rain fell in torrents. On Thursday the wind dropped, and a
thick gray fog brooded over the land, as though screening the
mysteries of the transformations that were being wrought in nature.
Behind the fog there was the flowing of water, the cracking and
floating of ice, the swift rush of turbid, foaming torrents; and on
the following Monday, in the evening, the fog parted, the storm clouds
split up into little curling crests of cloud, the sky cleared, and the
real spring had come. In the morning the sun arose brilliant and
quickly wore away the thin layer of ice that covered the water, and
all the warm air was quivering with the steam that rose up from the
quickened earth. The old grass looked greener, and the young grass
thrust up its tiny blades; the buds of the guelder-rose and of the
currant, and the sticky birch buds were swollen with sap, and an
exploring bee was humming about the golden blossoms that studded the
willow. Larks trilled unseen above the velvety green fields and the
ice-covered stubble land; pewits wailed over the lowlands and marshes,
flooded by the pools; cranes and wild geese flew high across the sky
uttering their spring calls. The cattle, bald in patches where the new
hair had not grown yet, lowed in the pastures; bowlegged lambs frisked
round their bleating dams, who were shedding their fleece;
nimble-footed children ran along the drying paths, covered with the
prints of bare feet; there was a merry chatter of peasant women over
their linen at the pond, and the ring of axes in the yard, where the
peasants were repairing plows and harrows. The real spring had come.
                             XIII.

  Levin put on his big boots, and, for the first time, a cloth
overcoat instead of his fur cloak, and went out to look after his
farm, stepping over streams of water that flashed in the sunshine
and dazzled his eyes, and stepping one minute on ice and the next into
sticky mud.
  Spring is the time of plans and projects. And, as he came out into
the farmyard, Levin, like a tree in spring that knows not what form
will be taken by the young shoots and twigs imprisoned in its swelling
buds, hardly knew what undertakings he was going to launch upon now in
the farmwork that was so dear to him. But he felt that he was full
of the most splendid plans and projects. First of all he went to the
cattle. The cows had been let out into their paddock, and their smooth
sides were already glossy with their new, sleek, spring coats; they
basked in the sunshine and lowed to go to the meadow. Levin gazed
admiringly at the cows he knew so intimately to the minutest detail of
their condition, and gave orders for them to be driven out into the
meadow, and the calves to be let into the paddock. The herdsman ran
gaily to get ready for the meadow. The cowherd girls, picking up their
petticoats, ran splashing through the mud with bare legs, still white,
not yet brown from the sun, waving brushwood in their hands, chasing
the calves that frolicked in the mirth of spring.
  After admiring the increase of that year, which were particularly
fine- the early calves were the size of a peasant's cow, and Pava's
daughter, at three months old, was as big as a yearling- Levin gave
orders for a trough to be brought out and hay to be put in the
racks. But it appeared that, since the paddock had not been used
during the winter, the racks made in the autumn were broken. He sent
for the carpenter, who, according to his orders, ought to have been at
work at the threshing machine. But it appeared that the carpenter
was repairing the harrows, which ought to have been repaired before
Lent. This was very annoying to Levin. It was annoying to come upon
that everlasting slovenliness in the farmwork against which he had
been striving with all his might for so many years. The racks, as he
ascertained, being not wanted in winter, had been carried to the
cart horses' stable, and there broken, as they were of light
construction, only meant for foddering calves. Moreover, it was
apparent also that the harrows and all the agricultural implements,
which he had directed to be looked over and repaired in the winter,
for which very purpose he had hired three carpenters, had not been put
into repair, and the harrows were being repaired when they ought to
have been harrowing the field. Levin sent for his bailiff, but
immediately went off himself to look for him. The bailiff, beaming all
over, like everything that day, in a sheepskin bordered with
astrakhan, came out of the barn, twisting a bit of straw in his hands.
  "Why isn't the carpenter at the threshing machine?"
  "Oh, I meant to tell you yesterday, the harrows want repairing. Here
it's time they got to work in the fields."
  "But what were they doing in the winter, then?"
  "But what did you want the carpenter for?"
  "Where are the racks for the calves' paddock?"
  "I ordered them to be got ready. What would you have with those
people!" said the bailiff, with a wave of his hand.
  "It's not those people but this bailiff!" said Levin, getting angry.
"Why, what do I keep you for?" he cried. But, bethinking himself
that this would not help matters, he stopped short in the middle of
a sentence, and merely sighed. "Well, what do you say? Can sowing
begin?" he asked, after a pause.
  "Behind Turkino, tomorrow or next day, they might begin."
  "And the clover?"
  "I've sent Vassilii and Mishka; they're sowing it. Only I don't know
if they'll manage to get through; it's so slushy."
  "How many dessiatinas?
  "Six."
  "Why not sow all?" cried Levin.
  That they were only sowing the clover on six dessiatinas, not in all
the twenty, was still more annoying to him. Clover, as he knew, both
from books and from his own experience, never did well except when
it was sown as early as possible, almost in the snow. And yet Levin
could never get this done.
  "There's no one to send. What would you do with such people? Three
haven't turned up. And there's Semion..."
  "Well, you should have taken some men from the chaffcutter."
  "And so I have, as it is."
  "Where are the peasants, then?"
  "Five are making compote" (which meant compost), "and four are
shifting the oats for fear of being touched, Konstantin Dmitrich."
  Levin knew very well that "touching" meant that his English seed
oats were already spoiled. Again they had not done as he had ordered.
  "Why, but I told you during Lent to put in pipes," he cried.
  "Don't be put out; we shall get it all done in time."
  Levin made an angry gesture, and went into the granary to glance
at the oats, and then to the stable. The oats were not yet spoiled.
But the laborers were carrying the oats in spades when they might
simply let them slide down into the lower granary; and arranging for
this to be done, and taking two laborers from there for sowing clover,
Levin got over the vexation his bailiff had caused him. Indeed, it was
such a lovely day that one could not be angry.
  "Ignat!" he called to the coachman, who, with his sleeves tucked up,
was washing the carriage wheels, "saddle..."
  "Which, sir?"
  "Well, let it be Kolpik."
  "Yes, sir."
  While they were saddling his horse, Levin again called the
bailiff, who was hanging about in sight, to make it up with him, and
began talking to him about the spring operations before them, and
his plans for the farming.
  The wagons were to begin carting manure earlier, so as to get all
done before the early mowing. And the plowing of the outlying land was
to go on without a break, so as to let it lie black fallow and
furrowed. And the moving to be all done by hired labor, not on
half-profits.
  The bailiff listened attentively, and obviously made an effort to
approve of his employer's projects. But still he had that look Levin
knew so well that always irritated him, a look of hopelessness and
despondency. That look said: "That's all very well, but as God wills."
  Nothing mortified Levin so much as that tone. But it was the tone
common to all the bailiffs he had ever had. They had all taken that
attitude to his plans, and so now he was not angered by it, but
mortified, and felt all the more roused to struggle against this
apparently elemental force continually ranged against him, for which
he could find no other name than "as God wills."
  "If we can manage it, Konstantin Dmitrich," said the bailiff.
  "Why shouldn't you manage it?"
  "We positively must have fifteen laborers more. And they don't
turn up. There were some here today asking seventy roubles for the
summer."
  Levin was silent. Again he was brought face to face with that
opposing force. He knew that however much they tried, they could not
hire more than forty- thirty-seven perhaps or thirty-eight- laborers
for a reasonable sum; some forty had been taken on, and there were
no more. But still he could not help struggling against it.
  "Send to Sury, to Chefirovka, if they don't come. We must look for
them."
  "I'll send, to be sure," said Vassilii Fiodorovich despondently.
"But then there are the horses- they're not good for much."
  "We'll get some more. I know, of course," Levin added laughing, "you
always want to do with as little and as poor a quality as possible;
but this year I'm not going to let you have things your own way.
I'll see to everything myself."
  "Why, I don't think you take much rest as it is. It cheers us up
to work under the master's eye...."
  "So they're sowing clover behind the Birch Dale? I'll go and have
a look at them," he said, mounting the little bay cob, Kolpik, who was
led up by the coachman.
  "You can't get across the stream, Konstantin Dmitrich," the coachman
shouted.
  "All right, I'll go by the forest."
  And Levin rode through the slush of the farmyard to the gate and out
into the open country, his good little horse, after his long
inactivity, ambling easily, snorting over the pools, and asking, as it
were, for guidance.
  If Levin had felt happy before in the cattle pens and farmyard, he
felt happier yet in the open country. Swaying rhythmically with the
ambling paces of his good little cob, drinking in the warm yet fresh
scent of the snow and the air, as he rode through his forest over
the crumbling, wasted snow, still left in parts, and covered with
dissolving tracks, he rejoiced over every tree, with the moss reviving
on its bark and the buds swelling on its shoots. When he came out of
the forest, in the immense plain before him, his winter fields
stretched in an unbroken carpet of green, without one bare place or
swamp, only spotted here and there in the hollows with patches of
melting snow. He was not put out of temper even by the sight of the
peasants' horse and colt trampling down his young grass (he told a
peasant he met to drive them out), nor by the sarcastic and stupid
reply of the peasant Ipat, whom he met on the way, and asked, "Well,
Ipat, shall we soon be sowing?" "We must get the plowing done first,
Konstantin Dmitrich," answered Ipat. The farther he rode, the
happier he became, and plans for the land rose to his mind each better
than the last: to plant all his fields with hedges along the
southern borders, so that the snow should not lie under them; to
divide them up into six fields of tillage and three for pasture and
hay; to build a cattle yard at the further end of the estate, and to
dig a pond and to construct movable pens for the cattle as a means
of manuring the land. And then three hundred dessiatinas of wheat, one
hundred of potatoes, and one hundred and fifty of clover, and not a
dessiatina exhausted.
  Absorbed in such dreams, carefully keeping his horse by the hedges
so as not to trample his young winter fields, he rode up to the
laborers who had been sent to sow clover. A telega with the seed in it
was standing, not at the edge, but in the middle of the tillage, and
the winter corn had been torn up by the wheels and trampled by the
horse. Both the laborers were sitting in the hedge, probably smoking a
pipe, turn and turn about. The earth in the telega, with which the
seed was mixed, was not crushed to powder, but crusted together or
adhering in clods. Seeing the master, the laborer, Vassilii, went
toward the telega, while Mishka set to work sowing. This was not as it
should be, but with the laborers Levin seldom lost his temper. When
Vassilii came up, Levin told him to lead the horse to the hedge.
  "Never mind, sir, it'll spring up again," responded Vassilii.
  "Please don't argue," said Levin, "but do as you're told."
  "Yes, sir," answered Vassilii, and he took the horse's head. "What a
sowing, Konstantin Dmitrich!" he said ingratiatingly. "First-rate.
Only it's a work to get about! A fellow drags thirty pounds of earth
at every step."
  "Why is it you have earth that's not sifted?" said Levin.
  "Well, we crumble it up," answered Vassilii, taking up some seed and
rolling the earth in his palms.
  Vassilii was not to blame for their having fired up his telega
with unsifted earth, but still it was annoying.
  Levin had already, more than once, tried a way he knew for
stifling his anger, and turning all that seemed dark right again,
and he tried that way now. He watched how Mishka strode along,
swinging the huge clods of earth that clung to each foot; and, getting
off his horse, he took the sieve from Vassilii and started sowing
himself.
  "Where did you stop?"
  Vassilii pointed to the mark with his foot, and Levin went forward
as best he could, scattering the seed on the land. Walking was as
difficult as on a bog, and by the time Levin had ended the row he
was in a great heat, and, stopping, gave the sieve over to Vassilii.
  "Well master, when summer's here, mind you don't scold me for this
row," said Vassilii.
  "Eh?" said Levin cheerily, already feeling the effect of his method.
  "Why, you'll see in the summertime. It'll look different. Look you
where I sowed last spring. How I did work at it I do my best,
Konstantin Dmitrich, d'ye see, as I would for my own father. I don't
like botchwork myself, nor would I let another man do it. What's
good for the master is good for us too. It does one's heart good,"
said Vassilii, pointing, "to look over yonder."
  "It's a lovely spring, Vassilii."
  "Why, it's a spring such as even the old men don't remember the like
of. I was up home; my father there has sown wheat too, three osminas
of it. He was saying you couldn't tell it from rye."
  "Have you been sowing wheat long?"
  "Why, sir, it was you taught us, the year before last. You gave me
two measures. We sold about one chetvert and sowed three osminas."
  "Well, mind you crumble up the clods," said Levin, going toward
his horse, "and keep an eye on Mishka. And if there's a good crop
you shall have half a rouble for every dessiatina."
  "Thank you, kindly. We are very well content, sir, with your
treatment, as it is."
  Levin got on his horse and rode toward the field where last year's
clover was, and the one which was plowed ready for the spring corn.
  The crop of clover coming up in the stubble was magnificent. It
had revived already, and stood up vividly green through the broken
stalks of last year's wheat. The horse sank in up to the pasterns, and
he drew each hoof with a sucking sound out of the half-thawed
ground. Over the plowland the riding was utterly impossible; the horse
could only keep a foothold where there was ice, and in the thawing
furrows he sank in deep at each step. The plowland was in splendid
condition; in a couple of days it would be fit for harrowing and
sowing. Everything was capital, everything was cheering. Levin rode
back across the streams, hoping the water would have gone down. And he
did in fact get across, and startled two ducks. "There must be
woodcock here too," he thought, and just as he reached the turning
homewards he met the forest keeper, who confirmed his theory about the
woodcock.
  Levin went home at a trot, so as to have time to eat his dinner
and get his gun ready for the evening.
                             XIV.

  As he rode up to the house in the happiest frame of mind, Levin
heard the bell ring at the side of the principal entrance of the
house.
  "Yes, that's someone from the railway station," he thought, "just
the time to be here from the Moscow train.... Who could it be? What if
it's brother Nikolai? He did say: 'I may go to the waters, or I may
come down to you.'" He felt dismayed and vexed for the first minute
that his brother Nikolai's presence should come to his happy mood of
spring. But he felt ashamed of the feeling, and at once he opened,
as it were, the arms of his soul, and with a softened feeling of joy
and expectation, he now hoped with all his heart that it was his
brother. He spurred on his horse, and as he rode out from behind the
acacias, he saw a hired troika from the railway station, and a
gentleman in a fur coat. It was not his brother. "Oh, if it were
only some pleasant person one could talk to a little!" he thought.
  "Ah," cried Levin joyfully, flinging up both his hands. "Here's a
delightful visitor! Ah, how glad I am to see you!" he shouted,
recognizing Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "I shall find out for certain whether she's married, or when she's
going to be married," he thought.
  And on that delicious spring day he felt that the thought of her did
not hurt him at all.
  "Didn't expect me, did you?" said Stepan Arkadyevich, getting out of
the sleigh, splashed with mud on the bridge of his nose, on his cheek,
and on his eyebrows, but radiant with health and good spirits. "I've
come primarily to see you," he said, embracing and kissing him,
"secondly, to have some stand shooting, and thirdly, to sell the
forest at Ergushovo."
  "Delightful! What a spring we're having! How ever did you get
along in a sleigh?"
  "In a wagon it would have been worse still, Konstantin Dmitrievich,"
answered the driver, who knew him.
  "Well, I'm very, very glad to see you," said Levin, with a genuine
smile of childlike delight.
  Levin led his friend to the guest room, where Stepan Arkadyevich's
things were also carried- a bag, a gun in a case, a satchel for
cigars. Leaving him there to wash and change his clothes, Levin went
off to the countinghouse to speak about the plowing and the clover.
Agathya Mikhailovna, always very anxious for the credit of the
house, met him in the hall with inquiries about dinner.
  "Do just as you like, only let it be as soon as possible," he
said, and went to the bailiff.
  When he came back, Stepan Arkadyevich, washed and combed, came out
of his room with a beaming smile, and they went upstairs together.
  "Well, I am glad I managed to get away to you! Now I shall
understand what the mysterious business is that you are always
absorbed in here. No, really, I envy you. What a house, how splendid
it all is! So bright, so cheerful!" said Stepan Arkadyevich,
forgetting that it was not always spring and fine weather as on this
day. "And your old nurse is simply charming! A pretty maid in an apron
might be even more agreeable, perhaps; but for your severe monastic
style it does very well."
  Stepan Arkadyevich imparted to him many interesting bits of news;
especially interesting to Levin was the news that his brother,
Sergei Ivanovich, was intending to spend the summer with him in the
country.
  Not one word did Stepan Arkadyevich say in reference to Kitty and
the Shcherbatskys; he merely gave him greetings from his wife. Levin
was grateful to him for his delicacy, and rejoiced exceedingly over
his guest. As always happened with him during his solitude, a mass
of ideas and feelings had been accumulating within him, which he could
not communicate to those about him. And now he poured out upon
Stepan Arkadyevich his poetic joy over the spring, and his failures
and plans for the land, and his thoughts and criticisms on the books
he had been reading, and the idea of his own book, the basis of
which really was, though he was unaware of it himself, a criticism
of all the old books on agriculture. Stepan Arkadyevich, always
charming, understanding everything at the slightest reference, was
particularly charming on this visit, and Levin noticed in him a
special tenderness, as it were, and a new tone of respect that
flattered him.
  The efforts of Agathya Mikhailovna and the cook to have the dinner
particularly good, only ended in the two famished friends attacking
the preliminary course, eating a great deal of bread and butter,
salt goose and salted mushrooms, and in Levin's finally ordering the
soup to be served without the accompaniment of little patties, with
which the cook had particularly meant to impress their visitor. But
though Stepan Arkadyevich was accustomed to very different dinners, he
thought everything excellent: the herb brandy, and the bread, and
the butter, and, above all, the salt goose and the mushrooms, and
the nettle soup, and the chicken in white sauce, and the white Crimean
wine- everything was excellent and marvelous.
  "Splendid, splendid!" he said, lighting a fat cigar after the roast.
"I feel as if, coming to you, I had landed on a peaceful shore after
the noise and jolting of a steamer. And so you maintain that the
laborer himself is an element to be studied, and to regulate the
choice of methods in agriculture. Of course, I'm an ignorant outsider;
but I should fancy theory and its application will have its
influence on the laborer too."
  "Yes, but wait a bit. I'm not talking of political economy- I'm
talking of the science of agriculture. It ought to be like the natural
sciences, and to observe given phenomena and the laborer in his
economic, ethnographical..."
  At that instant Agathya Mikhailovna came in with jam.
  "Oh, Agathya Fiodorovna," said Stepan Arkadyevich, kissing the
tips of his plump fingers, "what salt goose, what herb brandy!... What
do you think, isn't it time to start, Kostia?" he added.
  Levin looked out of the window at the sun sinking behind the bare
treetops of the forest.
  "Yes, it's time," he said. "Kouzma, get ready the wide droshky," and
he ran downstairs.
  Stepan Arkadyevich, going down, carefully took the canvas cover
off his varnished gun case with his own hands, and opening it, began
to get ready his expensive, new-fashioned gun. Kouzma, who already
scented a big tip, never left Stepan Arkadyevich's side, and put on
him both his stockings and boots, a task which Stepan Arkadyevich
readily left to him.
  "Kostia, give orders that if the merchant Riabinin comes- I told him
to come today- he's to be shown in and asked to wait for me..."
  "Why, do you mean to say you're selling the forest to Riabinin?"
  "Yes. Do you know him?"
  "To be sure I do. I have had to do business with him, 'positively
and definitively.'"
  Stepan Arkadyevich laughed. 'Positively and definitively' were the
merchant's favorite words.
  "Yes, it's wonderfully funny the way he talks. She knows where her
master's going!" he added, patting Laska, who hung about Levin,
whining and licking his hands, his boots, and his gun.
  The droshky was already at the steps when they went out.
  "I told them to bring the droshky round, though it's not far to
go; or would you rather walk?"
  "No, we'd better drive," said Stepan Arkadyevich, getting into the
droshky. He sat down, tucked the tiger-striped rug round him, and
lighted a cigar. "How is it you don't smoke? A cigar is a sort of
thing, not exactly a pleasure, but the crown and outward sign of
pleasure. Come, this is life! How splendid it is! This is how I should
like to live!"
  "Why, who prevents you?" said Levin, smiling.
  "No, you're a lucky man! You've got everything you like. You like
horses- and you have them; dogs- you have them; shooting- you have it;
farming- you have it."
  "Perhaps because I rejoice in what I have, and don't fret for what I
haven't," said Levin, thinking of Kitty.
  Stepan Arkadyevich comprehended, looked at him, but said nothing.
  Levin was grateful to Oblonsky, for noticing, with his never-failing
tact, that he dreaded conversation about the Shcherbatskys, and so
saying nothing about them. But now Levin was longing to find out about
that which was tormenting him so, yet had not the courage to begin.
  "Come, tell me how things are going with you," said Levin,
bethinking himself that it was not good of him to think only of
himself.
  Stepan Arkadyevich's eyes sparkled merrily.
  "You don't admit, I know, that one can be fond of new rolls when one
has had one's ration of bread- to your mind it's a crime; but I
don't count life as life without love," he said, taking Levin's
question in his own way. "What am I to do? I'm made that way. And
really, one does so little harm to anyone, and gives oneself so much
pleasure..."
  "What! is there something new, then?" queried Levin.
  "Yes, my boy, there is! There, do you see, you know the type of
Ossian's women... women, such as one sees in dreams... Well, these
women are sometimes to be met with in reality.... And these women
are terrible. Woman, don't you know, is such a subject that no
matter how much you study it, it's always perfectly new."
  "Well, then, it would be better not to study it."
  "No. Some mathematician has said that enjoyment lies in the search
for truth, not in the finding of it."
  Levin listened in silence, and, in spite of all the efforts he made,
he could not in the least enter into the feelings of his friend and
understand his sentiments and the charm of studying such women.
                             XV.

  The place fixed on for the stand shooting was not far above a stream
in a little aspen copse. On reaching the copse, Levin got out of the
droshky and led Oblonsky to a corner of a mossy, swampy glade, already
quite free from snow. He went back himself to a double birch tree on
the other side, and, leaning his gun on the fork of a dead lower
branch, he took off his full overcoat, fastened his belt again, and
worked his arms to see if they were free.
  Gray old Laska, who had followed them, sat down warily opposite
him and pricked up her ears. The sun was setting behind a thick
forest, and in the glow of sunset the birch trees, dotted about in the
aspen copse, stood out clearly with their hanging twigs, and their
buds swollen almost to bursting.
  From the thickest parts of the copse, where the snow still remained,
came the faint sound of narrow winding streamlets of water running
away. Tiny birds twittered, and now and then fluttered from tree to
tree.
  In the pauses of complete stillness there came the rustle of last
year's leaves, stirred by the thawing of the earth and the growth of
grasses.
  "Imagine! One can hear and see the grass growing!" Levin said to
himself, noticing a wet, slate-colored aspen leaf moving beside a
blade of young grass. He stood, listened, and gazed sometimes down
at the wet mossy ground, sometimes at Laska listening all alert,
sometimes at the sea of bare treetops that stretched on the slope
below him, sometimes at the darkening sky, covered with white
streaks of cloud. A hawk flew high over a forest far away with a
slow sweep of its wings; another flew with exactly the same motion
in the same direction and vanished. The birds twittered more and
more loudly and busily in the thicket. An owl hooted not far off,
and Laska, starting, stepped cautiously a few steps forward, and,
putting her head on one side, began to listen intently. Beyond the
stream was heard the cuckoo. Twice she uttered her usual call, and
then became hoarse, hurried, and broke down.
  "Imagine! The cuckoo already!" said Stepan Arkadyevich, coming out
from behind a bush.
  "Yes, I hear it," answered Levin, reluctantly breaking the stillness
with his voice, which sounded disagreeable to himself. "Now it's
coming!"
  Stepan Arkadyevich's figure again went behind the bush, and Levin
saw nothing but the bright flash of a match, followed by the red
glow and blue smoke of a cigarette.
  Tchk! Tchk! came the snapping sound of Stepan Arkadyevich cocking
his gun.
  "What's that cry?" asked Oblonsky, drawing Levin's attention to a
prolonged cry, as though a colt were whinnying in a high voice, in
play.
  "Oh, don't you know it? That's a buck hare. But enough talking!
Listen- here it comes!" almost shrieked Levin, cocking his gun.
  They heard a shrill whistle in the distance, and in the exact
time, so well known to the sportsman, two seconds later- another, a
third, and, after the third whistle, the hoarse, guttural cry could be
heard.
  Levin looked about him to right and to left, and there, just
facing him against the dusky blue sky above the confused mass of
tender shoots of the aspens, he saw the flying bird. It was flying
straight toward him; the guttural cry, like the even tearing of some
strong stuff, sounded close to his ear; the long beak and neck of
the bird could be seen, and at the very instant when Levin was
taking aim, behind the bush where Oblonsky stood, there was a flash of
red lightning: the bird dropped like an arrow, and darted upward
again. Again came the red flash and the sound of a blow, and,
fluttering its wings as though trying to keep up in the air, the
bird paused, stopped still an instant, and fell with a heavy splash to
the slushy ground.
  "Can I possibly have missed it?" shouted Stepan Arkadyevich, who
could not see for the smoke.
  "Here it is!" said Levin, pointing to Laska, who, with one ear
pricked up, wagging the tip of her shaggy tail, was coming slowly
back, as though she would prolong the pleasure, and seemingly smiling,
was bringing the dead bird to her master. "Well, I'm glad you were
successful," said Levin, who, at the same time, had a sense of envy
that he had not succeeded in shooting the woodcock.
  "It was a bad shot from the right barrel," responded Stepan
Arkadyevich, loading his gun. "Sh... Here it comes!"
  The shrill whistles rapidly following one another were heard
again. Two woodcocks, playing and chasing one another, and only
whistling, not crying, flew straight at the very heads of the
sportsmen. There was the report of four shots, and like swallows,
the woodcocks turned swift somersaults in the air and vanished from
sight.

  The stand shooting was capital. Stepan Arkadyevich shot two more
birds, and Levin two, of which one was not found. It began to get
dark. Venus, bright and silvery, shone with her soft light low down in
the west, behind the birch trees, and high up in the east twinkled the
red fires of somber Arcturus. Over his head Levin made out the stars
of the Great Bear and lost them again. The woodcocks had ceased
flying; but Levin resolved to stay a little longer, till Venus,
which he saw below a branch of birch, should be above it, and the
stars of the Great Bear should be perfectly plain. Venus had risen
above the branch, and the chariot of the Great Bear with its shaft was
now all plainly visible against the dark blue sky, yet still he
waited.
  "Isn't it time to go home?" said Stepan Arkadyevich.
  It was quite still now in the copse, and not a bird was stirring.
  "Let's stay a little while," answered Levin.
  "As you like."
  They were standing now about fifteen paces from one another.
  "Stiva!" said Levin unexpectedly; "how is it you don't tell me
whether your sister-in-law's married yet, or when she's going to be?"
  Levin felt so resolute and serene that no answer he fancied could
affect him. But he had never dreamed of the answer which Stepan
Arkadyevich made.
  "She's never thought of being married, and isn't thinking of it; but
she's very ill, and the doctors have sent her abroad. They're
positively afraid she may not live."
  "What!" cried Levin. "Very ill? What is wrong with her? How is
she?..."
  While they were speaking, Laska, with ears pricked up, was looking
upward at the sky, and, reproachfully, at them.
  "What a time they have chosen to gab," she was thinking. "There it
comes.... Here it is- yes, sure enough. They'll miss it..." thought
Laska.
  But at that very instant both suddenly heard a shrill whistle which,
as it were, smote on their ears, and both suddenly seized their guns
and two flashes gleamed, and two bangs sounded at the very same
instant. The woodcock flying high above instantly folded its wings and
fell into a thicket, bending down the delicate shoots.
  "Splendid! Together!" cried Levin, and he ran with Laska into the
thicket to look for the woodcock.
  "Oh, yes, what was it that was unpleasant?" he recollected. "Yes,
Kitty's ill... Well, it can't be helped; I'm very sorry," he thought.
  "She's found it! Isn't she a clever girl?" he said, taking the
warm bird from Laska's mouth and packing it into the almost full
gamebag. "I've got it, Stiva!" he shouted.
                             XVI.

  On the way home Levin asked all the details of Kitty's illness and
of the Shcherbatskys' plans, and though he would have been ashamed
to admit it, he was pleased at what he heard. He was pleased that
there was still hope, and still more pleased that she, who had made
him suffer, should be suffering so much. But when Stepan Arkadyevich
began to speak of the causes of Kitty's illness, and mentioned
Vronsky's name, Levin cut him short.
  "I have no right whatever to know family matters, and, to tell the
truth, no interest in them either."
  Stepan Arkadyevich smiled a barely perceptible smile, catching the
instantaneous change he knew so well in Levin's face, which had become
as gloomy as it had been bright a minute before.
  "Have you quite settled about the forest with Riabinin?" asked
Levin.
  "Yes, it's all settled. The price is magnificent- thirty-eight
thousand. Eight straightaway, and the rest in six years. I've been
bothering about it for ever so long. No one would give more."
  "Then you've as good as given away your forest for nothing," said
Levin gloomily.
  "How do you mean- for nothing?" said Stepan Arkadyevich with a
good-humored smile, knowing that nothing would be right in Levin's
eyes now.
  "Because the forest is worth at least five hundred roubles the
dessiatina," answered Levin.
  "Oh, these farmers!" said Stepan Arkadyevich playfully. "Your tone
of contempt for us poor townsfolk!... But when it comes to business,
we are better at it than anyone. I assure you I have reckoned it all
out," he said, "and the forest is fetching a very good price- so
much so that I'm afraid of this fellow's crying off, in fact. You know
it's not 'timber forest,'" said Stepan Arkadyevich, hoping by this
distinction to convince Levin completely of the unfairness of his
doubts, "but for the most part firewood. And it won't run to more than
thirty sazhenes of wood per dessiatina, and he's paying me at the rate
of two hundred roubles the dessiatina."
  Levin smiled contemptuously. "I know," he thought, "that fashion not
only in him, but in all city people, who, after being twice in ten
years in the country, pick up two or three phrases and use them in
season and out of season, firmly persuaded that they know all about
it. 'Timber, run to thirty sazhenes the dessiatina.' He says those
words without understanding them himself."
  "I wouldn't attempt to teach you what you write about in your
office," said he, "and if need arose, I should come to you to ask
about it. But you're so positive you know all the lore of the
forest. It's difficult. Have you counted the trees?"
  "How count the trees?" said Stepan Arkadyevich, laughing, still
trying to draw his friend out of his ill temper. "Count sands of seas,
and rays of stars, though could some higher power..."
  "Oh, well, the higher power of Riabinin can. Not a single merchant
ever buys a forest without counting the trees, unless they get it
given them for nothing, as you're doing now. I know your forest. I
go there every year shooting, and your forest's worth five hundred a
dessiatina paid down, while he's giving you two hundred by
installments. So that in fact you're making him a present of thirty
thousand."
  "Come, don't let your imagination run away with you," said Stepan
Arkadyevich piteously. "Why was it none would give it, then?"
  "Why, because he has an understanding with the merchants; he's
bought them off. I've had to do with all of them; I know them. They're
not merchants, you know; they're speculators. He wouldn't look at a
bargain that gave him ten, fifteen per cent profit, but holds back
to buy a rouble's worth for twenty kopecks."
  "Well, enough of it! You're out of temper."
  "Not in the least," said Levin gloomily, as they drove up to the
house.
  At the steps there stood a trap tightly covered with iron and
leather, with a sleek horse tightly harnessed with broad collar
straps. In the trap sat the chubby, tightly belted overseer who served
Riabinin as coachman. Riabinin himself was already in the house, and
met the friends in the hall. Riabinin was a tall, thinnish,
middle-aged man, with mustache and a projecting clean-shaven chin, and
prominent muddy-looking eyes. He was dressed in a long-skirted blue
coat, with buttons below the waist at the back, and wore high boots
wrinkled over the ankles and straight over the calf, with big galoshes
drawn over them. He mopped his face with his handkerchief, and,
wrapping himself in his coat, which sat extremely well as it was, he
greeted them with a smile, holding out his hand to Stepan Arkadyevich,
as though he wanted to catch something.
  "So, here you are," said Stepan Arkadyevich, giving him his hand.
"That's capital."
  "I did not venture to disregard Your Excellency's commands, though
the road was extremely bad. I positively covered the whole way at a
walk, but I am here on time. Konstantin Dmitrich, my respects"; he
turned to Levin, trying to seize his hand too. But Levin, scowling,
made as though he did not notice his hand, and took out the woodcocks.
"Your honors have been diverting yourselves with the chase? What
kind of bird may it be, pray?" added Riabinin, looking
contemptuously at the woodcocks: "a great delicacy, I suppose." And he
shook his head disapprovingly, as though he had grave doubts whether
this game were worth the candle.
  "Would you like to go into my study?" Levin said in French to Stepan
Arkadyevich, scowling morosely. "Go into my study; you can talk
there."
  "Quite so, wherever you please," said Riabinin with supercilious
dignity, as though wishing to make it felt that others might be in
difficulties as to how to behave, but that he could never be in any
difficulty about anything.
  On entering the study Riabinin looked about, as it was a habit of
his, as though seeking a holy image, but, when he had found it, he did
not cross himself. He scanned the bookcases and bookshelves, and
with the same dubious air with which he had regarded the woodcocks, he
smiled superciliously and shook his head disapprovingly, as though
by no means willing to allow that this game, either, were worth the
candle.
  "Well, have you brought the money?" asked Oblonsky. "Sit down."
  "Oh, don't trouble about the money. I've come to see you to talk
it over."
  "What is there to talk over? But do sit down."
  "I don't mind if I do," said Riabinin, sitting down and leaning
his elbows on the back of his armchair in a position of the
intensest discomfort to himself. "You must knock it down a bit,
Prince. It would be a sin otherwise. As for the money, it is ready
definitively, to the last kopeck. As for money down, there'll be no
hitch there."
  Levin, who had meanwhile been putting his gun away in the
cupboard, was just going out of the door, but catching the
merchant's words, he stopped.
  "Why, you've got the forest for nothing as it is," he said. "He came
to me too late, or I'd have fixed the price for him."
  Riabinin got up, and in silence, with a smile, he looked up at
Levin.
  "Konstantin Dmitrievich is very close," he said with a smile,
turning to Stepan Arkadyevich; "there's definitively no dealing with
him. I was bargaining for some wheat of him, and a pretty price I
offered too."
  "Why should I give you what's mine for nothing? I didn't pick it
up off the ground, nor did I steal it, either."
  "Mercy on us! Nowadays there's positively no chance at all of
stealing. With the definitively open courts, and everything done in
style, nowadays there's no question of stealing. We are just talking
things over like gentlemen. His Excellency's asking too much for the
forest. I can't make both ends meet over it. I must ask for a little
concession."
  "But is the thing settled between you or isn't it? If it's
settled, it's useless haggling; but if it isn't," said Levin, "I'll
buy the forest."
  The smile vanished at once from Riabinin's face. A hawklike, greedy,
cruel expression was left upon it. With rapid, bony fingers he
unbuttoned his coat, revealing a large shirt, bronze waistcoat
buttons, and a watch chain, and quickly pulled out a fat old
pocketbook.
  "Here you are, the forest is mine," he said, crossing himself
quickly, and holding out his hand. "Take the money; it's my forest.
That's Riabinin's way of doing business; he doesn't haggle over
every copper," he added, scowling and waving the pocketbook.
  "I wouldn't be in a hurry if I were you," said Levin.
  "Come, really," said Oblonsky in surprise, "I've given my word,
you know."
  Levin went out of the room, slamming the door. Riabinin looked
toward the door and shook his head with a smile.
  "It's all youthfulness- definitively nothing but childishness.
Why, I'm buying it, upon my honor, simply, believe me, for the glory
of it, that Riabinin, and no one else, should have bought the copse of
Oblonsky. And as to the profits, why, I must make what God gives.
God's my witness. If you would kindly sign the title deed..."
  Within an hour the merchant, carefully stroking his wrapper down,
and hooking up his coat, with the agreement in his pocket, seated
himself in his tightly covered trap, and drove homeward.
  "Ugh, these gentlefolk!" he said to the overseer. "They are all made
alike! they're a fine lot!"
  "That's so," responded the overseer, handing him the reins and
buttoning the leather apron. "But can I congratulate you on the
purchase, Mikhail Ignatich?"
  "Well, well..."
                             XVII.

  Stepan Arkadyevich went upstairs with his pocket bulging with
notes which the merchant had paid him for three months in advance. The
business of the forest was over, the money in his pocket; their
shooting had been excellent, and Stepan Arkadyevich was in the
happiest frame of mind, and therefore felt especially anxious to
dissipate the ill-humor that had come upon Levin. He wanted to
finish the day at supper as pleasantly as it had been begun.
  Levin certainly was out of humor, and, in spite of all his desire to
be affectionate and cordial to his charming guest, he could not
control his mood. The aftereffects of the intoxication of the news
that Kitty was not married had gradually begun to work upon him.
  Kitty was not married, and was ill, and ill from love for a man
who had slighted her. This offense, as it were, rebounded upon him.
Vronsky had slighted her, and she had slighted him, Levin.
Consequently Vronsky had the right to despise Levin, and therefore
he was his enemy. But all this Levin did not think of. He vaguely felt
that there was something in it insulting to him, and he was not
angry now at what had disturbed him, but he fell foul of everything
that presented itself. The stupid sale of the forest, the fraud
practised upon Oblonsky and concluded in his house, exasperated him.
  "Well, finished?" he said, meeting Stepan Arkadyevich upstairs.
"Would you like supper?"
  "Well, I wouldn't say no to it. What an appetite I get in the
country! Wonderful! Why didn't you offer Riabinin something?"
  "Oh, damn him!"
  "Still, how you do treat him!" said Oblonsky. "You didn't even shake
hands with him. Why not shake hands with him?"
  "Because I don't shake hands with a waiter, and a waiter's a hundred
times better than he is."
  "What a reactionist you are, really! What about the amalgamation
of classes?" said Oblonsky.
  "Anyone who likes it is welcome to it, but it sickens me."
  "You're a downright reactionist, I see."
  "Really. I have never considered what I am. I am Konstantin Levin,
and nothing else."
  "And Konstantin Levin very much out of temper," said Stepan
Arkadyevich, smiling.
  "Yes, I am out of temper, and do you know why? Because- excuse me-
of your stupid sale...."
  Stepan Arkadyevich frowned good-humoredly, like one who feels
himself teased and attacked for no fault of his own.
  "Come, enough about that!" he said. "When did anybody ever sell
anything without being told immediately after the sale, 'It was
worth much more'? But when one wants to sell, no one will give
anything.... No, I see you've a grudge against that unlucky Riabinin."
  "Maybe I have. And do you know why? You'll say again that I'm a
reactionist, or some other terrible word; but all the same it does
annoy and anger me to see on all sides the impoverishing of the
nobility to which I belong, and, in spite of the amalgamation of
classes, I'm glad to belong. And their impoverishment is not due to
living in luxury- that would be nothing; living in good style-
that's the proper thing for noblemen: it's only the nobles who know
how to do it. Now, the peasants about us buy land, and I don't mind
that. The gentleman does nothing, while the peasant works and
supplants the idle man. That's as it should be. And I welcome the
peasant. But I do mind seeing the process of impoverishment from a
sort of- I don't know what to call it- innocence. Here a Polish lessee
bought for half its value a magnificent estate from a lady who lives
in Nice. And there a merchant leases land, worth ten roubles in rent
the dessiatina, for one rouble. Here, for no kind of reason, you've
made that cheat a present of thirty thousand roubles."
  "Well, what should I have done? Counted every tree?"
  "Of course, they must be counted. You didn't count them, but
Riabinin did. Riabinin's children will have means of livelihood and
education, while yours, like as not, won't!"
  "Well, you must excuse me, but there's something mean in this
counting. We have our business and they have theirs, and they must
make their profit. Anyway, the thing's done, and there's an end of it.
And here come some fried eggs, my favorite dish. And Agathya
Mikhailovna will give us that marvelous herb brandy...."
  Stepan Arkadyevich sat down at the table and began jollying
Agathya Mikhailovna, assuring her that it was long since he had tasted
such a dinner and such a supper.
  "Well, you praise it, at any rate," said Agathya Mikhailovna, "but
Konstantin Dmitrievich, no matter what you give him- even a crust of
bread- will just eat it and walk away."
  Though Levin tried to control himself, he was gloomy and silent.
He wanted to put one question to Stepan Arkadyevich, but he could
not bring himself to the point, and could not find the words or the
moment in which to put it. Stepan Arkadyevich had gone down to his
room, undressed, again washed, and, attired in a nightshirt with
goffered frills, had got into bed, but Levin still lingered in his
room, talking of various trifling matters, and not daring to ask
what he wanted to know.
  "How wonderfully they make the soap," he said gazing at a piece of
soap he was unwrapping, which Agathya Mikhailovna had placed in
readiness for the guest, but a brand which Oblonsky did not use. "Just
look- why, it's a work of art."
  "Yes, everything's brought to such a pitch of perfection
nowadays," said Stepan Arkadyevich, with a moist and blissful yawn.
"The theater, for instance, and the entertainments... A-a-a!" he
yawned. "The electric light everywhere... A-a-a!"
  "Yes, the electric light," said Levin. "Yes. Oh, and where's Vronsky
now?" he asked suddenly, laying down the soap.
  "Vronsky?" said Stepan Arkadyevich, checking his yawn; "he's in
Peterburg. He left soon after you did, and hasn't been once in
Moscow since. And, do you know, Kostia, I'll tell you the truth," he
went on, leaning his elbow on the table, and, with his hand,
propping up his handsome ruddy face, in which his humid, good-natured,
sleepy eyes shone like stars. "It's your own fault. You took fright at
the sight of your rival. But, as I told you at the time, I couldn't
say which had the better chance. Why didn't you fight it out? I told
you at the time that..." He yawned inwardly, without opening his
mouth.
  "Does he know, or doesn't he, that I did propose?" Levin wondered
gazing at him. "Yes, there's something humbugging, something
diplomatic in his face." And, feeling he was blushing, he looked
Stepan Arkadyevich straight in the face without speaking.
  "If there was anything on her side at that time, it was nothing
but a superficial attraction," pursued Oblonsky. "His being such a
perfect aristocrat, you know, and his future position in society,
had an influence not with her, but with her mother."
  Levin scowled. The humiliation of his rejection stung him to the
heart, as though it were a fresh wound he had only just received.
But he was at home, and the walls of home are a support.
  "Wait, wait," he began, interrupting Oblonsky. "You talk of his
being an aristocrat. But allow me to ask what it consists of, that
aristocracy of Vronsky or of anybody else, beside which I can be
looked down upon? You consider Vronsky an aristocrat, but I don't. A
man whose father crawled up from nothing at all by intrigue, and whose
mother- God knows whom she wasn't mixed up with... No, excuse me,
but I consider myself aristocratic, and people like me, who can
point back in the past to three or four honorable generations of their
family, of the highest degree of breeding (talent and intellect, of
course, are another matter), and have never curried favor with anyone,
never depended on anyone for anything, like my father and my
grandfather. And I know many such. You think it mean of me to count
the trees in my forest, while you make Riabinin a present of thirty
thousand; but you get from the government your liferent, and I don't
know what, while I shall not, and so I prize what's come to me from my
ancestors, or has been won by hard work... We are aristocrats, and not
those who can only exist by favor of the powerful ones of this
earth, and who can be bought for twenty kopecks."
  "Well, but whom are you attacking? I agree with you," said Stepan
Arkadyevich, sincerely and genially; though he was aware that in the
class of those who could be bought for twenty kopecks Levin was
reckoning him as well. Levin's animation gave him genuine pleasure.
"Whom are you attacking? A good deal of what you say is not true about
Vronsky, of course, but I won't talk about that. I tell you straight
out, if I were you, I should go back with me to Moscow, and..."
  "No; I don't know whether you know it or not, but I don't care.
And I tell you- I did propose, and was rejected, and Katerina
Alexandrovna is nothing now to me but a painful and humiliating
reminiscence."
  "Why? What nonsense!"
  "But we won't talk about it. Please forgive me, if I've been nasty,"
said Levin. Now that he had opened his heart, he became as he had been
in the morning. "You're not angry with me, Stiva? Please don't be
angry," he said, and, smiling, he took his hand.
  "Of course not; not a bit- nor is there any reason to be. I'm glad
we've spoken openly. And, do you know, stand shooting in the morning
is usually good- why not go? I might go, without sleeping, straight
from shooting to the station."
  "Capital."
                             XVIII.

  Although all Vronsky's inner life was absorbed in his passion, his
external life unalterably and inevitably followed along the old
accustomed lines of his social and regimental ties and interests.
The interests of his regiment took an important place in Vronsky's
life, both because he was fond of the regiment, and still more because
the regiment was fond of him. They were not only fond of Vronsky in
his regiment, they respected him too, and were proud of him; proud
that this man, with his immense wealth, his brilliant education and
abilities, and the path open before him to every kind of success,
distinction and ambition, had disregarded all that, and of all the
interests of life had the interests of his regiment and his comrades
nearest to his heart. Vronsky was aware of his comrades' view of
him, and in addition to his liking for that sort of life, he felt
bound to keep up that reputation.
  It need not be said that he did not speak of his love to any of
his comrades, nor did he betray his secret even in the wildest
drinking bouts (though indeed he was never so drunk as to lose all
control of himself). And he closed the mouths of any of his
thoughtless comrades who attempted to allude to his liaison. But, in
spite of that, his love was known to all the town; everyone guessed
with more or less certainty at his relations with Madame Karenina. The
majority of the younger men envied him for just what was the most
irksome factor in his love- the exalted position of Karenin, and the
consequent transparency to society, of their liaison.
  The greater number of the young women, who envied Anna and had
long been weary of having her called righteous, rejoiced at the
fulfillment of their predictions, and were only waiting for a decisive
turn in public opinion to fall upon her with all the weight of their
scorn. They were already making ready their handfuls of mud to cast at
her when the right moment arrived. The greater number of the
middle-aged people and certain great personages were displeased at the
prospect of the impending scandal in society.
  Vronsky's mother, on hearing of his liaison, was at first pleased by
it, because nothing to her mind gave such a finishing touch to a
brilliant young man as a liaison in the highest society; she was
pleased, too, that Madame Karenina, who had so taken her fancy, and
had talked so much of her son, was, after all, just like all the other
pretty and decent women- according to the Countess Vronskaia's
ideas. But she had heard of late that her son had refused a position
offered him of great importance to his career, simply in order to
remain in the regiment, where could be constantly seeing Madame
Karenina; she heard that great personages were displeased with him
on this account, and she changed her opinion. She was vexed, too, that
from all she could learn of this liaison it was not that brilliant,
graceful, worldly liaison which she would have welcomed, but a sort of
Werther's desperate passion, so she was told, which might well lead
him into follies. She had not seen him since his abrupt departure from
Moscow, and she sent her elder son to bid him to come to her.
  This elder brother, too, was displeased with his younger brother. He
did not distinguish what sort of love his might be, big or little,
passionate or passionless, pure or impure (he kept a ballet girl
himself, though he was the father of a family, so he was rather
indulgent), but he knew that this love displeased those whom it was
necessary to please, and therefore he did not approve of his brother's
conduct.
  Besides the service and society, Vronsky had another great interest-
horses; he was passionately fond of horses.
  That year races and a steeplechase had been arranged for the
officers. Vronsky had put his name down, bought a thoroughbred English
mare, and in spite of his love, he was looking forward to the races
with intense, though reserved, excitement....
  These two passions did not interfere with one another. On the
contrary, he needed occupation and distraction quite apart from his
love, so as to recruit and rest himself from the violent emotions that
agitated him.
                             XIX.

  On the day of the races at Krasnoe Selo, Vronsky had come earlier
than usual to eat beefsteak in the common messroom of the regiment. He
had no need to be strict with himself, as his weight was exactly the
required one; but still he had to avoid gaining flesh, and so he
eschewed farinaceous and sweet dishes. He sat with his coat unbuttoned
over a white waistcoat, resting both elbows on the table, and, while
waiting for the steak he had ordered, was looking over a French
novel that lay open on his plate. He was only looking at the book to
avoid conversation with the officers coming in and out; he was
thinking.
  He was thinking of Anna's promise to see him today after the
races. But he had not seen her for three days, and as her husband
had just returned from abroad, he did not know whether she would be
able to meet him today or not, and he did not know how to find out. He
had had his last interview with her at his cousin Betsy's summer
villa. He visited the summer villa of the Karenins as rarely as
possible. Now he wanted to go there, and he pondered the question of
how to do it.
  "Of course I shall say Betsy has sent me to ask whether she's coming
to the races. Of course, I'll go," he decided, lifting his head from
the book. And as he vividly pictured the happiness of seeing her,
his face lighted up.
  "Send to my house, and tell them to have out the carriage and
three horses as quickly as they can," he said to the servant, who
handed him the steak on a hot silver dish, and moving the dish up
toward him, he began eating.
  From the adjoining billiard room came the sound of balls clicking,
of talk and laughter. Two officers appeared at the entrance door: one,
a young fellow with a weak, delicate face, who had lately joined the
regiment from the Corps of Pages; the other, a plump, elderly officer,
with a bracelet on his wrist, and little eyes, lost in fat.
  Vronsky glanced at them, frowned, and looking down at his book as
though he had not noticed them, he proceeded to eat and read at the
same time.
  "What? Fortifying yourself for your work?" said the plump officer,
sitting down beside him.
  "As you see," responded Vronsky, knitting his brows, wiping his
mouth, and without looking at the officer.
  "So you're not afraid of getting fat? said the latter, turning a
chair round for the young officer.
  "What?" said Vronsky angrily, making a wry face of disgust and
showing his heavy teeth.
  "You're not afraid of getting fat?"
  "Waiter, sherry!" said Vronsky, without replying, and moving the
book to the other side of him, he went on reading.
  The plump officer took up the list of wines and turned to the
young officer.
  "You choose what we're to drink," he said, handing him the card, and
looking at him.
  "Rhine wine, please," said the young officer, stealing a timid
glance at Vronsky, and trying to pull his scarcely visible mustache.
Seeing that Vronsky did not turn round, the young officer got up.
  "Let's go into the billiard room," he said.
  The plump officer rose submissively, and they moved toward the door.
  At that moment there walked into the room the tan and well-built
Captain Iashvin. Nodding with an air of lofty contempt to the two
officers, he went up to Vronsky.
  "Ah! Here he is!" he cried, bringing his big hand down heavily on
his epaulet. Vronsky looked round angrily, but his face lighted up
immediately with his characteristic expression of calm and firm
friendliness.
  "That's it, Aliosha," said the captain, in his loud baritone.
"Have a bite and drink one tiny glass."
  "Oh, I'm not very hungry."
  "There go the inseparables," Iashvin dropped, glancing sarcastically
at the two officers who were at that instant leaving the room. And
he bent his long legs, swathed in tight riding breeches, and sat
down in the chair, too low for him, so that his knees were cramped
up in a sharp angle. "Why didn't you turn up at Theater at Krasnoe
Selo yesterday? Numerova wasn't at all bad. Where were you?"
  "I was late at the Tverskys'," said Vronsky.
  "Ah!" responded Iashvin.
  Iashvin, a gambler and a rake, a man not merely without any
principles, but of immoral principles- Iashvin was Vronsky's
greatest friend in the regiment. Vronsky liked him both for his
exceptional physical strength, which he showed for the most part by
being able to drink like a fish and to do without sleep without
being in the slightest degree affected by it; and for his great
strength of character, which he showed in his relations with his
comrades and superior officers, commanding both fear and respect,
and also at cards, when he would play for tens of thousands and,
however much he might have drunk, always with such skill and
decision that he was reckoned the best player in the English Club.
Vronsky respected and liked Iashvin particularly because he felt
Iashvin liked him, not for his name and his money, but for himself.
And of all men he was the only one with whom Vronsky would have
liked to speak of his love. He felt that Iashvin, in spite of his
apparent contempt for every sort of feeling, was the only man who
could, so he fancied, comprehend the intense passion which now
filled his whole life. Moreover, he felt certain that Iashvin, as it
was, took no delight in gossip and scandal, and interpreted his
feeling rightly- that is to say, knew and believed that this passion
was not a joke, not a pastime, but something more serious and
important.
  Vronsky had never spoken to him of his passion, but he was aware
that he knew all about it, and that he put the right interpretation on
it, and he was glad to see this in his eyes.
  "Ah! yes," he said, to the announcement that Vronsky had been at the
Tverskys'; and, his black eyes shining, he plucked at his left
mustache, and began twisting it into his mouth- a bad habit he had.
  "Well, and what did you do yesterday? Win anything?" asked Vronsky.
  "Eight thousand. But three don't count; the chap will hardly pay
up."
  "Oh, then you can afford to lose over me," said Vronsky, laughing.
(Iashvin had betted heavily on Vronsky in the races.)
  "No chance of my losing. Makhotin's the only one who's a dangerous
entrant."
  And the conversation passed to forecasts of the coming race, the
only thing Vronsky could think of just now.
  "Come along, I've finished," said Vronsky, and getting up he went to
the door. Iashvin got up too, stretching his long legs and his long
back.
  "It's too early for me to dine, but I must have a drink. I'll come
along directly. Hi, wine!" he shouted, in his rich voice, that was
so famous at drill, and set the windows shaking. "No, I don't need
it!" he shouted again, immediately after. "You're going home, so
I'll go with you."
  And he walked out with Vronsky.
                             XX.

  Vronsky was staying in a roomy, clean, Finnish hut, divided into two
by a partition. Petritsky lived with him in camp too. Petritsky was
asleep when Vronsky and Iashvin came into the hut.
  "Get up, don't go on sleeping," said Iashvin, going behind the
partition and giving Petritsky, who was lying with ruffled hair and
with his nose in the pillow, a prod on the shoulder.
  Petritsky jumped up suddenly onto his knees and looked around.
  "Your brother's been here," he said to Vronsky. "He waked me up, the
devil take him, and said he'd look in again." And pulling up the rug
he flung himself back on the pillow. "Oh do quit that, Iashvin!" he
said, getting furious with Iashvin, who was pulling the rug off him.
"Quit that!" He turned over and opened his eyes. "You'd better tell me
what to drink; I've such a nasty taste in my mouth that..."
  "Vodka's better than anything," boomed Iashvin. "Tereshchenko! Vodka
for your master and cucumbers," he shouted, obviously taking
pleasure in the sound of his own voice.
  "Vodka, do you think? Eh?" queried Petritsky, blinking and rubbing
his eyes. "And you'll drink something? All right then, we'll have a
drink together! Vronsky, have a drink?" said Petritsky, getting up and
wrapping the tiger-striped bedcover round him. He went to the door
of the partition wall, raised his hands, and hummed in French: "'There
was a king in Thu-u-le.' Vronsky, will you have a drink?"
  "Go along," said Vronsky, putting on the coat his valet handed him.
  "Where are you off to?" asked Iashvin. "Oh, here is your troika," he
added, seeing the carriage drive up.
  "To the stables, and I've got to see Briansky, too, about the
horses," said Vronsky.
  Vronsky had as a fact promised to call at Briansky's, some ten
verstas from Peterhof, and to bring him money owing for some horses;
and he hoped to have time to get that in too. But his comrades were at
once aware that that was not the only place he was going.
  Petritsky, still humming, winked and made a pout with his lips, as
though he would say: "Oh, yes, we know your Briansky!"
  "Mind you're not late!" was Iashvin's only comment; and, to change
the conversation: "How's my roan? Is he doing all right?" he inquired,
looking out of the window at the shaft horse, which he had sold to
Vronsky.
  "Stop!" cried Petritsky to Vronsky, just as he was going out.
"Your brother left a letter and a note for you. Wait a bit; where
are they?"
  Vronsky stopped.
  "Well, where are they?"
  "Where are they? That's just the question!" said Petritsky solemnly,
sliding his forefinger upward along his nose.
  "Come, tell me; this is silly!" said Vronsky smiling.
  "I haven't lighted the fire. They must be here somewhere."
  "Come, enough fooling! Where is the letter?"
  "No, I've forgotten, really. Or was it a dream? Wait a bit, wait a
bit! But what's the use of getting in a rage? If you'd drunk four
bottles per man yesterday as I did, you'd forget where you were at.
Wait a bit, I'll remember!"
  Petritsky went behind the partition and lay down on his bed.
  "Wait a bit! This was how I was lying, and this was how he was
standing. Yes- yes- yes... Here it is!"- and Petritsky pulled a letter
out from under the mattress, where he had hidden it.
  Vronsky took the letter and his brother's note. It was the letter he
was expecting- from his mother, reproaching him for not having been to
see her- and the note was from his brother to say that he must have
a little talk with him. Vronsky knew that it was all about the same
thing. "What business is it of theirs!" thought Vronsky, and crumpling
up the letters he thrust them between the buttons of his coat so as to
read them carefully on the road. In the porch of the hut he was met by
two officers; one of his regiment and one of another.
  Vronsky's quarters were always a meeting place for all the officers.
  "Where are you off to?"
  "I must go to Peterhof."
  "Has the mare come from Tsarskoe?"
  "Yes, but I've not seen her yet."
  "They say Makhotin's Gladiator's lame."
  "Nonsense! However, are you going to race in this mud?" said the
other.
  "Here are my saviors!" cried Petritsky, seeing them come in.
Before him stood the batman with vodka and pickled cucumbers on a
tray. "Here's Iashvin, ordering me to drink a pick-me-up."
  "Well, you did make it hot for us yesterday," said one of those
who had come in; "you didn't let us get a wink of sleep all night."
  "Oh, didn't we make a pretty finish!" said Petritsky. "Volkov
climbed onto the roof and began telling us how sad he was. I said:
'Let's have music, the funeral march!' He fairly dropped asleep on the
roof over the funeral march."
  "Drink it up; you positively must drink the vodka, and then
Seltzer water, and a lot of lemon," said Iashvin, standing over
Petritsky like a mother making a child take medicine, "and then a
little champagne- just a wee bottle."
  "Come, there's some sense in that. Stop a bit, Vronsky. We'll all
have a drink."
  "No; good-by, all of you. I'm not going to drink today."
  "Why, are you gaining weight? All right, then we must have it alone.
Give us the Seltzer water and lemon."
  "Vronsky!" shouted someone when he was already outside.
  "Well?"
  "You'd better get your hair cut, it'll weigh you down- especially at
the bald place."
  Vronsky was in fact beginning, prematurely, to get a little bald. He
laughed gaily, showing his heavy teeth, and pulling his cap over the
thin place, went out and got into his carriage.
  "To the stables!" he said, and was just pulling out the letters to
read them through, but thought better of it, and put off reading
them so as not to distract his attention before looking at the mare.
"Later on!..."
                             XXI.

  The temporary stable, a wooden booth, had been put up close to the
racecourse, and there his mare was to have been taken the previous
day. He had not yet seen her there. During the last few days he had
not ridden her out for exercise himself, but had put her in the charge
of the trainer, and so now he absolutely did not know in what
condition his mare had arrived yesterday or was in today. He had
scarcely got out of his carriage when his stableboy (groom),
recognizing the carriage some way off, called the trainer. A
dry-looking Englishman, in high boots and a short jacket,
clean-shaven, except for a tuft below his chin, came to meet him
walking with the uncouth gait of a jockey, turning his elbows out
and swaying from side to side.
  "Well, how's Frou-Frou?" Vronsky asked in English.
  "All right, sir," the Englishman's voice responded somewhere far
down in his throat. "Better not go in," he added, touching his hat.
"I've put a muzzle on her, and the mare's fidgety. Better not go in,
it'll excite the mare."
  "No, I'm going in. I want to look at her."
  "Come along, then," said the Englishman, frowning, and speaking with
his mouth shut, and, with swinging elbows, he went on in front with
his disjointed gait.
  They went into the little yard in front of the shed. The stableboy
on duty, spruce and smart in his holiday attire, met them with a broom
in his hand, and followed them. In the shed there were five horses
in their separate stalls, and Vronsky knew that his chief rival,
Makhotin's Gladiator, a very tall chestnut horse, had been brought
there, and must be standing among them. Even more than his mare,
Vronsky longed to see Gladiator, whom he had never seen, but Vronsky
knew that by the etiquette of the racecourse it was not merely
impossible for him to see the horse, but improper even to ask
questions about him. just as he was passing along the passage, the boy
opened the door into the second horsebox on the left, and Vronsky
caught a glimpse of a big chestnut horse with white legs. He knew that
this was Gladiator, but, with the feeling of a man turning away from
the sight of another man's open letter, he turned round and went
into Frou-Frou's stall.
  "The stall belonging to Ma-k... Mak... I never can say the name-
is here," said the Englishman over his shoulder, pointing his
dirty-nailed thumb toward Gladiator's stall.
  "Makhotin? Yes, he's my most serious rival," said Vronsky.
  "If you were riding him," said the Englishman, "I'd bet on you.
  "Frou-Frou's more nervous, while the other is more powerful," said
Vronsky, smiling at the compliment to his riding.
  "In a steeplechase it all depends on riding and on pluck," said
the Englishman.
  Of pluck- that is, energy and courage- Vronsky did not merely feel
that he had enough; what was of far more importance, he was firmly
convinced that no one in the world could have more of this pluck
than he had.
  "Don't you think I want more sweating down?"
  "Oh, no," answered the Englishman. "Please, don't speak loud. The
mare's fidgety," he added, nodding toward the horse box, before
which they were standing, and from which came the sound of restless
stamping in the straw.
  He opened the door, and Vronsky went into the horse box, dimly
lighted by one little window. In the horse box stood a dark bay
mare, with a muzzle on, shifting her feet on the fresh straw.
Looking round him in the twilight of the horse box, Vronsky
unconsciously took in once more in a comprehensive glance all the
points of his favorite mare. Frou-Frou was an animal of medium size,
not altogether free from reproach, from a breeder's point of view. She
was small-boned all over; though her chest was extremely prominent
in front, it was narrow. Her hindquarters were a little drooping,
and in her forelegs, and still more in her hind legs, there was a
noticeable curvature. The muscles of both hind legs and forelegs
were not very thick; but across her shoulders the mare was
exceptionally broad, a peculiarity specially striking now that she was
lean from training. The bones of her legs below the knees looked no
thicker than a finger from in front, but were extraordinarily thick
seen from the side. She looked altogether, except across the
shoulders, apparently pinched in at the sides and pressed out in
depth. But she had in the highest degree the quality that makes all
defects forgotten: that quality was blood, the blood that tells, as
the English expression has it. The muscles stood up sharply under
the network of sinews, covered with the delicate, mobile skin, soft as
satin, and they were hard as bone. Her clean-cut head, with prominent,
bright, spirited eyes, broadened out at the open nostrils, that showed
the red blood in the cartilage within. About all her figure, and
especially her head, there was a certain expression of energy, and, at
the same time, of softness. She was one of those creatures which
seem devoid of speech only because the mechanism of their mouths
does not allow of it.
  To Vronsky, at any rate, it seemed that she understood all he felt
at that moment as he looked at her.
  Directly Vronsky went toward her, she drew in a deep breath, and,
turning back her prominent eye tin the white looked bloodshot, she
started at the approaching figures from the opposite side, shaking her
muzzle, and shifting lightly from one leg to the other.
  "There, you see how fidgety she is," said the Englishman.
  "Whoa, darling! Whoa!" said Vronsky, going up to the mare and
speaking soothingly to her.
  But the nearer he came, the more excited she grew. Only when he
stood by her head she was suddenly quieter, while the muscles quivered
under her soft, delicate coat. Vronsky patted her strong neck,
straightened over her sharp withers a stray lock of her mane that
had fallen on the other side, and moved his face near her dilated
nostrils, transparent as a bat's wing. She drew a loud breath and
snorted out through her tense nostrils, started, pricked up her
sharp ear, and put out her strong, black lip toward Vronsky, as though
she would nip hold of his sleeve. But remembering the muzzle, she
shook it and again began restlessly stamping her shapely legs one
after the other.
  "Calm down, darling, calm down!" he said, patting her again over her
hindquarters; and, with a glad sense that his mare was in the best
possible condition, he went out of the horse box.
  The mare's excitement had infected Vronsky. He felt that his heart
was throbbing, and that he, too, like the mare, longed to move, to
bite; it was both fearful and delicious.
  "Well, I rely on you, then," he said to the Englishman, "half-past
six on the ground."
  "All right," said the Englishman. "Oh, where are you going, my
lord?" he asked suddenly, using the title my lord, which he scarcely
ever used.
  Vronsky in amazement raised his head, and stared, as he knew how
to stare, not into the Englishman's eyes, but at his forehead,
astounded at the impertinence of his question. But realizing that in
asking this the Englishman had been looking at him not as an employer,
but as a jockey, he answered:
  "I've got to go to Briansky's; I shall be home within an hour."
  "How often I'm asked that question today!" he said to himself, and
he blushed, a thing which rarely happened to him. The Englishman
looked gravely at him; and, as though he, too, knew where Vronsky
was going, he added:
  "The great thing is to keep quiet before a race," said he; "don't
get out of temper, or upset about anything."
  "All right," answered Vronsky, smiling; and, jumping into his
carriage, he told the man to drive to Peterhof.
  Before he had driven many paces away, the dark clouds that had
been threatening rain all day broke, and there was a heavy downpour of
rain.
  "What a pity!" thought Vronsky, putting up the roof of the carriage.
"It was muddy before, now it will be a perfect swamp." As he sat in
solitude in the closed carriage, he took out his mother's letter and
his brother's note, and read them through.
  Yes, it was the same thing over and over again. Everyone- his
mother, his brother- everyone thought fit to interfere in the
affairs of his heart. This interference aroused in him a feeling of
angry hatred- a feeling he had rarely known before. "What business
is it of theirs? Why does everybody feel called upon to concern
himself about me? And why do they worry me so? Just because they see
that this is something they can't understand. If it were a common,
vulgar, worldly intrigue, they would have left me alone. They feel
that this is something different, that this is not a mere pastime,
that this woman is dearer to me than life. And this is
incomprehensible, and that's why it annoys them. Whatever our
destiny is or may be, we have made it ourselves, and we do not
complain of it," he said, in the word we linking himself with Anna.
"No, they must needs teach us how to live. They haven't an idea of
what happiness is; they don't know that without our love there is
for us neither happiness nor unhappiness- no life at all," he thought.
  He was angry with all of them for their interference just because he
felt in his soul that they, all these people, were right. He felt that
the love that bound him to Anna was not a momentary impulse, which
would pass, as worldly intrigues do pass, leaving no other traces in
the life of either save pleasant or unpleasant memories. He felt all
the torture of his own position and hers, all the difficulty in
store for them, conspicuous as they were in the eye of all the
world- in concealing their love, in lying and deceiving; and in lying,
deceiving, feigning and continually thinking of others, when the
passion that united them was so intense that they were both
oblivious of everything else save their love.
  He vividly recalled all the constantly recurring instances of
inevitable necessity for lying and deceit, which were so against his
natural bent. He recalled particularly vividly the shame he had more
than once detected in her at this necessity for lying and deceit.
And he experienced the strange feeling that had sometimes come upon
him since his relations with Anna. This was a feeling of loathing
for something- whether for Alexei Alexandrovich, or for himself, or
for the whole world, he could not have said. But he always drove
away this strange feeling. Now, too, he shook it off and continued the
thread of his thoughts.
  "Yes, she was unhappy before, but proud and at peace; and now she
cannot be at peace and feel secure in her dignity, though she does not
show it. Yes, we must put an end to it," he decided.
  And for the first time the idea clearly presented itself that it was
essential to put an end to this false position, and the sooner the
better. "Abandon everything must we- she and I- and hide ourselves
somewhere alone with our love," he said to himself.
                             XXII.

  The shower did not last long, and by the time Vronsky arrived, his
shaft horse trotting at full speed, and dragging the off horses
galloping through the mud with their reins hanging loose, the sun
had peeped out again, the roofs of the summer villas and the old
lime trees in the gardens on both sides of the high street sparkled
with wet brilliance, and from the twigs came a pleasant drip, and,
from the roofs, rushing streams of water. He thought no more of shower
spoiling the racecourse, but was now rejoicing because- thanks to
the rain- he would be sure to find her at home and alone, as he knew
that Alexei Alexandrovich, who had lately returned from a watering
place, had not moved from Peterburg.
  Hoping to find her alone, Vronsky alighted, as he always did, to
avoid attracting attention, before crossing the bridge, and walked
to the house. He did not go up the steps to the street door, but
went into the court.
  "Has your master come?" he asked a gardener.
  "No, sir. The mistress is at home. But will you please go to the
front door; there are servants there," the gardener answered. "They'll
open the door."
  "No, I'll go in from the garden."
  And feeling satisfied that she was alone, and wanting to take her by
surprise, since he had not promised to be there today, and she would
certainly not expect him to come before the races, he walked,
holding his sword and stepping cautiously over the sandy path,
bordered with flowers, to the terrace that looked out upon the garden.
Vronsky forgot now all that he had thought on the way of the hardships
and difficulties of his position. He thought of nothing but that he
would see her directly, not in imagination, but living, all of her, as
she was in reality. He was just going in, stepping on his whole foot
so as not to make a noise, up the worn steps of the terrace, when he
suddenly remembered what he always forgot, and what caused the most
torturing side of his relations with her: her son, with his
questioning, and, as he fancied, hostile eyes.
  This boy was more often than anyone else a check upon their freedom.
When he was present, both Vronsky and Anna did not merely avoid
speaking of anything that they could not have repeated before
everyone; they did not even allow themselves to refer by hints to
anything the boy did not understand. They had made no agreement
about this, it had been settled of itself. They would have felt it
as wounding themselves to deceive the child. In his presence they
talked like acquaintances. But, in spite of this caution, Vronsky
often saw the child's intent, bewildered glance fixed upon him, and
a strange shyness, uncertainty- at one time there was friendliness, at
another coldness and reserve, in the boy's manner to him, as though
the child felt that between this man and his mother there existed some
important bond, the significance of which he could not understand.
  As a matter of fact the boy did feel that he could not understand
this relation, and he tried painfully, yet was unable, to make clear
to himself what feeling he ought to have for this man. With a
child's keen instinct for every manifestation of feeling he saw
distinctly that his father, his governess, his nurse- all not merely
disliked Vronsky, but looked on him with horror and aversion, though
they never said anything about him; while his mother looked on him
as her greatest friend.
  "What does it mean? Who is he? How ought I to love him? If I don't
know, it's my fault; either I'm stupid or a naughty boy," thought
the child. And this was what caused his dubious, inquiring,
sometimes hostile expression, and the shyness and uncertainty which
Vronsky found so irksome. This child's presence always and
infallibly called up in Vronsky that strange feeling of inexplicable
loathing which he had experienced of late. This child's presence
called up both in Vronsky and in Anna a feeling akin to the feeling of
a sailor who sees by the compass that the direction in which he is
swiftly moving is far from the right one, but that to arrest his
motion is not in his power, that every instant is carrying him farther
and farther away, and that to admit to himself his deviation from
the right direction is tantamount to admitting his certain ruin.
  This child, with his innocent outlook upon life, was the compass
that showed them the point at which they had departed from what they
knew, yet did not want to know.
  This time Seriozha was not at home, and she was completely alone.
She was sitting on the terrace waiting for the return of her son,
who had gone out for a stroll and had been caught in the rain. She had
sent out a manservant and a maid to look for him, and was sitting here
waiting for them. Dressed in a white gown, deeply embroidered, she was
sitting in a corner of the terrace behind some flowers, and did not
hear him. Bending her curly dark head, she pressed her forehead
against a cool watering pot that stood on the parapet, and both her
lovely hands, with the rings he knew so well, clasped the pot. The
beauty of her whole figure, her head, her neck, her hands, struck
Vronsky every time as something new and unexpected. He stood still,
gazing at her in ecstasy. But, directly he would have made a step to
come nearer to her, she was aware of his presence, pushed away the
watering pot, and turned her flushed face toward him.
  "What's the matter? Are you unwell," he said to her in French, going
up to her. He would have run to her, but remembering that there
might be outsiders, he looked round toward the balcony door, and
reddened, as he always reddened, feeling that he had to be afraid
and be on his guard.
  "No, I'm quite well," she said, getting up and squeezing his
outstretched hand tightly. "I did not expect... thee."
  "My God! what cold hands!" he said.
  "You startled me," she said. "I'm alone, and expecting Seriozha;
he's out for a walk; they'll come from this direction."
  But, in spite of her efforts to be calm, her lips were quivering.
  "Forgive me for coming, but I couldn't pass the day without seeing
you," he went on, speaking French, as he always did, to avoid using
the stiff Russian plural form, so impossibly frigid between them,
and the dangerously intimate singular.
  "Forgive- for what I'm so glad!"
  "But you're ill or worried," he went on, without letting go her
hands and bending over her. "What were you thinking of?"
  "Always of the same thing." she said, with a smile.
  She spoke the truth. If ever at any moment she had been asked what
she was thinking of, she could have answered truly: Of the same thing,
of her happiness and her unhappiness. She was thinking, just when he
came upon her, of this: Why was it, she wondered, that to others, to
Betsy for instance (she knew of her secret connection with
Tushkevich), all this was so easy, while to her it was such torture?
Today this thought gained special poignancy from certain other
considerations. She asked him about the races. He answered her
questions, and, seeing that she was agitated, trying to calm her, he
began telling her in the simplest tone the details of his preparations
for the races.
  "Shall I tell him, or not?" she thought, looking into his calm,
affable eyes. "He is so happy, so absorbed in his races that he
won't understand as he should; he won't understand all the
significance of this event to us."
  "But you haven't told me what you were thinking of when I came
in," he said, interrupting his narrative; "pray, tell me!"
  She did not answer, and, bending her head a little, she looked
inquiringly at him from under her brows, her eyes shining under
their long lashes. Her hand shook as it played with a leaf she had
picked. He saw it, and his face expressed that utter subjection,
that slavish devotion, which had done so much to win her.
  "I see something has happened. Do you suppose I can be at peace,
knowing you have a trouble I am not sharing? Tell me, for God's sake!"
he repeated imploringly.
  "Yes, I shan't be able to forgive him if he does not realize all the
significance of it. Better not tell; why put him to the proof?" she
thought, still staring at him in the same way, and feeling that her
hand that held the leaf was trembling more and more.
  "For God's sake!" he repeated, taking her hand.
  "Shall I tell you?"
  "Yes, yes, yes..."
  "I am pregnant," she said, softly and slowly.
  The leaf in her hand shook more violently, but she did not take
her eyes off him, watching how he would take it. He turned pale, would
have said something, but stopped; he dropped her hand, and his head
sank on his breast. "Yes, he realizes all the significance of the
fact," she thought, and gratefully she pressed his hand.
  But she was mistaken in thinking he realized the significance of the
news as she, a woman, realized it. On hearing it, he felt come upon
him with tenfold intensity that strange feeling of loathing of
someone. But, at the same time, he realized that the turning point
he had been longing for had come now; that it was impossible to go
on concealing things from her husband, and it was inevitable in one
way or another that they should soon put an end to their unnatural
position. But, besides that, her emotion physically affected him in
the same way. He looked at her with a look of submissive tenderness,
kissed her hand, got up, and, in silence, paced up and down the
terrace.
  "Yes," he said, going up to her resolutely. "Neither you nor I
have looked on our relations as a passing amusement, and now our
fate is sealed. It is absolutely necessary to put an end"- he looked
round as he spoke- "to the deception in which we are living."
  "Put an end? Put an end how, Alexei?" she said softly.
  She was calmer now, and her face lighted up with a tender smile.
  "Leave your husband and make our life one."
  "It is one as it is," she answered, scarcely audibly.
  "Yes, but completely, completely."
  "But how, Alexei- tell me how?" she said in melancholy mockery at
the hopelessness of her own situation. "Is there any way out of such a
situation? Am I not the wife of my husband?"
  "There is a way out of every situation. We must take our stand,"
he said. "Anything's better than the situation in which you're living.
Of course, I see how you torture yourself over everything- the
world, and your son, and your husband."
  "Oh, not over my husband," she said, with a plain smile. "I don't
know him, I don't think of him. He doesn't exist."
  "You're not speaking sincerely. I know you. You worry about him
too."
  "Oh, he doesn't even know," she said, and suddenly a hot flush
came over her face; her cheeks, her brow, her neck crimsoned, and
tears of shame came into her eyes. "But let us not even talk of him."
                             XXIII.

  Vronsky had several times already, though not so resolutely as
now, tried to bring her to consider her position, and every time he
had been confronted by the same superficiality and frivolity with
which she met his appeal now. It was as though there were something in
this which she could not or would not face, as though directly she
began to speak of this, she, the real Anna, retreated somehow into
herself, and another strange and unaccountable woman came out, whom he
did not love and whom he feared, and who was in opposition to him. But
today he was resolved to have it out.
  "Whether he knows or not," said Vronsky, in his usual calm and
firm tone, "whether he knows or not, has nothing to do with us. We
cannot... You cannot stay like this, especially now."
  "What's to be done, according to you?" she asked with the same
frivolous irony. She who had so feared he would take her condition too
frivolously, was now vexed with him for deducing from it the necessity
of taking some step.
  "Tell him everything, and leave him."
  "Very well, let us suppose I do that," she said. "Do you know what
the result of that would be? I can tell you it all beforehand," and
a wicked light gleamed in her eyes, that had been so tender a minute
before. "'Eh, you love another man, and have entered into a criminal
liaison with him?'" (Mimicking her husband, she threw an emphasis on
the word "criminal," as Alexei Alexandrovich did.) "'I warned you of
the results in the religious, the civil, and the domestic aspects. You
have not listened to me. Now I cannot let you disgrace my name'"- "and
my son," she had meant to say, but about her son she could not jest-
"'disgrace my name, and'- and more in the same style," she added.
"In general terms, he'll say in his official manner, and with all
distinctness and precision, that he cannot let me go, but will take
all measures in his power to prevent scandal. And he will calmly and
punctiliously act in accordance with his words. That's what will
happen. He's not a man, but a machine- and a spiteful machine when
he's angry," she added, recalling Alexei Alexandrovich as she spoke,
with all the peculiarities of his figure and manner of speaking, and
reckoning against him every defect she could find in him, forgiving
him nothing for the great wrong she herself was doing him.
  "But, Anna," said Vronsky, in a soft and persuasive voice, trying to
soothe her, "we absolutely must tell him, at any rate, and then be
guided by the line he takes."
  "What- run away?"
  "And why not run away? I don't see how we can keep on like this. And
not for my sake- I see that you suffer."
  "Yes, run away, and become your mistress," she said angrily.
  "Anna," he said, with reproachful tenderness.
  "Yes," she went on, "become your mistress, and complete the ruin
of..."
  Again she would have said "my son," but she could not utter that
word.
  Vronsky could not understand how she, with her strong and truthful
nature, could endure this state of deceit, and not long to get out
of it. But he did not suspect that the chief cause of it was the
word son, which she could not utter. When she thought of her son,
and his future attitude to his mother, who had abandoned his father,
she felt such terror at what she had done that she no longer reasoned,
but, being a woman, could only try to comfort herself with lying
assurances and words so that everything should remain as it always had
been, and that it was possible to forget the fearful question of how
it would be with her son.
  "I beg you, I entreat you," she said suddenly, taking his hand,
and speaking in quite a different tone, sincere and tender, "never
speak to me of that!"
  "But, Anna..."
  "Never. Leave it to me. I know all the baseness, all the horror of
my position; but it's not so easy to decide as you think. Therefore
leave it to me, and do what I say. Never speak to me of it. Do you
promise me?... No, no, promise!..."
  "I promise everything, but I can't be at peace, especially after
what you have told me I can't be at peace, when you can't be at
peace...."
  "I?" she repeated. "Yes, I am worried sometimes; but that will pass,
if you will never talk about this. When you talk about it- it's only
then it worries me."
  "I don't understand," he said.
  "I know," she interrupted him, "how hard it is for your truthful
nature to lie, and I grieve for you. I often think, how could you ruin
your whole life for me."
  "I was just thinking the very same thing," he said; "how could you
sacrifice everything for my sake? I can't forgive myself because
you're unhappy."
  "I unhappy?" she said, coming closer to him, and looking at him with
an ecstatic smile of love. "I am like a hungry man who has been
given food. He may be cold, and dressed in rags, and ashamed, but he
is not unhappy. I unhappy? No, this is my happiness...."
  She could hear the sound of her son's voice coming toward them, and,
glancing swiftly round the terrace, she got up impulsively. Her eyes
glowed with the fire he knew so well; with a rapid movement she raised
her lovely hands, covered with rings, took his head, looked into his
face with a protracted gaze, and, putting up her face with smiling,
parted lips, swiftly kissed his mouth and both eyes, and thrust him
away. She would have gone, but he held her back.
  "When?" he murmured in a whisper, gazing in ecstasy at her.
  "Tonight, at one o'clock," she whispered, and, with a heavy sigh,
she walked with her light, swift step to meet her son.
  Seriozha had been caught by the rain in the big garden, and he and
his nurse had taken shelter in a bower.
  "Well, au revoir," she said to Vronsky. "I must soon be getting
ready for the races. Betsy promised to fetch me."
  Vronsky, looking at his watch, hurriedly drove off.
                             XXIV.

  When Vronsky had looked at his watch on the Karenins' balcony, he
had been so greatly agitated and lost in his thoughts that, although
he saw the hands on the face of his watch, he could not take in what
time it was. He came out onto the highroad and walked, picking his way
carefully through the mud, to his carriage. He was so completely
absorbed in his feeling for Anna, that he did not even think what
o'clock it was, and whether he had time to go to Briansky's. He
preserved, as often happens, only the external faculty of memory, that
points out each step one has to take, one after the other. He went
up to his coachman, who was dozing on the box in the shadow, already
lengthening, of a thick lime tree; he admired the shifting clouds of
midges circling over the hot horses, and, waking the coachman, he
jumped into the carriage, and told him to drive to Briansky's. It
was only after driving nearly seven verstas that he had sufficiently
recovered himself to look at his watch, and realize that it was half
past five, and that he was late.
  There were several races set for that day: the Body Guards' race,
then the officers' two-versta race, then the four-versta race, and
then the race for which he was entered. He could still be in right
time for his race, but if he went to Briansky's he could be only in
full time, and he would arrive when the whole Court would be in
their places. That would be a pity. But he had promised Briansky to
come, and so he decided to drive on, telling the coachman not to spare
the horses.
  He reached Briansky's, spent five minutes there, and galloped
back. This rapid drive calmed him. All that was painful in his
relations with Anna, all the feeling of indefiniteness left by their
conversation, had slipped out of his mind. He was thinking now with
pleasure and excitement of the race, of his being in time after all,
and now and then the thought of the happiness of this night's
assignation flashed across his imagination like a dazzling light.
  The excitement of the approaching race gained upon him more and more
as he drove farther and farther into the atmosphere of the races,
overtaking carriages driving up from the summer villas or out of
Peterburg.
  There was no longer anyone at home at his quarters; all were at
the races, and his valet was looking out for him at the gate. While he
was changing his clothes, his valet told him that the second race
had begun already, that a lot of gentlemen had been to ask for him,
and a boy had twice run up from the stables.
  Dressing without hurry (he never hurried himself, and never lost his
self-possession), Vronsky drove to the sheds. From the sheds he
could see a perfect sea of carriages, and people on foot, soldiers
surrounding the racecourse, and pavilions swarming with people. The
second race was apparently going on, for just as he went into the
sheds he heard a bell ringing. Going toward the stable, he met the
white-legged chestnut, Makhotin's Gladiator, being led to the
racecourse in a blue and orange horsecloth, with what looked like huge
ears edged with blue.
  "Where's Cord?" he asked the stableboy.
  "In the stable, putting on the saddle."
  In the open horse box stood Frou-Frou, saddled ready. They were just
going to lead her out.
  "I'm not too late?"
  "All right! All right!" said the Englishman; "don't upset yourself!"
  Vronsky once more took in at one glance the beautiful lines of his
favorite mare, who was quivering all over, and with an effort he
tore himself from the sight of her, and went out of the stable. He
went toward the pavilions at the most favorable moment for escaping
attention. The two-versta race was just finishing, and all eyes were
fixed on the cavalry guard in front and the light hussar behind,
urging their horses on with a last effort close to the winning post.
From the center and outside of the ring all were crowding to the
winning post, and a group of soldiers and officers of the cavalry
guards were shouting loudly their delight at the expected triumph of
their officer and comrade. Vronsky moved into the middle of the
crowd unnoticed, almost at the very moment when the bell rang at the
finish of the race, and the tall, mud-spattered cavalry guard who came
in first, leaning over the saddle, let go the reins of his panting
gray stallion that looked dark with sweat.
  The stallion, stiffening out his legs, with an effort stopped his
rapid course, and the officer of the cavalry guards looked round him
like a man waking up from a heavy sleep, and just managed to smile.
A crowd of friends and outsiders pressed round him.
  Vronsky intentionally avoided that select crowd of upper world,
which was moving and talking with discreet freedom before the
pavilions. He knew that Madame Karenina was there, and Betsy, and
his brother's wife, and he purposely did not go near them for fear
of something distracting his attention. But he was continually met and
stopped by acquaintances, who told him about the previous races, and
kept asking him why he was so late.
  At the time when the racers had to go to the pavilion to receive the
prizes, and all attention was directed to that point, Vronsky's
elder brother, Alexandre, a colonel with the shoulder knot, came up to
him. He was not tall, though as broadly built as Alexei, and handsomer
and rosier than he; he had a red nose, and an open, tipsy face.
  "Did you get my note?" he said. "There's never any finding you."
  Alexandre Vronsky, in spite of his dissolute life, and
particularly his drunken habits, for which he was notorious, was quite
one of the Court circle.
  Now, as he talked to his brother of a matter bound to be exceedingly
disagreeable to him, knowing that the eyes of many people might be
fixed upon him, he kept a smiling countenance, as though he were
jesting with his brother about something of little moment.
  "I got it, and I really can't make out what you are worrying
yourself about," said Alexei.
  "I'm worrying myself because the remark has just been made to me
that you weren't here, and that you were seen in Peterhof on Monday."
  "There are matters which only concern those directly interested in
them, and the matter you are so worried about is of that nature..."
  "Yes, but if so, one does not belong in the service, one does
not..."
  "I beg you not to meddle, and that is all."
  Alexei Vronsky's frowning face turned pale, and his prominent
lower jaw quivered, which happened rarely with him. Being a man of
very warm heart, he was seldom angry; but when he was angry, and
when his chin quivered, then, as Alexandre Vronsky knew, he was
dangerous. Alexandre Vronsky smiled gaily.
  "I only wanted to give you mother's letter. Answer it and don't
worry about anything just before the race. Bonne chance," he added,
smiling, and he moved away from him. But after him another friendly
greeting brought Vronsky to a standstill.
  "So you won't recognize your friends! How are you, mon cher?" said
Stepan Arkadyevich, as conspicuously brilliant in the midst of all the
Peterburg brilliance as he was in Moscow, his face rosy, and his
whiskers sleek and glossy. "I came up yesterday, and I'm delighted
because I shall see your triumph. When shall we meet?"
  "Come tomorrow to the messroom," said Vronsky, and squeezing him
by the sleeve of his greatcoat, with apologies, he moved away to the
center of the racecourse, where the horses were being led for the
great steeplechase.
  The horses who had run in the last race were being led home,
steaming and exhausted, by the stableboys, and one after another the
fresh horses for the coming race made their appearance, for the most
part English racers, wearing horsecloths and looking with their
drawn-up bellies like strange, huge birds. On the right Frou-Frou
was led in, lean and beautiful, lifting up her elastic, rather long
pasterns, as though moved by springs. Not far from her they were
taking the caparison off the lop-cared Gladiator. The strong,
exquisite, perfectly correct lines of the stallion, with his superb
hindquarters and excessively short pasterns almost over his hoofs,
attracted Vronsky's attention in spite of himself. He would have
gone up to his mare, but he was again detained by an acquaintance.
  "Oh, there's Karenin!" said the acquaintance with whom he was
chatting. "He's looking for his wife, and she's in the middle of the
pavilion. Didn't you see her?"
  "No, I didn't," answered Vronsky, and without even glancing round
toward the pavilion where his friend was pointing out Madame Karenina,
he went up to his mare.
  Vronsky had not had time to look at the saddle, about which he had
to give some direction, when the entrants were summoned to the
pavilion to receive their numbers and places in the row at starting.
Seventeen officers, looking serious and severe, many with pale
faces, met together in the pavilion and drew the numbers. Vronsky drew
number 7. The cry was heard: "Mount!"
  Feeling that, with the others riding in the race, he was the
center upon which all eyes were fastened, Vronsky walked up to his
mare in that state of nervous tension in which he usually became
dilatory and calm in his movements. Cord, in honor of the races, had
put on his best clothes, a black coat buttoned up, a stiffly
starched collar, which propped up his cheeks, a black bowler and
Hessian boots. He was calm and dignified as ever, and was with his own
hands holding Frou-Frou by both reins, standing straight in front of
her. Frou-Frou was still trembling as though in a fever. Her eye, full
of fire, glanced sideways at Vronsky. Vronsky slipped his finger under
the saddle girth. The mare glanced aslant at him, drew up her lip, and
twitched her ear. The Englishman puckered up his lips, intending to
indicate a smile that anyone should verify his saddling.
  "Get up; you won't feel so excited."
  Vronsky looked round for the last time at his rivals. He knew that
he would not see them during the race. Two were already riding forward
to the point from which they were to start. Galtsin, a friend of
Vronsky's and one of his more formidable rivals, was moving round a
bay horse that would not let him mount. A little hussar of the life
guards in tight riding breeches rode off at a gallop, crouched up like
a cat over the porridge, in imitation of English jockeys. Prince
Kuzovlev sat with a white face on his thoroughbred mare from the
Grabovsky stud, while an English groom led her by the bridle.
Vronsky and all his comrades knew Kuzovlev and his peculiarity of
"weak nerves" and terrible vanity. They knew that he was afraid of
everything- afraid of riding a line horse. But now, just because it
was terrible, because people broke their necks, and there was a doctor
standing at each obstacle, and an ambulance with a cross on it, and
a sister of mercy, he had made up his mind to take part in the race.
Their eyes met, and Vronsky gave him a friendly and encouraging nod.
Only one he did not see, his chief rival, Makhotin on Gladiator.
  "Don't be in a hurry," said Cord to Vronsky, "and remember one
thing: don't hold her in at the fences, and don't urge her on; let her
go as she likes."
  "All right, all right," said Vronsky, taking the reins.
  "If you can, lead the race; but don't lose heart till the last
minute, even if you're behind."
  Before the mare had time to move, Vronsky stepped with an agile,
vigorous movement into the steel-toothed stirrup, and lightly and
firmly placed his compacted body on the creaking leather of the
saddle. Getting his right foot in the stirrup, he with habitual moving
smoothed the double reins between his fingers, and Cord let go. As
though she did not know which foot to put first, Frou-Frou started,
dragging at the reins with her long neck, and as though she were on
springs, shaking her rider from side to side. Cord quickened his step,
following him. The excited mare, trying to deceive her rider, pulled
at the reins, first on one side and then the other, and Vronsky
tried in vain with voice and hand to soothe her.
  They were just reaching the dammed-up stream on their way to the
starting point. Several of the riders were in front and several
behind, when suddenly Vronsky heard the sound of a horse galloping
in the behind him, and he was overtaken by Makhotin on his
white-legged, lop-eared Gladiator. Makhotin smiled, showing his long
teeth, but Vronsky looked at him angrily. He did not like him, and
regarded him now as his most formidable rival. He was angry with him
for galloping past and exciting his mare. Frou-Frou started into a
gallop, her left foot forward, made two bounds, and fretting at the
tightened reins, passed into a jolting trot, bumping her rider up
and down. Cord, too, scowled, and followed Vronsky almost ambling.
                             XXV.

  There were seventeen officers in all riding in this race. The
racecourse was a large four-versta ring in the form of an ellipse in
front of the pavilion. On this course nine obstacles had been
arranged: the stream, a big and solid barrier two arsheenes high, just
before the pavilion, a dry ditch, a ditch full of water, a precipitous
slope, an Irish barricade (one of the most difficult obstacles,
consisting of a mound fenced with brushwood, beyond which was a
ditch out of sight for the horses, so that the horse had to clear both
obstacles or possibly be killed); then two more ditches filled with
water, and one dry one; and the end of the race was just facing the
pavilion. But the race began not in the ring, but a hundred
arsheenes away from it, and in that part of the course was the first
obstacle, a dammed-up stream, three arsheenes in breadth, which the
racers could leap or wade through as they preferred.
  Three times they were ranged ready to start, but each time some
horse thrust itself out of line, and they had to begin again. The
starter, Colonel Sestrin, was beginning to lose his temper, when at
last, for the fourth time, he shouted "Away!" and the riders started.
  Every eye, every opera glass, was turned on the brightly colored
group of riders at the moment they were in line to start.
  "They're off! They're starting!" was heard on all sides after the
hush of expectation.
  And little groups and solitary figures among the public began
running from place to place to get a better view. In the very first
minute the close group of horsemen spread out, and it could be seen
that they were approaching the stream in twos and threes and one
behind another. To the spectators it seemed as though they had all
started simultaneously, but to the racers there were seconds of
difference that had great value to them.
  Frou-Frou, excited and overnervous, had lost the first moment, and
several horses had started before her, but before reaching the stream,
Vronsky, who was holding in the mare with all his force as she
tugged at the bridle, easily overtook three, and there were left in
front of him Makhotin's chestnut Gladiator, whose hindquarters were
moving lightly and rhythmically up and down exactly in front of
Vronsky, and, in front of all, the dainty mare Diana bearing the
more dead than alive Kuzovlev.
  For the first instant Vronsky was not master either of himself or
his mare. Up to the first obstacle, the stream, he could not guide the
motions of his mare.
  Gladiator and Diana came up to it together and almost at the same
instant; at a stroke they rose above the stream and flew across to the
other side; Frou-Frou darted after them easily, as if flying; but at
the very moment when Vronsky felt himself in the air, he suddenly
saw almost under his mare's hoofs Kuzovlev, who was floundering with
Diana on the further side of the stream. (Kuzovlev had let go the
reins as he took the leap, and the mare had fallen together with him
over her head.) Those details Vronsky learned later; at the moment all
he saw was that just under him, where Frou-Frou must alight, Diana's
legs or head might be in the way. But Frou-Frou drew up her legs and
back in the very act of leaping, like a falling cat, and, clearing the
other mare, alighted beyond her.
  "Oh, you darling!" flashed through Vronsky's head.
  After crossing the stream Vronsky had complete control of his
mare, and began holding her in, intending to cross the great barrier
behind Makhotin, and to try to overtake him in the clear ground of
about two hundred sazhenes that followed it.
  The great barrier stood just in front of the Imperial Pavilion.
The Czar and the whole Court, and crowds of people, were all gazing at
them- at him, and at Makhotin, a length ahead of him, as they drew
near the "devil," as the solid barrier was called. Vronsky was aware
of those eyes fastened upon him from all sides, but he saw nothing
except the ears and neck of his own mare, the ground racing to meet
him, and the back and white legs of Gladiator beating time swiftly
before him, and keeping always the same distance ahead. Gladiator
rose, with no sound of knocking against anything. With a wave of his
short tail he disappeared from Vronsky's sight.
  "Bravo!" cried a voice.
  At the same instant, under Vronsky's eyes, right before him
flashed the palings of the barrier. Without the slightest change in
her action his mare flew over it; the palings vanished, and he heard
only a crash behind him. The mare, excited by Gladiator's keeping
ahead, had risen too soon before the barrier, and grazed it with one
of her hind hoofs. But her pace never changed, and Vronsky, feeling
a spatter of mud in his face, realized that he was once more the
same distance from Gladiator. Once more he perceived in front of him
the same back and short tail, and again the same swiftly moving
white legs that got no further away.
  At the very moment when Vronsky thought that now was the time to
overtake Makhotin, Frou-Frou herself, understanding his thoughts,
without any incitement on his part, gained considerably, and began
getting alongside of Makhotin on the most favorable side, close to the
inner rope. Makhotin would not let her pass that side. Vronsky had
hardly formed the thought that he could perhaps pass on the outer
side, when Frou-Frou shifted her pace and began overtaking him on
the other side. Frou-Frou's shoulder, beginning by now to be dark with
sweat, was even with Gladiator's back. For a few bounds they moved
evenly. But before the obstacle they were approaching, Vronsky began
working at the reins, anxious to avoid having to take the outer
circle, and swiftly passed Makhotin just upon the declivity. He caught
a glimpse of his mud-stained face as he flashed by. He even fancied
that he smiled. Vronsky passed Makhotin, but he was immediately
aware of him close upon him, and he never ceased hearing just behind
him the even-thudding hoofs and the rapid and still quite fresh
breathing of Gladiator.
  The next two obstacles, the watercourse and the barrier, were easily
crossed, but Vronsky began to hear the snorting and thud of
Gladiator closer upon him. He urged on his mare, and to his delight
felt that she easily quickened her pace, and the thud of Gladiator's
hoofs was again heard at the same distance away.
  Vronsky was at the head of the race, just as he wanted to be and
as Cord had advised, and now he felt sure of being the winner. His
excitement, his delight, and his tenderness for Frou-Frou grew
keener and keener. He longed to look round, but he did not dare do
this, and tried to be cool and not to urge on his mare, so as to
keep the same reserve of force in her as he felt that Gladiator
still kept. There remained only one obstacle, the most difficult; if
he could cross it ahead of the others, he would come in first. He
was flying toward the Irish barricade; Frou-Frou and he both
together saw the barricade in the distance, and both the man and the
mare had a moment's hesitation. He saw the uncertainty in the mare's
ears and lifted the whip, but at the same time felt that his fears
were groundless; the mare knew what was wanted. She quickened her pace
and rose rhythmically, just as he had fancied she would, and as she
left the ground gave herself up to the force of her rush, which
carried her far beyond the ditch; and with the same rhythm, without
effort, with the same leg forward, Frou-Frou fell back into her pace
again.
  "Bravo, Vronsky!" he heard shouts from a knot of men- he knew they
were his friends and his regiment comrades- who were standing at the
obstacle. He could not fail to recognize Iashvin's voice, though he
did not see him.
  "O my sweet!" he said inwardly to Frou-Frou, as he listened for what
was happening behind. "He's cleared it!" he thought, catching the thud
of Gladiator's hoofs behind him. There remained only the last ditch,
filled with water and two arsheenes wide. Vronsky did not even look at
it, but anxious to come in a long way ahead began sawing away at the
reins, lifting the mare's head and letting it go in time with her
paces. He felt that the mare was at her very last reserve of strength;
not her neck and shoulders merely were wet, but the sweat was standing
in drops on her mane, her head, her sharp ears, and her breath came in
short, sharp gasps. But he knew that she had strength left more than
enough for the remaining two hundred sazhenes. It was only from
feeling himself nearer the ground and from the peculiar smoothness
of his motion that Vronsky knew how greatly the mare had quickened her
pace. She flew over the ditch as though not noticing it. She flew over
it like a bird; but at the same instant Vronsky, to his horror, felt
that failing to keep up with the mare's pace, he had, he did not
know how, made an abominable, unpardonable move in recovering his seat
in the saddle. All at once his position had shifted and he knew that
something awful had happened. He could not yet make out what had
happened, when the white legs of a chestnut horse flashed by close
to him, and Makhotin passed at a swift gallop. Vronsky was touching
the ground with one foot, and his mare was sinking on that foot. He
just had time to free his leg when she fell on one side, gasping
painfully, and, making vain efforts to rise with her delicate, soaking
neck, she fluttered on the ground at his feet like a shot bird. The
clumsy movement made by Vronsky had broken her back. But that he
only knew much later. At that moment he knew only that Makhotin had
flown swiftly by, while he stood staggering alone on the muddy,
motionless ground, and Frou-Frou lay gasping before him, bending her
head back and gazing at him with her exquisite eye. Still unable to
realize what had happened, Vronsky tugged at his mare's reins. Again
she struggled all over like a fish, and, her shoulders making the
wings of the saddle crackle, she rose on her front legs; but unable to
lift her back, she quivered all over and again fell on her side.
With his face hideous with passion, pale, his lower jaw trembling,
Vronsky kicked her with his heel in the stomach and again fell to
tugging at the rein. She did not stir, but thrusting her nose into the
ground, she simply gazed at her master with her speaking eyes.
  "A-a-a!" groaned Vronsky, clutching at his head. "Ah! what have I
done!" he cried. "The race lost! And my fault! shameful, unpardonable!
And the poor darling, ruined mare! Ah, what have I done!"
  A crowd of men, a doctor and his assistant, the officers of his
regiment, ran up to him. To his misery he felt that he was whole and
unhurt. The mare had broken her back, and it was decided to shoot her.
Vronsky could not answer questions, could not speak to anyone. He
turned, and without picking up his fallen cap, walked away from the
racecourse, unconscious of where he was going. He felt utterly
wretched. For the first time in his life he knew the bitterest sort of
misfortune, misfortune beyond remedy, and caused by his own fault.
  Iashvin overtook him with his cap, and led him home, and half an
hour later Vronsky had regained his self-possession. But the memory of
that race remained for long in his heart, the cruelest and bitterest
memory of his life.
                             XXVI.

  The external relations of Alexei Alexandrovich and his wife had
remained unchanged. The sole difference lay in the fact that he was
more busily occupied than ever. As in former years, at the beginning
of the spring he had gone to a foreign watering place for the sake
of his health, being deranged every year with his strenuous winter
work. And just as always he returned in July and at once fell to his
usual work with increased energy. Just as always, too, his wife had
moved for the summer to a villa out of town, while he remained in
Peterburg.
  From the date of their conversation after the party at Princess
Tverskaia's he had never spoken again to Anna of his suspicions and
his jealousies, and that habitual tone of his of bantering mimicry was
the most convenient tone possible for his present attitude to his
wife. He was a little colder to his wife. He simply seemed to be
slightly displeased with her for that first midnight conversation,
which she had repelled. In his attitude to her there was a shade of
vexation, but nothing more. "You would not be open with me," he seemed
to say, mentally addressing her; "so much the worse for you. Now you
may beg as you please, but I won't be open with you. So much the worse
for you!" he said mentally, like a man who, after vainly attempting to
extinguish a fire, should fly in a rage with his vain efforts and say,
"Oh, very well then! You shall burn for this!"
  This man, so subtle and astute in official life, did not realize all
the insanity of such an attitude to his wife. He did not realize it,
because it was too terrible to him to realize his actual position, and
he shut down and locked and sealed up in his heart that secret place
where lay hid his feelings toward his family- that is, his wife and
son. He who had been such a considerate father, had from the end of
that winter become peculiarly frigid to his son, and adopted to him
just the same bantering tone as he used with his wife. "Aha, young
man!" was the greeting with which he met him.
  Alexei Alexandrovich asserted, and believed, that he had never in
any previous year had so much official business as that year. But he
was not aware that he sought work for himself that year, that this was
one of the means for keeping shut that secret place where lay hid
his feelings toward his wife and son, and his thoughts about them,
which became more terrible the longer they lay there. If anyone had
had the right to ask Alexei Alexandrovich what he thought of his
wife's behavior, the mild and peaceable Alexei Alexandrovich would
have made no answer, but he would have been greatly angered with any
man who should question him on that subject. It was precisely for this
reason that there came into Alexei Alexandrovich's face a look of
haughtiness and severity whenever anyone inquired after his wife's
health. Alexei Alexandrovich did not want to think at all about his
wife's behavior and feelings, and he actually succeeded in not
thinking about them at all.
  Alexei Alexandrovich's permanent summer villa was in Peterhof, and
the Countess Lidia Ivanovna used to spend the summer there, close to
Anna, and constantly seeing her. That year Countess Lidia Ivanovna
declined to settle in Peterhof, did not call once at Anna
Arkadyevna's, and had hinted to Alexei Alexandrovich about the
unsuitability of Anna's close intimacy with Betsy and Vronsky.
Alexei Alexandrovich had sternly cut her short, roundly declaring
his wife to be above suspicion, and from that time began to avoid
Countess Lidia Ivanovna. He did not want to see, and did not see, that
many people in society cast dubious glances on his wife; he did not
want to understand, and did not understand, why his wife had so
particularly insisted on staying at Tsarskoe, where Betsy was staying,
and not far from the camp of Vronsky's regiment. He did not allow
himself to think about it, and he did not think about it; but, all the
same, though he never admitted it to himself, and had no proofs, nor
even suspicious evidence, at the bottom of his heart he knew beyond
all doubt that he was a deceived husband, and he was profoundly
miserable about it.
  How often during those eight years of happy life with his wife had
Alexei Alexandrovich looked at other men's faithless wives and other
deceived husbands and asked himself: "How can people descend to
that? How is it they don't put an end to such a hideous situation?"
But now, when the misfortune had come upon himself, he was so far from
thinking of putting an end to the situation that he would not
recognize it at all- would not recognize it just because it was too
awful, too unnatural.
  Since his return from abroad Alexei Alexandrovich had been twice
at their country villa. Once he dined there, another time he spent the
evening there with a party of friends, but he had not once stayed
the night there, as it had been his habit to do in previous years.
  The day of the races had been a very busy day for Alexei
Alexandrovich; but when sketching out the day in the morning he made
up his mind to go immediately after his early dinner, to their
summer villa to see his wife and from there to the races, which all
the Court were to witness, and at which he was bound to be present. He
was going to see his wife, because he had determined to see her once a
week to keep up appearances. And besides, on that day, as it was the
fifteenth, he had to give his wife some money for her expenses,
according to their usual arrangement.
  With his habitual control over his thoughts, though he thought all
this about his wife, he did not let his thoughts stray further in
regard to her.
  That morning was a very full one for Alexei Alexandrovich. The
evening before, Countess Lidia Ivanovna had sent him a pamphlet by a
celebrated traveler in China, who was staying in Peterburg, and with
it she enclosed a note begging him to see the traveler himself, as
he was an extremely interesting person from various points of view,
and likely to be useful. Alexei Alexandrovich had not had time to read
the pamphlet through in the evening, and finished it in the morning.
Then people began arriving with petitions, and then came the
reports, interviews, appointments, dismissals, apportionment of
rewards, pensions, payments, papers- the workday round, as Alexei
Alexandrovich called it, that always took up so much time. Then
there was a private business of his own, a visit from the doctor,
and from the steward who managed his property. The steward did not
take up much time. He simply gave Alexei Alexandrovich the money he
needed, together with a brief statement of the position of his
affairs, which was not altogether satisfactory, as during that year,
owing to increased expenses, more had been paid out than usual, and
there was a deficit. But the doctor, a celebrated Peterburg doctor,
who was an intimate acquaintance of Alexei Alexandrovich, had taken up
a great deal of time. Alexei Alexandrovich had not expected him that
day, and was surprised at his visit, and still more so when the doctor
questioned him very carefully about his health, listened to his
breathing, and tapped at his liver. Alexei Alexandrovich did not
know that his friend Lidia Ivanovna, noticing that he was not as
well as usual that year, had begged the doctor to go and examine
him. "Do this for my sake," the Countess Lidia Ivanovna had said to
him.
  "I will do it for the sake of Russia, Countess," replied the doctor.
  "A priceless man!" said the Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
  The doctor was extremely dissatisfied with Alexei Alexandrovich.
He found the liver considerably enlarged, and the digestive powers
weakened, while the course of mineral waters had been quite without
effect. He prescribed more physical exercise as far as possible, and
as far as possible less mental strain, and above all no worry- in
other words, just what was as much out of Alexei Alexandrovich's power
as abstaining from breathing. Then he withdrew, leaving in Alexei
Alexandrovich an unpleasant sense that something was wrong with him,
and that there was no chance of curing it.
  As he was coming away, the doctor chanced to meet on the steps an
acquaintance of his, Sludin, who was head clerk in Alexei
Alexandrovich's office. They had been comrades at the university, and,
though they rarely met, they thought highly of each other and were
excellent friends, and hence there was no one to whom the doctor would
have given his opinion of a patient so freely as to Sludin.
  "How glad I am you've been seeing him!" said Sludin. "He's not well,
and I fancy... Well, what do you think of him?"
  "I'll tell you," said the doctor, beckoning over Sludin's head to
his coachman to bring the carriage round. "It's just this," said the
doctor, taking a finger of his kid glove in his white hands and
pulling it, "if you don't strain the strings, and then try to break
them, you'll find it a difficult job; but strain a string to its
very utmost, and the mere weight of one finger on the strained
string will snap it. And with his close assiduity, his conscientious
devotion to his work, he's strained to the utmost; and there's some
outside burden weighing on him, and that not a light one," concluded
the doctor, raising his eyebrows significantly. "Will you be at the
races?" he added, as he came down to his carriage. "Yes, yes, to be
sure; it does waste a lot of time," the doctor responded vaguely to
some reply of Sludin's he had not caught.
  Directly after the doctor, who had taken up so much time, came the
celebrated traveler, and Alexei Alexandrovich, by means of the
pamphlet he had only just finished reading, and his previous
acquaintance with the subject, impressed the traveler by the depth
of his knowledge of the subject and the breadth and enlightenment of
his view of it.
  At the same time with the traveler there was announced a
provincial marshal of nobility on a visit to Peterburg, with whom
Alexei Alexandrovich had to have some conversation. After his
departure, he had to finish the daily routine of business with his
head clerk, and then he still had to drive round to call on a
certain personage on a matter of grave and serious import. Alexei
Alexandrovich hardly managed to be back by five o'clock, his dinner
hour, and, after dining with his head clerk, he invited him to drive
with him to his summer villa and to the races.
  Though he did not acknowledge it to himself, Alexei Alexandrovich
always tried nowadays to secure the presence of a third person in
his interviews with his wife.
                             XXVII.

  Anna was upstairs, standing before the looking glass, and, with
Annushka's assistance, pinning the last ribbon on her gown when she
heard carriage wheels crunching the gravel at the entrance.
  "It's too early for Betsy," she thought, and, glancing out of the
window, she caught sight of the carriage and, protruded from it, the
black hat of Alexei Alexandrovich, and the ears that she knew so well.
"How unlucky! Can he be going to stay the night?" she wondered, and
the thought of all that might come of such a chance struck her as so
awful and terrible that, without dwelling on it for a moment, she went
down to meet him with a bright and radiant face; and conscious of
the presence of that spirit of falsehood and deceit in herself that
she had come to know of late, she abandoned herself to that spirit and
began talking, hardly knowing what she was saying.
  "Ah, how lovely of you!" she said, giving her husband her hand,
and with a smile greeting Sludin, who was like one of the family.
"You're staying the night, I hope?" was the first word the spirit of
falsehood prompted her to utter. "And now we'll go together. Only it's
a pity I've promised Betsy. She's coming for me."
  Alexei Alexandrovich knit his brows at Betsy's name.
  "Oh, I'm not going to separate the inseparables," he said in his
usual bantering tone. "I'm going with Mikhail Vassilyevich. Even the
doctors order me to walk. I'll walk, and fancy myself at the springs
again."
  "There's no hurry," said Anna. "Would you like tea?"
  She rang.
  "Bring in tea, and tell Seriozha that Alexei Alexandrovich is
here. Well, tell me, how have you been? Mikhail Vassilyevich, you've
not been to see me before. Look how lovely it is out on the
terrace," she said, turning first to one and then to the other.
  She spoke very simply and naturally, but too much and too fast.
She was the more aware of this from noticing in the inquisitive look
which Mikhail Vassilyevich turned on her that he was, as it were,
keeping watch on her.
  Mikhail Vassilyevich promptly went out on the terrace.
  She sat down beside her husband.
  "You don't look quite well," she said.
  "Yes," he said; "the doctor's been with me today and wasted an
hour of my time. I feel that some one of our friends must have sent
him: my health's so precious...."
  "Come: what did he say?"
  She questioned him about his health, and what he had been doing, and
tried to persuade him to take a rest and come out to her.
  All this she said brightly, rapidly, and with a peculiar
brilliance in her eyes. But Alexei Alexandrovich did not now attach
any special significance to this tone of hers. He heard only her words
and gave them only the direct sense they bore. And he answered simply,
though jestingly. There was nothing remarkable in all this
conversation, but never after could Anna recall this brief scene
without an agonizing pang of shame.
  Seriozha came in, preceded by his governess. If Alexei Alexandrovich
had allowed himself to observe he would have noticed the timid and
bewildered eyes with which Seriozha glanced first at his father and
then at his mother. But he would not see anything, and he did not
see it.
  "Ah, the young man! He's grown. Really, he's getting quite a man.
How are you, young man?"
  And he gave his hand to the scared child.
  Seriozha had been shy of his father before, and now, ever since
Alexei Alexandrovich had taken to calling him "young man," and since
that insolvable question had occurred to him as to whether Vronsky
were friend or foe, he avoided his father. He looked round toward
his mother, as though seeking refuge. It was only with his mother that
he was at ease. Meanwhile, Alexei Alexandrovich was holding his son by
the shoulder, while he was speaking to the governess, and Seriozha was
so miserably uncomfortable that Anna saw he was on the point of tears.
  Anna, who had flushed a little the instant her son had come in,
noticing that Seriozha was uncomfortable, got up hurriedly, took
Alexei Alexandrovich's hand from her son's shoulder, and, kissing
the boy, led him out onto the terrace, and quickly came back.
  "It's time to start, though," said she, glancing at her watch.
"How is it Betsy doesn't come?..."
  "Yes," said Alexei Alexandrovich, and, getting up, he folded his
hands and cracked his fingers. "I've come to bring you some money,
too- for nightingales, we know, can't live on fairy tales," he said.
"You want it, I expect?"
  "No, I don't... Yes, I do," she said, without looking at him, and
crimsoning to the roots of her hair. "But you'll come back here
after the races, I suppose?"
  "Oh, yes!" answered Alexei Alexandrovich. "And here's the glory of
Peterhof- Princess Tverskaia," he added, looking out of the window
at the English harnessed carriage, with the tiny seats placed
extremely high. "What elegance! Charming! Well, let us be starting
too, then."
  Princess Tverskaia did not get out of her carriage, but her
liveryman, in spatterdashes, a cape and black high hat, jumped off
at the entrance.
  "I'm going; good-by!" said Anna, and, kissing her son, she went up
to Alexei Alexandrovich and held out her hand to him. "It was ever
so lovely of you to come."
  Alexei Alexandrovich kissed her hand.
  "Well, au revoir, then! You'll come back for some tea- that'll be
delightful!" she said, and went out, radiant and gay. But as soon as
he was out of sight, she became aware of the spot on her hand that his
lips had touched, and she shuddered with repulsion.
                             XXVIII.

  When Alexei Alexandrovich reached the racecourse Anna was already
sitting in the pavilion beside Betsy, in that pavilion where the
highest society had gathered. She caught sight of her husband in the
distance. Two men, her husband and her lover, were the two centers
of her existence, and, unaided by her external senses, she was aware
of their proximity. She was aware of her husband approaching a long
way off, and she could not help following him in the surging crowd
in the midst of which he was moving. She watched his progress toward
the pavilion, saw him now responding condescendingly to an
ingratiating bow, now exchanging friendly, nonchalant greetings with
his equals, now assiduously trying to catch the eye of some great
one of this world, and taking off his big round hat that pressed
down the tips of his ears. All these ways of his she knew, and all
were hateful to her. "Nothing but ambition, nothing but desire to
get on- that's all there is in his soul," she thought; "as for his
lofty ideals, love of culture, religion, they are only so many tools
for getting on."
  From his glances toward the ladies' pavilion (he was staring
straight at her, but did not distinguish his wife in the sea of
muslin, ribbons, feathers, parasols and flowers) she saw that he was
looking for her, but she purposely avoided noticing him.
  "Alexei Alexandrovich!" Princess Betsy called to him; "I'm sure
you don't see your wife: here she is."
  He smiled his chilly smile.
  "There's so much splendor here that one's eyes are dazzled," he
said, and he went into the pavilion. He smiled to his wife as a man
should smile on meeting his wife after only just parting from her, and
greeted the princess and other acquaintances, giving to each what
was due- that is to say, jesting with the ladies and dealing out
friendly greetings among the men. Below, near the pavilion, was
standing an adjutant general of whom Alexei Alexandrovich had a high
opinion, noted for his intelligence and culture. Alexei
Alexandrovich entered into conversation with him.
  There was an interval between the races, and so nothing hindered
conversation. The adjutant general expressed his disapproval of races.
Alexei Alexandrovich replied defending them. Anna heard his high,
measured tones, without losing one word, and every word struck her
as false, and stabbed her ears with pain.
  When the four-versta steeplechase was beginning, she bent forward
and gazed with fixed eyes at Vronsky as he went up to his horse and
mounted, and at the same time she heard that loathsome,
never-ceasing voice of her husband. She was in an agony of terror
for Vronsky, but a still greater agony was the never-ceasing, as it
seemed to her, stream of her husband's shrill voice with its
familiar intonations.
  "I'm a wicked woman, a lost woman," she thought; "but I don't like
lying, I can't endure falsehood, while as for him [her husband],
falsehood is the breath of life to him. He knows all about it, he sees
it all; what does he care if he can talk so calmly? If he were to kill
me, if he were to kill Vronsky, I might respect him. No, all he
wants is falsehood and propriety," Anna said to herself, not
considering exactly what it was she wanted of her husband, and how she
would have liked to see him behave. She did not understand either that
Alexei Alexandrovich's peculiar loquacity that day, so exasperating to
her, was merely the expression of his inward distress and
uneasiness. As a child that has been hurt hops about, putting all
his muscles into movement to drown the pain, in the same way Alexei
Alexandrovich needed mental exercise to drown the thoughts of his
wife, that in her presence and in Vronsky's, and with the continual
iteration of his name, would force themselves on his attention. And it
is as natural for a child to hop about, as it was natural for him to
talk well and cleverly. He was saying:
  "Danger in the races to officers, to cavalrymen, is an essential
element in the race. If England can point to the most brilliant
feats of cavalry in military history, it is simply owing to the fact
that she has historically developed this force both in beasts and in
men. Sport has, in my opinion, a great value, and, as is always the
case, we see nothing but what is most superficial."
  "It's not superficial," said Princess Tverskaia. "One of the
officers, they say, has broken two ribs."
  Alexei Alexandrovich smiled his smile, which uncovered his teeth,
but revealed nothing more.
  "We'll admit, Princess, that that's not superficial," he said,
"but internal. But that's not the point," and he turned again to the
general with whom he talked seriously; "we mustn't forget that those
who are taking part in the race are military men, who have chosen that
career, and one must allow that every calling has its disagreeable
side. It forms an integral part of the duties of an officer. Low
sports, such as prize fighting or Spanish bullfights, are a sign of
barbarity. But specialized trials of skill are a sign of development."
  "No, I shan't come another time; it's too upsetting," said
Princess Betsy. "Isn't it, Anna?"
  "It is upsetting, but one can't tear oneself away," said another
lady. "If I'd been a Roman woman I should never have missed a single
circus."
  Anna said nothing, and, keeping her opera glass up, gazed always
at the same spot.
  At that moment a tall general walked through the pavilion.
Breaking off what he was saying, Alexei Alexandrovich got up
hurriedly, though with dignity, and bowed low to the general.
  "You're not racing?" the officer asked, chaffing him.
  "My race is a harder one," Alexei Alexandrovich responded
deferentially.
  And though the answer meant nothing, the general looked as though he
had heard a witty remark from a witty man, and fully relished la
pointe de la sauce.
  "There are two aspects," Alexei Alexandrovich resumed: "those who
take part and those who look on; and love for such spectacles is an
unmistakable proof of a low degree of development in the spectator,
I admit, but..."
  "Any bets, Princess?" sounded Stepan Arkadyevich's voice from below,
addressing Betsy. "Who's your favorite?"
  "Anna and I are for Kuzovlev," replied Betsy.
  "I'm for Vronsky. A pair of gloves?"
  "Done!"
  "But it is a pretty sight, isn't it?"
  Alexei Alexandrovich paused while the others were talking near
him, but he began again directly.
  "I admit that manly sports do not..." he made an attempt to
continue.
  But at that moment the racers started, and all conversation
ceased. Alexei Alexandrovich also fell silent, and everyone stood up
and turned toward the stream. Alexei Alexandrovich took no interest in
the race, and so he did not watch the racers, but fell listlessly to
scanning the spectators with his weary eyes. His eyes rested upon
Anna.
  Her face was white and stern. She was obviously seeing nothing and
no one but one man. Her hand had convulsively clutched her fan, and
she held her breath. He looked at her and hastily turned away,
scrutinizing other faces.
  "But here's this lady too, and others very much moved as well;
it's very natural," Alexei Alexandrovich told himself He tried not
to look at her, but unconsciously his eyes were drawn to her. He
examined that face again, trying not to read what was so plainly
written on it, and against his own will, with horror, read in it
what he did not want to know.
  The first fall- Kuzovlev's, at the stream- agitated everyone, but
Alexei Alexandrovich saw distinctly on Anna's pale, triumphant face
that the man she was watching had not fallen. When, after Makhotin and
Vronsky had cleared the worst barrier, the next officer had been
thrown straight on his head at it and fatally injured, and a shudder
of horror passed over the whole public, Alexei Alexandrovich saw
that Anna did not even notice it, and had some difficulty in realizing
what they were saying around her. But more and more often, and with
greater persistence, he watched her. Anna, wholly engrossed as she was
with the sight of Vronsky racing, became aware of her husband's cold
eyes fixed upon her from aside.
  She glanced round for an instant, looked inquiringly at him, and
with a slight frown turned away again.
  "Ah, I don't care!" she seemed to say to him, and she did not once
glance at him again.
  The race was an unlucky one, and of the seventeen officers who
rode in it more than half had been thrown and hurt. Toward the end
of the race everyone was in a state of agitation, which was
intensified by the fact that the Czar was displeased.
                             XXIX.

  Everyone was loudly expressing disapprobation, everyone was
repeating a phrase someone had uttered: "The lions and gladiators will
be the next thing," and everyone was feeling horrified; so that when
Vronsky fell to the ground, and Anna moaned aloud, there was nothing
very much out of the way in it. But afterward a change came over
Anna's face which really went beyond decorum. She utterly lost her
head. She began fluttering like a caged bird, at one moment wanting to
get up and move away, and at the next turning to Betsy.
  "Let us go, let us go!" she said.
  But Betsy did not hear her. She was bending down, talking to a
general who had come up to her.
  Alexei Alexandrovich went up to Anna and courteously offered her his
arm.
  "Let us go, if you like," he said in French, but Anna was
listening to the general and did not notice her husband.
  "He's broken his leg too, so they say," the general was saying.
"This surpasses everything."
  Without answering her husband, Anna lifted her opera glass and gazed
toward the place where Vronsky had fallen; but it was so far off,
and there was such a crowd of people about it, that she could make out
nothing. She put down the opera glass, and would have moved away,
but at that moment an officer galloped up and made some announcement
to the Czar. Anna craned forward, listening.
  "Stiva! Stiva!" she cried to her brother.
  But her brother did not hear her. Again she would have moved away.
  "Once more I offer you my arm if you want to be going," said
Alexei Alexandrovich, reaching for her hand.
  She drew back from him with aversion, and without looking at his
face answered:
  "No, no, leave me alone- I'll stay."
  She saw now that from the place of Vronsky's accident an officer was
running across the course toward the pavilion. Betsy waved her
handkerchief to him. The officer brought the news that the rider was
not killed, but that the back of the horse had been broken.
  On hearing this Anna sat down hurriedly, and hid her face in her
fan. Alexei Alexandrovich saw that she was weeping, and could not
control her tears, nor even the sobs that were shaking her bosom.
Alexei Alexandrovich stood so as to screen her, giving her time to
recover herself.
  "For the third time I offer you my arm," he said to her after a
short interval, turning to her. Anna gazed at him and did not know
what to say. Princess Betsy came to her rescue.
  "No, Alexei Alexandrovich; I brought Anna and I promised to take her
home," put in Betsy.
  "Excuse me, Princess," he said smiling courteously, but looking
her very firmly in the face, "but I see that Anna's not very well, and
I wish her to come home with me."
  Anna looked about her in a frightened way, got up submissively,
and laid her hand on her husband's arm.
  "I'll send to him and find out, and let you know," Betsy whispered
to her.
  As they left the pavilion, Alexei Alexandrovich, as always, talked
to those he met, and Anna had, as always, to talk and answer; but
she was utterly beside herself, and moved hanging on her husband's
arm, as though in a dream.
  "Is he killed or not? Is it true? Will he come or not? Shall I see
him today?" she was thinking.
  She took her seat in her husband's carriage in silence, and in
silence drove out of the press of carriages. In spite of all he had
seen, Alexei Alexandrovich still did not allow himself to consider his
wife's real condition. He merely saw the outward symptoms. He saw that
she was behaving unbecomingly, and considered it his duty to tell
her so. But it was very difficult for him not to say more, to tell her
nothing but that. He opened his mouth to tell her she had behaved
unbecomingly, but he could not help saying something utterly
different.
  "What an inclination we all have, though, for these cruel
spectacles! he said. "I observe..."
  "Eh? I don't understand," said Anna contemptuously.
  He was offended, and at once began to say what he had meant to say.
  "I am obliged to tell you..." he began.
  "So now we are to have it out," she thought, and she felt
frightened.
  "I am obliged to tell you that your behavior has been unbecoming
today," he said to her, in French.
  "In what way has my behavior been unbecoming?" she said aloud,
turning her head swiftly and looking him straight in the face, not
with the bright expression that seemed covering something, but with
a look of determination, under which she concealed with difficulty the
dismay she was feeling.
  "Be careful," he said, pointing to the open window opposite the
coachman.
  He got up and pulled up the window.
  "What did you consider unbecoming?" she repeated.
  "The despair you were unable to conceal at the accident to one of
the riders."
  He waited for her to retort, but she was silent, looking straight
before her.
  "I have already begged you so to conduct yourself in society that
even malicious tongues can find nothing to say against you. There
was a time when I spoke of your inward attitude, but I am not speaking
of that now. Now I speak only of your external attitude. You have
behaved improperly, and I would wish it not to occur again."
  She did not hear half of what he was saying; she felt panic-stricken
before him, and was thinking whether it was true that Vronsky was
not killed. Was it of him they were speaking when they said the
rider was unhurt, but that the back of the horse had been broken?
She merely smiled with a forced smile when he finished, and made no
reply, because she had not heard what he said. Alexei Alexandrovich
had begun to speak boldly, but as he realized plainly what he was
speaking of, the dismay she was feeling infected him too. He saw the
smile, and a strange misapprehension came over him.
  "She is smiling at my suspicions. Yes, she will tell me directly
what she told me before; that there is no foundation for my
suspicions, that the whole thing is absurd."
  At that moment, when the revelation of everything was hanging over
him, there was nothing he expected so much as that she would answer
mockingly, as before, that his suspicions were absurd and utterly
groundless. So terrible to him was what he knew that now he was
ready to believe anything. But the expression of her face, scared
and gloomy, did not now promise even deception.
  "Possibly I was mistaken," said he. "If so, I beg your pardon."
  "No, you were not mistaken," she said slowly, looking desperately
into his frigid face. "You were not mistaken. I was in despair, nor
could I help being in despair. I am listening to you, but I am
thinking of him. I love him, I am his mistress; I can't bear you;
I'm afraid of you, and I hate you... You can do what you like to me."
  And dropping back into the corner of the carriage, she broke into
sobs, hiding her face in her hands. Alexei Alexandrovich did not stir,
and kept looking straight before him. But his whole face suddenly bore
the solemn rigidity of the dead, and his expression did not change
during the whole time of the drive home. On reaching the house he
turned his head to her, still with the same expression.
  "Very well! But I expect a strict observance of the external forms
of propriety till such time"- his voice shook- "as I may take measures
to secure my honor, and communicate them to you."
  He got out first and helped her to get out. Before the servants he
pressed her hand, took his seat in the carriage, and drove back to
Peterburg.
  Immediately afterward a footman came from Princess Betsy and brought
Anna a note.
  "I sent to Alexei to find out how he is, and he writes me he is
quite well and unhurt, but in despair."
  "So he will be here," she thought. "What a good thing I told him
all."
  She glanced at her watch. She had still three hours to wait, and the
memories of their last meeting set her blood in flame.
  "My God, how light it is! It's dreadful, but I do love to see his
face, and I do love this fantastic light.... My husband! Oh! yes...
Well, thank God! everything's at an end with him."
                             XXX.

  In the little German watering place to which the Shcherbatskys had
betaken themselves, as in all places indeed where people are
gathered together, the usual process, as it were, of the
crystallization of society went on, assigning to each member of that
society a definite and unalterable place. Just as the particle of
water in frost, definitely and unalterably, takes the special form
of the crystal of snow, so each new person that arrived at the springs
was at once placed in his or her peculiar place.
  Furst Shcherbatsky, samt Gemahlin und Tochter, by the apartments
they took, and from their name and from the friends they made, were
immediately crystallized into a definite place marked out for them.
  There was visiting the watering place that year a real German
Furstin, in consequence of which the crystallizing process went on
more vigorously than ever. Princess Shcherbatsky wished, above
everything, to present her daughter to this German Princess, and the
day after their arrival she duly performed this rite. Kitty made a low
and graceful curtsy in the "very simple," that is to say, very elegant
frock that had been ordered for her from Paris. The German Princess
said, "I hope the roses will soon come back to this pretty little
face," and for the Shcherbatskyg certain definite lines of existence
were at once laid down, from which there was no departing. The
Shcherbatskys made the acquaintance too of the family of an English
lady, and of a German Countess and her son, wounded in the last war,
and of a learned Swede, and of M. Canut and his sister. Yet inevitably
the Shcherbatskys were thrown most into the society of a Moscow
lady, Marya Eugenyevna Rtishcheva and her daughter, whom Kitty
disliked, because she had fallen ill, like herself, over a love
affair; and a Moscow colonel, whom Kitty had known from childhood, and
had always seen in uniform and epaulets, and who now, with his
little eyes and his open neck and flowered cravat, was uncommonly
ridiculous and tedious, because there was no getting rid of him.
When all this was so firmly established, Kitty began to be very much
bored, especially as the Prince went off to Carlsbad and she was
left alone with her mother. She took no interest in the people she
knew, feeling that nothing fresh would come of them. Her chief
mental interest in the watering place consisted in watching and making
theories about the people she did not know. It was characteristic of
Kitty that she always imagined everything in people in the most
favorable light possible, especially so in those she did not know. And
now, as she made surmises as to who people were, what were their
relations to one another, and what they were like, Kitty endowed
them with the most marvelous and noble characters, and found
confirmation in her observations.
  Of these people the one that attracted her most was a Russian girl
who had come to the watering place with an invalid Russian lady,
Madame Stahl, as everyone called her. Madame Stahl belonged to the
highest society, but she was so ill that she could not walk, and
only on exceptionally fine days made her appearance at the springs
in an invalid carriage. But it was not so much from ill-health as from
pride- so Princess Shcherbatskaia interpreted it- that Madame Stahl
had not made the acquaintance of anyone among the Russians there.
The Russian girl looked after Madame Stahl, and besides that, she was,
as Kitty observed, on friendly terms with all the invalids who were
seriously ill- and there were many of them at the springs- and was
solicitous over them in the most natural way. This Russian girl was
not, as Kitty gathered, related to Madame Stahl, nor was she a paid
attendant. Madame Stahl called her Varenka, and other people called
her "Mademoiselle Varenka." Apart from the interest Kitty took in this
girl's relations with Madame Stahl and with other unknown persons,
Kitty, as often happened, felt an inexplicable attraction to
Mademoiselle Varenka, and was aware when their eyes met that she too
liked her.
  Of Mademoiselle Varenka one would not say that she had passed her
first youth, but she was, as it were, a creature without youth; she
might have been taken for nineteen or for thirty. If her features were
criticized separately, she was handsome rather that plain, in spite of
the sickly hue of her face. Hers would have been a good figure, too,
if it had not been for her extreme thinness and the size of her
head, which was too large for her medium height. But she was not
likely to be attractive to men. She was like a fine flower, already
past its bloom and without fragrance, though the petals were still
unwithered. Moreover, she would have been unattractive to men also
from the lack of just what Kitty had too much of- of the suppressed
fire of vitality, and the consciousness of her own attractiveness.
  She always seemed absorbed in work, beyond a doubt, and so it seemed
as if she could take no interest in anything outside it. It was just
this contrast with her own position that was for Kitty the great
attraction of Mademoiselle Varenka. Kitty felt that in her, in her
manner of life, she would find an example of what she was now so
painfully seeking: interest in life, a dignity in life- apart from the
worldly relations of girls with men, which so revolted Kitty, and
appeared to her now as a shameful exhibition of goods in search of a
purchaser. The more attentively Kitty watched her unknown friend,
the more convinced she was that this girl was the perfect creature she
fancied her, and the more eagerly she wished to make her acquaintance.
  The two girls used to meet several times a day, and every time
they met Kitty's eyes said: "Who are you? What are you? Are you really
the exquisite creature I imagine you to be? But for goodness' sake
don't suppose," her eyes added, "that I would force my acquaintance on
you- I simply admire you and like you." "I like you too, and you're
very, very sweet. And I should like you better still, if I had
time," answered the eyes of the unknown girl. Kitty saw, indeed,
that she was always busy. Either she was taking the children of a
Russian family home from the springs, or fetching a shawl for a sick
lady, and wrapping her up in it, or trying to interest an irritable
invalid, or selecting and buying teacakes for someone.
  Soon after the arrival of the Shcherbatskys there appeared in the
morning crowd at the springs two persons who attracted universal and
unfavorable attention. These were a tall man with a stooping figure
and huge hands, in an old coat too short for him, with black,
simple, and yet terrible eyes, and a pock-marked, kind-looking
woman, very badly and tastelessly dressed. Recognizing these persons
as Russians, Kitty had already in her imagination begun constructing a
delightful and touching romance about them. But the Princess, having
ascertained from the Kurliste that this was Nikolai Levin and Marya
Nikolaevna, explained to Kitty what a bad man this Levin was, and
all her fancies about these two people vanished. Not so much from what
her mother told her, as from the fact that it was Konstantin's
brother, this pair suddenly seemed to Kitty in the highest degree
unpleasant. This Levin, with his continual twitching of his head,
aroused in her now an irrepressible feeling of disgust.
  It seemed to her that his big, terrible eyes, which persistently
pursued her, expressed a feeling of hatred and contempt, and she tried
to avoid meeting him.
                             XXXI.

  It was a foul day; it had been raining all the morning, and the
invalids, with their parasols, had flocked into the arcades.
  Kitty was walking there with her mother and the Moscow colonel,
smart and jaunty in his European coat, bought ready-made at Frankfort.
They were walking on one side of the arcade, trying to avoid Levin,
who was walking on the other side. Varenka, in her dark dress, in a
black hat with a turndown brim, was walking up and down the whole
length of the arcade with a blind Frenchwoman, and, every time she met
Kitty, they exchanged friendly glances.
  "Mamma, couldn't I speak to her?" said Kitty, watching her unknown
friend, and noticing that she was going up to the spring, and that
they might come there together.
  "Oh, if you want to so much, I'll find out about her first and
make her acquaintance myself," answered her mother. "What do you see
in her out of the way? A companion, most probably. If you like, I'll
make acquaintance with Madame Stahl; I used to know her
belle-soeur," added the Princess, lifting her head haughtily.
  Kitty knew that the Princess was offended because Madame Stahl had
apparently avoided making her acquaintance. Kitty did not insist.
  "How wonderfully sweet she is!" she said, gazing at Varenka just
as she handed a glass to the Frenchwoman. "Look how natural and
sweet it all is."
  "It's so funny to see your engouements," said the Princess. "No,
we'd better go back," she added, noticing Levin coming toward them
with his companion and a German doctor, to whom he was talking very
noisily and angrily.
  They turned to go back, when suddenly they heard, not merely noisy
talk, but actual shouting. Levin, stopping short, was shouting at
the doctor, and the doctor, too, was excited. A crowd gathered about
them. The Princess and Kitty beat a hasty retreat, while the colonel
joined the crowd to find out what was up.
  A few minutes later the colonel overtook them.
  "What was it?" inquired the Princess.
  "Scandalous and disgraceful!" answered the colonel. "The one thing
to be dreaded is meeting Russians abroad. That tall gentleman was
abusing the doctor, flinging all sorts of insults at him because he
wasn't treating him quite as he liked, and he began waving his stick
at him. It's simply scandalous!"
  "Oh, how unpleasant!" said the Princess. "Well, and how did it end?"
  "Luckily at that point that miss... the one in the mushroom hat...
intervened. She is a Russian lady, I think," said the colonel.
  "Mademoiselle Varenka?" Kitty asked joyously.
  "Yes, yes. She came to the rescue before anyone else; she took the
man by the arm and led him away."
  "There, mamma," said Kitty, "yet you wonder why I'm enthusiastic
about her."
  The next day, as she watched her unknown friend, Kitty noticed
that Mademoiselle Varenka was already on the same terms with Levin and
his companion as with her other proteges. She went up to them, entered
into conversation with them, and served as interpreter for the
woman, who could not speak any foreign language.
  Kitty began to entreat her mother still more urgently to let her
make acquaintance with Varenka. And, disagreeable as it was to the
Princess to seem to take the first step in wishing to make the
acquaintance of Madame Stahl, who thought fit to give herself airs,
she made inquiries about Varenka, and, having ascertained
particulars about her tending to prove that there could he no harm,
even if little good in the acquaintance, she herself approached
Varenka and made acquaintance with her.
  Choosing a time when her daughter had gone to the spring, while
Varenka had stopped outside the baker's, the Princess approached her.
  "Allow me to make your acquaintance," she said, with her dignified
smile. "My daughter has lost her heart to you," she said. "Possibly
you do not know me. I am..."
  "That feeling is more than reciprocal, Princess," Varenka answered
hurriedly.
  "What a good deed you did yesterday to our poor compatriot!" said
the Princess.
  Varenka flushed a little.
  "I don't remember. I don't think I did anything," she said.
  "Why, you saved that Levin from disagreeable consequences."
  "Yes, sa compagne called me, and I tried to pacify him; he's very
ill, and was dissatisfied with the doctor. I'm used to looking after
such invalids."
  "Yes, I've heard you live at Mentone with your aunt- I think- Madame
Stahl: I used to know her belle-soeur."
  "No, she's not my aunt. I call her maman, but I am not related to
her; I was brought up by her," answered Varenka, flushing a little
again.
  This was so simply said, and so sweet was the truthful and candid
expression of her face, that the Princess saw why Kitty had taken such
a fancy to Varenka.
  "Well, and what's this Levin going to do?" asked the Princess.
  "He's going away," answered Varenka.
  At that instant Kitty came up from the spring beaming with delight
because her mother had become acquainted with her unknown friend.
  "See, Kitty, your intense desire to make friends with
Mademoiselle..."
  "Varenka," Varenka put in smiling, "that's what everyone calls me."
  Kitty blushed with pleasure, and slowly, without speaking,
squeezed her new friend's hand, which did not respond to her pressure,
but lay motionless in her hand. The hand did not respond to her
pressure, but the face of Mademoiselle Varenka glowed with a soft,
glad, though rather mournful, smile, that showed large but handsome
teeth.
  "I have long wished for this too," she said.
  "But "But you are so busy..."
  "Oh, no I'm not at all busy," answered Varenka, but at that moment
she had to leave her new friends because two little Russian girls,
children of an invalid, ran up to her.
  "Varenka, mamma's calling!" they cried.
  And Varenka went after them.
                             XXXII.

  The particulars which the Princess had learned in regard to
Varenka's past and her relations with Madame Stahl were as follows:
  Madame Stahl, of whom some people said that she had worried her
husband out of his life, while others said it was he who had made
her wretched by his immoral behavior, had always been a woman of
weak health and enthusiastic temperament. When, after her separation
from her husband, she gave birth to her only child, the child had died
almost immediately, and the family of Madame Stahl, knowing her
sensibility and fearing the news would kill her, had substituted
another child, a baby born the same night and in the same house in
Peterburg, the daughter of the chief cook of the Imperial Household.
This was Varenka. Madame Stahl learned later on that Varenka was not
her own child, but she went on bringing her up, especially as very
soon afterward Varenka had not a relation of her own living.
  Madame Stahl had now been living without a break, more than ten
years abroad, in the south, never leaving her couch. And some people
said that Madame Stahl had made her social position as a
philanthropic, highly religious woman; other people said she really
was at heart the highly ethical being, living for nothing but the good
of her fellow creatures, which she represented herself to be. No one
knew what her faith was- Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox. But one
fact was indubitable- she was in amicable relations with the highest
dignitaries of all the churches and sects.
  Varenka lived with her all the while abroad, and everyone who knew
Madame Stahl knew and liked Mademoiselle Varenka, as everyone called
her.
  Having learned all these facts, the Princess found nothing to object
to in her daughter's intimacy with Varenka, more especially as
Varenka's breeding and education were of the best- she spoke French
and English extremely well- and, what was of the most weight,
brought a message from Madame Stahl expressing her regret that she had
been prevented by her ill-health from making the acquaintance of the
Princess.
  After getting to know Varenka, Kitty became more and more fascinated
by her friend, and every day she discovered new virtues in her.
  The Princess, hearing that Varenka had a good voice, asked her to
come and sing to them in the evening.
  "Kitty plays, and we have a piano; not a good one, it's true, but
you will give us so much pleasure," said the Princess with her
affected smile, which Kitty disliked particularly just then, because
she noticed that Varenka had no inclination to sing. Varenka came,
however, in the evening, and brought a roll of music with her. The
Princess had invited Marya Eugenyevna and her daughter, and the
colonel.
  Varenka seemed quite unaffected by the presence of persons whom
she did not know, and she went directly to the piano. She could not
accompany herself, but she could sing music at sight very well. Kitty,
who played well, accompanied her.
  "You have an extraordinary talent," the Princess said to her after
Varenka had sung the first song excellently.
  Marya Eugenyevna and her daughter expressed their thanks and
admiration.
  "Look," said the colonel, looking out of the window, "what an
audience has collected to listen to you."
  There actually was a considerable crowd under the windows.
  "I am very glad it gives you pleasure," Varenka answered simply.
  Kitty looked with pride at her friend. She was enchanted by her
talent, and her voice, and her face, but most of all by her manner, by
Varenka's obviously thinking nothing of her singing and being quite
unmoved by their praise. She seemed only to be asking: "Am I to sing
again, or is that enough?"
  "If it had been I," thought Kitty, "how proud I should have been!
How delighted I should have been to see that crowd under the
windows! But she's utterly unmoved by it. Her only motive is to
avoid refusing and to please maman. What is there about her? What is
it gives her the power to look down on everything, to be calm
independently of everything? How I should like to know it, and to
learn it from her!" thought Kitty, gazing into her serene face. The
Princess asked Varenka to sing again, and Varenka sang another song,
also smoothly, distinctly, and well, standing erect at the piano and
beating time on it with her thin, dark-skinned hand.
  The next song in the book was an Italian one. Kitty played the
opening bars, and looked round at Varenka.
  "Let's skip that," said Varenka, flushing a little.
  Kitty let her eyes rest on Varenka's face, with a look of dismay and
inquiry.
  "Very well, the next one," she said hurriedly, turning over the
pages, and at once feeling that there was something connected with the
song.
  "No," answered Varenka with a smile, laying her hand on the music,
"no, let's have that one." And she sang it just as quietly, as coolly,
and as well as the others.
  When she had finished, they all thanked her again, and went off to
tea. Kitty and Varenka went out into the little garden that adjoined
the house.
  "Am I right, that you have some reminiscences connected with that
song?" said Kitty. "Don't tell me," she added hastily, "only say if
I'm right."
  "No, why not? I'll tell you," said Varenka simply, and, without
waiting for a reply, she went on: "Yes, it brings up memories, once
painful ones. I cared for someone once, and I used to sing him that
song."
  Kitty with big, wide-open eyes gazed silently, sympathetically at
Varenka.
  "I cared for him, and he cared for me; but his mother was opposed,
and he married another girl. He's living now not far from us, and I
see him sometimes. You didn't think I had a love story, too," she
said, and there was a faint gleam in her handsome face of that fire
which Kitty felt must once have glowed all over her.
  "I didn't think so? Why, if I were a man, I could never care for
anyone else after knowing you. Only I can't understand how he could,
to please his mother, forget you and make you unhappy; he had no
heart."
  "Oh, no, he's a very good man, and I'm not unhappy; quite the
contrary- I'm very happy. Well, we shan't be singing any more now,"
she added, turning toward the house.
  "How good you are! How good you are!" cried Kitty, and stopping her,
she kissed her. "If I could only be even a little like you!"
  "Why should you be like anyone? You're lovely as you are," said
Varenka, smiling her gentle, weary smile.
  "No, I'm not lovely at all. Come, tell me... Stop a minute, let's
sit down," said Kitty, making her sit down again beside her. "Tell me,
isn't it humiliating to think that a man has disdained your love, that
he hasn't cared for it?..."
  "But he didn't disdain it; I believe he cared for me, but he was a
dutiful son...."
  "Yes, but if it hadn't been on account of his mother, if it had been
his own doing?..." said Kitty, feeling she was giving away her secret,
and that her face, burning with the flush of shame, had betrayed her
already.
  "In that case he would have done wrong, and I should not have
regretted him," answered Varenka, evidently realizing that they were
now talking not of her, but of Kitty.
  "But the humiliation," said Kitty, "the humiliation one can never
forget- never!" she said, remembering her look at the last ball during
the pause in the music.
  "Where is the humiliation? Why, you did nothing wrong?"
  "Worse than wrong- shameful."
  Varenka shook her head and laid her hand on Kitty's.
  "Why, what's shameful about it?" she said. "You didn't tell a man
who didn't care for you, that you loved him, did you?"
  "Of course not; I never said a word, but he knew it. No, no, there
are looks, there are ways; I can't forget it, if I live a hundred
years."
  "Why so? I don't understand. The whole point is whether you love him
now or not," said Varenka, who called everything by its name.
  "I hate him; I can't forgive myself."
  "Why, what for?"
  "The shame, the humiliation!"
  "Oh! if everyone were as sensitive as you are!" said Varenka. "There
isn't a girl who hasn't been through the same. And it's all so
unimportant."
  "Why, what is important?" said Kitty, looking into her face with
inquisitive wonder.
  "Oh, there's so much that's important," said Varenka, smiling.
  "Why, what?"
  "Oh, so much that's more important," answered Varenka, not knowing
what to say. But at that instant they heard the Princess's voice
from the window. "Kitty, it's cold! Either get a shawl, or come
indoors."
  "It really is time to go in!" said Varenka, getting up. "I have to
go on to Madame Berthe's; she asked me to."
  Kitty held her by the hand, and with passionate curiosity and
entreaty her eyes asked her: "What is it, what is this of such
importance, that gives you such tranquility? You know, tell me!" But
Varenka did not even know what Kitty's eyes were asking her. She
merely thought that she had to go to see Madame Berthe too that
evening, and to make haste home in time for maman's tea at twelve
o'clock. She went indoors, collected her music, and saying good-by
to everyone, was about to go.
  "Allow me to see you home," said the colonel.
  "Yes, how can you go alone at night like this?" chimed in the
Princess. "Anyway, I'll send Parasha."
  Kitty saw that Varenka could hardly restrain a smile at the idea
that she needed an escort.
  "No, I always go about alone and nothing ever happens to me," she
said, taking her hat. And kissing Kitty once more, without saying what
was important, she stepped out courageously with the music under her
arm and vanished into the twilight of the summer night, bearing away
with her her secret of what was important, and what gave her that calm
and dignity so much to be envied.
                             XXXIII.

  Kitty made the acquaintance of Madame Stahl too, and this
acquaintance, together with her friendship with Varenka, did not
merely exercise a great influence on her- it also comforted her in her
mental distress. She found this comfort through a completely new world
being opened to her by means of this acquaintance, a world having
nothing in common with her past; an exalted, noble world, from the
height of which she could contemplate her past calmly. It was revealed
to her that besides the instinctive life to which Kitty had given
herself up hitherto there was a spiritual life. This life was
disclosed in religion, but a religion having nothing in common with
that one which Kitty had known from childhood, and which found
expression in masses and evening services at the Widow's Home, where
one might meet one's friends; and in learning by heart Slavonic
texts with the priest. This was a lofty, mysterious religion connected
with a whole series of noble thoughts and feelings, which one could
not merely believe because one was told to believe, but which one
could love.
  Kitty found all this out not from words. Madame Stahl talked to
Kitty as to a charming child that one regards with pleasure, as one
regards the memory of one's youth, and only once she said in passing
that in all human sorrows nothing gives comfort but love and faith,
and that in the sight of Christ's compassion for us no sorrow is
trifling- and immediately talked of other things. But in every gesture
of Madame Stahl, in every word, in every heavenly- as Kitty called it-
look; and, above all, in the whole story of her life, which she
heard from Varenka, Kitty recognized that something "that was
important," of which, till then, she had known nothing.
  Yet, elevated as Madame Stahl's character was, touching as was her
story, and exalted and moving as was her speech, Kitty could not
help detecting in her some traits which perplexed her. She noticed
that, when questioning her about her family, Madame Stahl had smiled
contemptuously, which was not in accord with Christian meekness. Kitty
noticed, too, that when she had found a Catholic priest with her,
Madame Stahl had studiously kept her face in the shadow of the lamp
shade and had smiled in a peculiar way. Trivial as these two
observations were, they perplexed her, and she had her doubts as to
Madame Stahl. But on the other hand Varenka, alone in the world,
without friends or relations, with a melancholy disappointment in
the past, desiring nothing, regretting nothing, was just that
perfection of which Kitty dared hardly dream. In Varenka she
realized that one has but to forget oneself and love others, and one
will be calm, happy and good. And that was what Kitty longed to be.
Seeing now clearly what was most important, Kitty was not satisfied
with being enthusiastic over it; she at once gave herself up with
her whole soul to the new life that was opening to her. From Varenka's
accounts of the doings of Madame Stahl and other people whom she
mentioned, Kitty had already constructed the plan of her own future
life. She would, like Madame Stahl's niece, Aline, of whom Varenka had
talked to her a great deal, seek out those who were in trouble,
wherever she might be living, help them as far as she could, giving
them the Gospel; she would read the Gospel to the sick, to the
criminals, to the dying. The idea of reading the Gospel to
criminals, as Aline did, particularly fascinated Kitty. But all
these were secret dreams, of which Kitty did not talk either to her
mother or to Varenka.
  While awaiting the time for carrying out her plans on a large scale,
however, Kitty, even then at the springs, where there were so many
people ill and unhappy, readily found a chance for practicing her
new principles in imitation of Varenka.
  At first the Princess noticed nothing but that Kitty was much
under the influence of her engouement, as she called it, for Madame
Stahl, and still more for Varenka. She saw that Kitty did not merely
imitate Varenka in her conduct, but unconsciously imitated her in
her manner of walking, of talking, of blinking her eyes. But later
on the Princess noticed that, apart from this adoration, some kind
of serious spiritual change was taking place in her daughter.
  The Princess saw that in the evenings Kitty read a French
Testament that Madame Stahl had given her- a thing she had never
done before; that she avoided society acquaintances and associated
with the sick people who were under Varenka's protection, and
especially one poor family, that of a sick painter, Petrov. Kitty
was unmistakably proud of playing the part of a sister of mercy in
that family. All this was well enough, and the Princess had nothing to
say against it, especially as Petrov's wife was a perfectly
respectable woman, and that the German Princess, noticing Kitty's
devotion, praised her, calling her an angel of consolation. All this
would have been very well, if there had been no exaggeration. But
the Princess saw that her daughter was rushing into extremes, and so
indeed she told her.
  "Il ne faut jamais rien outrer," she said to her.
  Her daughter made her no reply, but in her heart she thought that
one could not talk about exaggeration where Christianity was
concerned. What exaggeration could there be in the practice of a
doctrine wherein one was bidden to turn the other cheek when one was
smitten, and give one's shirt if one's coat were taken? But the
Princess disliked this exaggeration, and disliked even more the fact
that she felt her daughter did not care to show her all her heart.
Kitty did in fact conceal her new views and feelings from her
mother. She concealed them not because she did not respect or did
not love her mother, but simply because she was her mother. She
would have revealed them to anyone sooner than to her mother.
  "How is it Anna Pavlovna's not been to see us for so long?" the
Princess said one day, referring to Madame Petrov. "I've asked her,
but she seems put out about something."
  "No, I've not noticed it, maman," said Kitty, flushing hotly.
  "Is it long since you've been to see them?"
  "We intend making an excursion to the mountains tomorrow,"
answered Kitty.
  "Well, you may go," answered the Princess, gazing at her
daughter's embarrassed face and trying to guess the cause of her
embarrassment.
  That day Varenka came to dinner and told them that Anna Pavlovna had
changed her mind and given up the excursion for the morrow. And the
Princess noticed again that Kitty reddened.
  "Kitty, haven't you had some misunderstanding with the Petrovs?"
said the Princess, when they were left alone. "Why has she given up
sending the children and coming to see us?"
  Kitty answered that nothing had happened between them, and that
she could not tell why Anna Pavlovna seemed displeased with her. Kitty
answered perfectly truthfully. She did not know the reason Anna
Pavlovna had changed toward her, but she guessed it. She guessed at
something which she could not tell her mother, which she did not put
into words to herself It was one of those things which one knows but
which one can never speak of even to oneself, so terrible and shameful
would it be to be mistaken.
  Again and again she went over in her memory all her relations with
the family. She remembered the simple delight expressed on the
round, good-natured face of Anna Pavlovna at their meetings; she
remembered their secret confabulations about the invalid, their
plots to draw him away from the work which was forbidden him, and to
get him out of doors; the devotion of the youngest boy, who used to
call her "my Kitty," and would not go to bed without her. How lovely
it all was! "Then she recalled the thin, terribly thin figure of
Petrov, with his long neck, in his brown coat, his scant, curly
hair, his questioning blue eyes that were so terrible to Kitty at
first, and his painful attempts to seem hearty and lively in her
presence. She recalled the efforts she had made at first to overcome
the repugnance she felt for him, as for all consumptive people, and
the pains it had cost her to think of things to say to him. She
recalled the timid, softened look with which he gazed at her, and
the strange feeling of compassion and awkwardness, and later of a
sense of her own goodness, which she had felt at it. How lovely it all
was! But all that was at first. Now, a few days ago, everything was
suddenly spoiled. Anna Pavlovna had met Kitty with affected
cordiality, and had kept continual watch on her and on her husband.
  Could that touching pleasure he showed when she came near be the
cause of Anna Pavlovna's coolness?
  "Yes," she mused, "there was something unnatural about Anna
Pavlovna, and utterly unlike her good nature, when she said angrily
the day before yesterday: 'There, he will keep waiting for you; he
wouldn't drink his coffee without you, though he's grown so dreadfully
weak.'"
  "Yes, perhaps, too, she didn't like it when I gave him the rug. It
was all so simple, but he took it so awkwardly, and was so long
thanking me, that I felt awkward too. And then that portrait of me
he did so well. And most of all that look of confusion and tenderness!
Yes, yes, that's it!" Kitty repeated to herself with horror. "No, it
can't be, it oughtn't to be! He's so much to be pitied!" she said to
herself directly after.
  This doubt poisoned the charm of her new life.
                             XXXIV.

  Before the end of the water cure, Prince Shcherbatsky, who had
gone on from Carlsbad to Baden and Kissingen to Russian friends- to
get a breath of Russian atmosphere, as he said- came back to his
wife and daughter.
  The views of the Prince and of the Princess on life abroad were
completely opposed. The Princess thought everything delightful, and in
spite of her established position in Russian society, she tried abroad
to be like a European fashionable lady, which she was not for the
simple reason that she was a typical Russian gentlewoman; and so she
was affected, which did not altogether suit her. The Prince, on the
contrary, thought everything foreign detestable, got sick of
European life, kept to his Russian habits, and purposely tried to show
himself abroad less European than he was in reality.
  The Prince returned thinner, with the skin hanging in loose bags
on his cheeks, but in the most cheerful frame of mind. His good
humor was even greater when he saw Kitty completely recovered. The
news of Kitty's friendship with Madame Stahl and Varenka, and the
reports the Princess gave him of some kind of change she had noticed
in Kitty, troubled the Prince and aroused his habitual feeling of
jealousy of everything that drew his daughter away from him, and a
dread that his daughter might have got out of the reach of his
influence into regions inaccessible to him. But this unpleasant news
was all drowned in the sea of kindliness and good humor which was
always within him, and more so than ever since his course of
Carlsbad waters.
  The day after his arrival the Prince, in his long overcoat, with his
Russian wrinkles and baggy cheeks propped up by a starched collar, set
off with his daughter to the spring in the greatest good humor.
  It was a lovely morning: the tidy, cheerful houses with their little
gardens, the sight of the red-faced, red-armed, beer-drinking German
waitresses, working away merrily, and bright sun did one's heart good.
But the nearer they got to the springs the oftener they met sick
people; and their appearance seemed more pitiable than ever among
the everyday conditions of prosperous German life. Kitty was no longer
struck by this contrast. The bright sun, the brilliant green of the
foliage, the strains of the music were for her the natural setting
of all these familiar faces, with their changes to greater
emaciation or to convalescence, for which she watched. But to the
Prince the brightness and gaiety of the June morning, and the sound of
the orchestra playing a gay waltz then in fashion, and above all,
the appearance of the robust waitresses, seemed something unseemly and
monstrous, in conjunction with these slowly moving cadavers gathered
together from all parts of Europe.
  In spite of his feeling of pride and, as it were, of the return of
youth, when he walked with his favorite daughter on his arm, he felt
awkward, and almost ashamed of his vigorous step and his sturdy, stout
and fat limbs. He felt almost like a man not dressed in a crowd.
  "Present, present me to your new friends," he said to his
daughter, squeezing her hand with his elbow. "I like even your
horrid Soden for making you so well again. Only it's melancholy,
very melancholy here. Who's that?"
  Kitty mentioned the names of all the people they met, of some with
whom she was acquainted, and some with whom she was not. At the very
entrance of the garden they met the blind lady, Madame Berthe, with
her guide, and the Prince was delighted to see the old Frenchwoman's
face light up when she heard Kitty's voice. She at once began
talking to him with the exaggerated politeness of the French,
applauding him for having such a delightful daughter, extolling
Kitty to the skies before her face, and calling her a treasure, a
pearl and a consoling angel.
  "Well, she's the second angel, then," said the Prince, smiling. "She
calls Mademoiselle Varenka angel number one."
  "Oh! Mademoiselle Varenka- she's a real angel, allez," Madame Berthe
assented.
  In the arcade they met Varenka herself. She was walking rapidly
toward them, carrying an elegant red bag.
  "Here is papa come," Kitty said to her.
  Varenka made- simply and naturally as she did everything- a movement
between a bow and curtsy, and immediately began talking to the Prince,
without shyness, naturally, as she talked to everyone.
  "Of course I know you; I know you very well," the Prince said to her
with a smile, in which Kitty detected with joy that her father liked
her friend. "Where are you off to in such haste?"
  "Maman's here," she said, turning to Kitty. "She has not slept all
night, and the doctor advised her to go out. I'm taking her her work."
  "So that's angel number one?" said the Prince when Varenka had
gone on.
  Kitty saw that her father had meant to make fun of Varenka, but that
he could not do it because he liked her.
  "Come, so we shall see all your friends," he went on, "even Madame
Stahl, if she deigns to recognize me."
  "Why, did you know her, papa?" Kitty asked apprehensively,
catching the gleam of irony that kindled in the Prince's eyes at the
mention of Madame Stahl.
  "I used to know her husband, and her too a little, before she'd
joined the Pietists."
  "What is a Pietist, papa?" asked Kitty, dismayed to find that what
she prized so highly in Madame Stahl had a name.
  "I don't quite know myself. I only know that she thanks God for
everything, for every misfortune, and thanks God too that her
husband died. And that's rather droll, as they didn't get on together.
Who's that? What a piteous face!" he asked, noticing a sick man of
medium height sitting on a bench, wearing a brown overcoat and white
trousers that fell in strange folds about his long, fleshless legs.
This man lifted his straw hat, showed his scanty curly hair and high
forehead, painfully reddened by the pressure of the hat.
  "That's Petrov, an artist," answered Kitty blushing. "And that's his
wife," she added, indicating Anna Pavlovna, who, as though on purpose,
at the very instant they approached, walked away after a child that
had run off along a path.
  "Poor fellow! And what a fine face he has!" said the Prince. "Why
don't you go up to him? He wanted to speak to you."
  "Well, let us go, then," said Kitty, turning round resolutely.
"How are you feeling today?" she asked Petrov.
  Petrov got up, leaning on his stick, and looked shyly at the Prince.
  "This is my daughter," said the Prince. "Let me introduce myself."
  The painter bowed and smiled, showing his strangely dazzling white
teeth.
  "We expected you yesterday, Princess," he said to Kitty.
  He staggered as he said this, and then repeated the motion, trying
to make it seem as if it had been intentional.
  "I meant to come, but Varenka said that Anna Pavlovna sent word
you were not going."
  "Not going!" said Petrov, blushing, and immediately beginning to
cough, and his eyes sought his wife. "Aneta! Aneta!" he said loudly,
and the swollen veins stood out like cords on his thin white neck.
  Anna Pavlovna came up.
  "So you sent word to the Princess that we weren't going!" he
whispered to her angrily, losing his voice.
  "Good morning, Princess," said Anna Pavlovna, with an assumed
smile utterly unlike her former manner. "Very glad to make your
acquaintance," she said to the Prince. "You've long been expected,
Prince."
  "Why did you send word to the Princess that we weren't going?" the
artist whispered hoarsely again, still more angrily, obviously
exasperated that his voice failed him so that he could not give his
words the expression he would have liked to.
  "Oh, mercy on us! I thought we weren't going," his wife answered
crossly.
  "What, when..." He coughed and waved his hand.
  The Prince took off his hat and moved away with his daughter.
  "Ah! ah!" he sighed deeply. "Oh, poor things!"
  "Yes, papa," answered Kitty. "And you must know they've three
children, no servant, and scarcely any means. He gets something from
the Academy," she went on briskly, trying to drown the distress that
queer change in Anna Pavlovna's manner toward her had aroused in
her. "Oh, here's Madame Stahl," said Kitty, indicating an invalid
carriage, where, propped on pillows, something in gray and blue was
lying under a sunshade. This was Madame Stahl. Behind her stood the
gloomy, robust German workman who pushed the carriage. Close by was
standing a flaxen-headed Swedish Count, whom Kitty knew by name.
Several invalids were lingering near the low carriage, staring at
the lady as though she were some curiosity.
  The Prince walked up to her, and Kitty detected that disconcerting
gleam of irony in his eyes. He walked up to Madame Stahl, and
addressed her with extreme courtesy and charm in that excellent French
which so few speak nowadays.
  "I don't know if you remember me, but I must recall myself to
thank you for your kindness to my daughter," he said taking off his
hat and not putting it on again.
  "Prince Alexandre Shcherbatsky," said Madame Stahl, lifting upon him
her heavenly eyes, in which Kitty discerned a look of annoyance.
"Delighted! I have taken a great fancy to your daughter."
  "You are still in weak health?"
  "Yes; I'm used to it," said Madame Stahl, and she introduced the
Prince to the Swedish Count.
  "You are scarcely changed at all," the Prince said to her. "It's ten
or eleven years since I had the honor of seeing you."
  "Yes; God sends the cross and sends the strength to bear it. Often
one wonders what is the goal of this life?... The other side!" she
said angrily to Varenka, who had rearranged the rug over her feet
not to her satisfaction.
  "To do good, probably," said the Prince with a twinkle in his eye.
  "That is not for us to judge," said Madame Stahl, perceiving the
shade of expression on the Prince's face. "So you will send me that
book, dear Count? I'm very grateful to you," she said to the young
Swede.
  "Ah!" cried the Prince, catching sight of the Moscow colonel
standing near, and with a bow to Madame Stahl he walked away with
his daughter and the Moscow colonel, who joined them.
  "That's our aristocracy, Prince!" the Moscow colonel said with
ironical intention. He cherished a grudge against Madame Stahl for not
making his acquaintance.
  "She's the same as ever," replied the Prince.
  "Did you know her before her illness, Prince- that's to say,
before she took to her bed?"
  "Yes. She took to her bed before my eyes," said the Prince.
  "They say it's ten years since she has stood on her feet."
  "She doesn't stand up because her legs are too short. She has a very
bad figure."
  "Papa, it's not possible!" cried Kitty.
  "That's what wicked tongues say, my darling. And your Varenka is
to endure still," he added. "Oh, these invalid ladies!"
  "Oh, no, papa!" Kitty objected warmly. "Varenka worships her. And
then she does so much good! Ask anyone! Everyone knows her and Aline
Stahl."
  "Perhaps so," said the Prince, squeezing her hand with his elbow;
"but it's better when one does good so that you may ask everyone and
no one knows."
  Kitty did not answer, not because she had nothing to say, but
because she did not care to reveal her secret thoughts even to her
father. But, strange to say, although she had made up her mind so
firmly not to be influenced by her father's views, not to let him into
her inmost sanctuary, she felt that the heavenly image of Madame
Stahl, which she had carried for a whole month in her heart, had
vanished, never to return, just as the fantastic figure made up of
some clothes thrown down at random vanishes when one sees that it is
only some fallen garment. All that was left was a woman with short
legs, who lay down because she had a bad figure, and worried patient
Varenka for not arranging her rug to her liking. And by no effort of
her imagination could Kitty bring back the former Madame Stahl.
                             XXXV.

  The Prince communicated his good humor to his own family and his
friends, and even to the German landlord in whose rooms the
Shcherbatskys were staying.
  On coming back with Kitty from the springs, the Prince, who had
asked the colonel, and Marya Eugenyevna, and Varenka all to come and
have coffee with them, gave orders for a table and chairs to be
taken into the tiny garden under the chestnut tree, and lunch to be
laid there. The landlord and the servants, too, grew brisker under the
influence of his good spirits. They knew his openhandedness; and
half an hour later the invalid doctor from Hamburg, who lived on the
top floor, looked enviously out of his window at the merry party of
healthy Russians assembled under the chestnut tree. In the trembling
circles of shadow cast by the leaves, at a table covered with a
white cloth, and set with coffeepot, bread, butter, cheese, and cold
game, sat the Princess in a high cap with lilac ribbons,
distributing cups and sandwiches. At the other end sat the Prince,
eating heartily, and talking loudly and merrily. The Prince had spread
out near him his purchases- carved boxes, and knickknacks, and paper
knives of all sorts, of which he had bought a heap at every watering
place, and bestowed them upon everyone, including Lieschen, the
servant girl, and the landlord, with whom he jested in his comically
bad German, assuring him that it was not the water had cured Kitty,
but his splendid cookery- especially his plum soup. The Princess
laughed at her husband for his Russian ways, but she was more lively
and good-humored than she had been all the while she had been at the
waters. The colonel smiled, as he always did, at the Prince's jokes,
but as far as regards Europe, of which he believed himself to be
making a careful study, he took the Princess's side. The goodhearted
Marya Eugenyevna simply roared with laughter at everything absurd
the Prince said, and his jokes made Varenka helpless with feeble but
infectious laughter, which was something Kitty had never seen before.
  Kitty was glad of all this, but she could not be lighthearted. She
could not solve the problem her father had unconsciously set her by
his good-humored view of her friends, and of the life that had so
attracted her. To this doubt there was joined the change in her
relations with the Petrovs, which had been so conspicuously and
unpleasantly marked that morning. Everyone was good-humored, but Kitty
could not feel good-humored, and this increased her distress. She felt
a feeling such as she had known in childhood, when she had been shut
in her room as a punishment, and had heard her sisters' merry laughter
outside.
  "Well, but what did you buy this mass of things for? said the
Princess, smiling, and handing her husband a cup of coffee.
  "One goes for a walk, one looks in a shop, and they ask you to
buy. 'Erlaucht, Excellenz, Durchlaucht?' Directly they say
'Durchlaucht,' I can't hold out- and ten thalers are gone."
  "It's simply from boredom," said the Princess.
  "Of course it is. Such boredom, my dear, that one doesn't know
what to do with oneself."
  "How can you be bored, Prince? There's so much that's interesting
now in Germany," said Marya Eugenyevna.
  "But I know everything that's interesting: the plum soup I know
and the pea sausages I know. I know everything."
  "No, you may say what you like, Prince- there's the interest of
their institutions," said the colonel.
  "But what is there interesting? They're all as beaming with joy as
brass halfpence; they've conquered everybody. And why am I to be
pleased at that? I haven't conquered anyone; only I have myself to
take off my own boots, and, besides, to expose them before the door;
in the morning, get up and dress at once, and go to the coffeeroom
to drink bad tea! How different it is at home! You get up in no haste,
you get cross, grumble a little and come round again. You've time to
think things over, and no hurry."
  "But time's money, you forget that," said the colonel.
  "Time, indeed! Why, there are times one would give a month of for
half a rouble, and times you wouldn't give half an hour of for any
money. Isn't that so, Katenka? What is it? Why are you so depressed?"
  "I'm not depressed."
  "Where are you off to? Stay a little longer," he said to Varenka.
  "I must be going home," said Varenka, getting up, and again she
broke out laughing. When she had recovered, she said good-by, and went
into the house to get her hat.
  Kitty followed her. Even Varenka struck her as different. She was
not inferior, but different from what she had fancied her before.
  "Oh, dear! It's a long while since I've laughed so much!" said
Varenka, gathering up her parasol and her handbag. "What a dear your
father is!"
  Kitty did not speak.
  "When shall I see you again?" asked Varenka.
  "Maman meant to go and see the Petrovs. Won't you be there?" said
Kitty, to try Varenka.
  "Yes," answered Varenka. "They're getting ready to go away, so I
promised to help them pack."
  "Well, I'll come too, then."
  "No, why should you?"
  "Why not? Why not? Why not?" said Kitty, opening her eyes wide,
and clutching at Varenka's parasol, so as not to let her go. "No, wait
a minute- why not?"
  "Oh, nothing; your father has come, and, besides, they will feel
awkward at your helping."
  "No, tell me why you don't want me to be often at the Petrovs? You
don't want me to- why not?"
  "I didn't say that," said Varenka quietly.
  "No, please tell me!"
  "Tell you everything?" asked Varenka.
  "Everything, everything!" Kitty assented.
  "Well, there's really nothing of any consequence; only that
Mikhail Alexeievich" (that was the artist's name) "had meant to
leave earlier, and now he doesn't want to go away," said Varenka,
smiling.
  "Go on, go on!" Kitty urged impatiently, looking somberly at
Varenka.
  "Well, and for some reason Anna Pavlovna told him that he didn't
want to go because you are here. Of course, that was nonsense; but
there was a dispute over it- over you. You know how irritable these
sick people are."
  Kitty, scowling more than ever, kept silent, and Varenka went on
speaking alone, trying to soften or soothe her, and seeing a storm
coming- she did not know whether of tears or of words.
  "So you'd better not go... You understand; you won't be
offended?..."
  "And it serves me right! And it serves me right!" Kitty cried
quickly, snatching the parasol out of Varenka's hand, and avoiding
looking at her friend's face.
  Varenka felt inclined to smile, looking at her friend's childish
fury, but she was afraid of wounding her.
  "How does it serve you right? I don't understand," she said.
  "It serves me right, because it was all sham; because it was all
done on purpose, and not from the heart. What business had I to
interfere with outsiders? And so it's come about that I'm the cause of
a quarrel, and that I've done what nobody asked me to do. Because it
was all a sham! A sham! A sham!..."
  "A sham? With what object?" said Varenka gently.
  "Oh, it's so idiotic! So hateful! There was no need whatever for
me... Nothing but sham!" she said, opening and shutting the parasol.
  "But with what object?"
  "To seem better to people, to myself, to God; to deceive everyone.
No! Now I won't descend to that. One could be bad; but anyway not a
liar, not a cheat."
  "But who is a cheat?" said Varenka reproachfully. "You speak as
if..."
  But Kitty was in one of her gusts of fury, and she would not let her
finish.
  "I don't talk about you- not about you at all. You're perfection.
Yes, yes, I know you're all perfection; but what am I to do if I'm
bad? This would never have been if I weren't bad. So let me be what
I am, but not to be a sham. What have I to do with Anna Pavlovna?
Let them go their way, and me go mine. I can't be different.... And
yet it's not that, it's not that."
  "What is it?" asked Varenka in bewilderment.
  "Everything. I can't act except from the heart, and you act from
principle. I simply liked you, but you most likely only wanted to save
me, to improve me."
  "You are unjust," said Varenka.
  "But I'm not speaking of other people, I'm speaking of myself."
  "Kitty," they heard her mother's voice, "come here, show papa your
necklace."
  Kitty, with a haughty air, without making peace with her friend,
took the necklace in a little box from the table and went to her
mother.
  "What's the matter? Why are you so red?" her mother and father
said to her with one voice.
  "Nothing," she answered. "I'll be back directly," and she ran back.
  "She's still here," she thought. "What am I to say to her? Oh, dear!
What have I done, what have I said? Why was I rude to her? What am I
to do? What am I to say to her?" thought Kitty, and she stopped in the
doorway.
  Varenka in her hat and with the parasol in her hands was sitting
at a table examining the parasol spring which Kitty had broken. She
lifted her head.
  "Varenka, forgive me, do forgive me," whispered Kitty, going up to
her. "I don't remember what I said. I..."
  "I really didn't mean to hurt you," said Varenka, smiling.

  Peace was made. But with her father's coming all the world in
which she had been living was transformed for Kitty. She did not
give up everything she had learned, but she became aware that she
had deceived herself in supposing she could be what she wanted to
be. Her eyes were, it seemed, opened; she felt all the difficulty of
maintaining herself without hypocrisy and self-conceit on the pinnacle
to which she had wished to mount. Moreover, she became aware of all
the dreariness of the world of sorrow, of sick and dying people, in
which she had been living. The efforts she had made to like it
seemed to her intolerable, and she felt a longing to get back
quickly into the fresh air, to Russia, to Ergushovo, where, as she
knew from letters, her sister Dolly had already gone with her
children.
  But her affection for Varenka did not wane. Parting Kitty begged her
to come to them in Russia.
  "I'll come when you get married," said Varenka.
  "I shall never marry."
  "Well, then, I shall never come."
  "Well, then, I shall be married simply for that. Mind now,
remember your promise," said Kitty.
  The doctor's prediction was fulfilled. Kitty returned home, to
Russia, cured. She was not as gay and thoughtless as before, but she
was serene. Her Moscow troubles had become a memory to her.
                         PART THREE

                             I.

  Sergei Ivanovich Koznishev wanted a rest from mental work, and
instead of going abroad as he usually did, he came toward the end of
May to stay in the country with his brother. In his judgment the
best sort of life was a country life. He had come now to enjoy such
a life at his brother's. Konstantin Levin was very glad to have him,
especially as he did not expect his brother Nikolai that summer. But
in spite of his affection and respect for Sergei Ivanovich, Konstantin
Levin was uncomfortable with his brother in the country. It made him
uncomfortable, and it even annoyed him, to see his brother's
attitude to the country. To Konstantin Levin the country was the
background of life- that is of pleasures, endeavors, labor; to
Sergei Ivanovich the country meant on one hand rest from work, on
the other a valuable antidote to laxness- an antidote which he took
with satisfaction and a sense of its salutariness. To Konstantin Levin
the country was good because it afforded a field for labor, of the
usefulness of which there could be no doubt; to Sergei Ivanovich the
country was particularly good, because there it was possible and
fitting to do nothing. Moreover, Sergei Ivanovich's attitude toward
"the people" rather piqued Konstantin. Sergei Ivanovich used to say
that he knew and liked "the people," and he often talked to the
peasants, which he knew how to do without affectation or
condescension, and from every such conversation he would deduce
general conclusions in favor of "the people" and in confirmation of
his knowing them. Konstantin Levin did not like such an attitude
toward "the people." To Konstantin "the people" was simply the chief
partner in the common labor, and in spite of all the respect and the
love, almost like that of kinship, he had for the peasant (sucked in
probably, as he said himself, with the milk of his peasant nurse),
Konstantin as a fellow worker with them, while sometimes
enthusiastic over the vigor, gentleness, and justice of these men, was
very often, when their common labors called for other qualities,
exasperated with the peasant for his carelessness, slovenliness,
drunkenness and lying. If he had been asked whether he liked or didn't
like "the people," Konstantin Levin would have been absolutely at a
loss what to reply. He liked and did not like "the people," just as he
liked and did not like men in general. Of course, being a
goodhearted man, he liked men more than he disliked them, and so too
with "the people." But like or dislike "the people" as something
peculiar he could not, not only because he lived with "the people,"
and all his interests were bound up with theirs, but also because he
regarded himself as a part of "the people," did not see any peculiar
qualities or failings distinguishing himself from "the people," and
could not contrast himself with them. Moreover, although he had
lived so long in the closest relations with the peasants, as farmer
and arbitrator, and what was more, as adviser (the peasants trusted
him, and for forty verstas round they would come to ask his advice),
he had no definite views of "the people," and would have been as
much at a loss to answer the question whether he knew "the people"
as the question whether he liked them. For him to say he knew "the
people" would have been the same as to say he knew men. He was
continually watching and getting to know people of all sorts, and
among them peasants, whom he regarded as good and interesting
people, and he was continually observing new points in them,
altering his former views of them and forming new ones.
  With Sergei Ivanovich it was quite the contrary. Just as he liked
and praised a country life in comparison with the life he did not
like, so too he liked "the people" in contradistinction to the class
of men he did not like, and so too he knew "the people" as something
distinct from, and opposed to, men in general. In his methodical brain
there were distinctly formulated certain aspects of peasant life,
deduced partly from that life itself, but chiefly from contrast with
other modes of life. He never changed his opinion of "the people"
and his sympathetic attitude toward them.
  In the discussions that arose between the brothers on their views of
"the people," Sergei Ivanovich always got the better of his brother,
precisely because Sergei Ivanovich had definite ideas about the
peasant- his character, his qualities, and his tastes; Konstantin
Levin had no definite and unalterable idea on the subject, and so in
their arguments Konstantin was readily convicted of contradicting
himself.
  In Sergei Ivanovich's eyes his younger brother was a capital fellow,
with his heart in the right place (as he expressed it in French),
but with a mind which, though fairly quick, was too much influenced by
the impressions of the moment, and consequently filled with
contradictions. With all the condescension of an elder brother he
sometimes explained to him the true import of things, but he derived
little satisfaction from arguing with him because he got the better of
him too easily.
  Konstantin Levin regarded his brother as a man of immense
intellect and culture, as generous in the highest sense of the word,
and possessed of a special faculty for working for the public good.
But in the depths of his heart, the older he became, and the more
intimately he knew his brother, the more and more frequently the
thought struck him that this faculty of working for the public good,
of which he felt himself utterly devoid, was possibly not so much a
quality as a lack of something- not a lack of good, honest, noble
desires and tastes, but a lack of vital force, of what is called
heart, of that impulse which drives a man to choose some one out of
the innumerable paths of life, and to care only for that one. The
better he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergei Ivanovich,
and many other people who worked for the public welfare, were not
led by any impulse of the heart to care for the public good, but
reasoned from intellectual considerations that it was a right thing to
take an interest in public affairs, and consequently took an
interest in them. Levin was confirmed in this conjecture by
observing that his brother did not take questions affecting the public
welfare or the question of the immortality of the soul a bit more to
heart than he did chess problems, or the ingenious construction of a
new machine.
  Besides this, Konstantin Levin was not at his ease with his brother,
because in the country, especially in summertime, Levin was
continually busy with work on the land, and the long summer day was
not long enough for him to get through all he had to do, while
Sergei Ivanovich was merely taking a holiday. But though he was taking
a holiday now- that is to say, he was doing no writing- he was so used
to intellectual activity that he liked to put into concise and
eloquent shape the ideas that occurred to him, and liked to have
someone listen to him. His most usual and natural listener was his
brother. And so, in spite of the friendliness and directness of
their relations, Konstantin felt an awkwardness in leaving him
alone. Sergei Ivanovich liked to stretch himself on the grass in the
sun, and to lie so, basking and chatting lazily.
  "You wouldn't believe," he would say to his brother, "what a
pleasure this rural laziness is to me. Not an idea in one's brain-
as empty as a drum!"
  But Konstantin Levin found it dull sitting and listening to him,
especially when he knew that while he was away manure would be
carted into fields not plowed ready for it, and heaped up God knows
how; and the shares in the plows would not be screwed in, so that they
would come off, and then his men would say the new plows were a
silly invention, and there was nothing like the old wooden plow, and
so on.
  "Come, you've done enough trudging about in the heat," Sergei
Ivanovich would say to him.
  "No, I must just run round to the countinghouse for a minute," Levin
would answer, and would run off to the fields.
                             II.

  Early in June Agathya Mikhailovna, the old nurse and housekeeper, in
carrying to the cellar a jar of mushrooms she had just pickled,
happened to slip, fall and sprain her wrist. The district doctor, a
talkative young medico who had just finished his studies, came to
see her. He examined the wrist, said it was not luxated, bandaged
it, and being asked to dinner evidently was delighted at a chance of
talking to the celebrated Sergei Ivanovich Koznishev, and to show
his advanced views of things told him all the scandal of the district,
complaining of the poor state into which the Zemstvo affairs had
fallen. Sergei Ivanovich listened attentively, asked him questions,
and, roused by a new listener, he talked fluently, uttered a few
keen and weighty observations, respectfully appreciated by the young
doctor, and was soon in that animated frame of mind his brother knew
so well, which always, with him, followed a brilliant and animated
conversation. After the departure of the doctor, he wanted to go
with a fishing rod to the river. Sergei Ivanovich was fond of angling,
and was, it seemed, proud of being able to care for such a stupid
occupation.
  Konstantin Levin, whose presence was needed in the plowland and
the meadows, had come to take his brother in the cabriolet.
  It was that time of the year, the turning point of summer, when
the crops of the present year are a certainty, when one begins to
think of the sowing for next year, and the mowing is at hand; when the
rye is all in ear, though its ears are still light, not yet full,
and it waves in gray-green billows in the wind; when the green oats,
with tufts of yellow grass scattered here and there among it, droop
irregularly over the late-sown fields; when the early buckwheat is
already out and hiding the ground; when the fallow lands, trodden hard
as stone by the cattle, are half-plowed over, with paths left
untouched by the plow; when the odor from the dry manure heaps
carted into the fields mingles at sunset with the smell of
meadowsweet, and on the low-lying lands the preserved meadows are a
thick sea of grass waiting for the mowing, with blackened heaps of
sorrel stalks among it.
  It was the time when there comes a brief pause in the toil of the
fields before the beginning of the labors of harvest- every year
recurring, every year claiming all the peasant's thews. The crop was a
splendid one, and bright, hot summer days had set in with short,
dewy nights.
  The brothers had to drive through the woods to reach the meadows.
Sergei Ivanovich was all the while admiring the beauty of the woods,
which were a tangled mass of leaves, pointing out to his brother now
an old lime tree on the point of flowering, dark on the shady side,
and brightly spotted with yellow stipules, now the young shoots of
this year's saplings brilliant with emerald. Konstantin Levin did
not like talking and hearing about the beauty of nature. Words for him
took away the beauty of what he saw. He assented to what his brother
said, but could not help thinking of other things. When they came
out of the woods, all his attention was engrossed by the view of the
fallow land on the upland, in parts yellow with grass, in parts
trampled and checkered with furrows, in parts dotted with ridges of
manure, and in parts even plowed. A string of telegas was moving
across it. Levin counted the telegas, and was pleased that all that
were wanted had been brought, and at the sight of the meadows his
thoughts passed to the mowing. He always felt something peculiar
moving him to the quick at haymaking. On reaching the meadow Levin
stopped the horse.
  The morning dew was still lying on the thick undergrowth of the
grass, and, that he might not get his feet wet, Sergei Ivanovich asked
his brother to drive him in the cabriolet up to the willow tree from
which the perch were caught. Sorry as Konstantin Levin was to crush
down his mowing grass, he drove him into the meadow. The high grass
softly turned about the wheels and the horse's legs, leaving its seeds
clinging to the wet axles and spokes of the wheels.
  His brother seated himself under a bush, arranging his tackle, while
Levin led the horse away, tied him up and walked into the vast
gray-green sea of grass unstirred by the wind. The silky grass with
its ripe seeds came almost to his waist in the riverside spots.
  Crossing the meadow, Konstantin Levin came out on the road, and
met an old man with a swollen eye, carrying a swarming basket with
bees.
  "What? Taken a stray swarm, Fomich?" he asked.
  "No, indeed, Konstantin Mitrich! All we can do to keep our own! This
is the second new swarm that has flown away.... Luckily the lads
caught them. They were plowing your field. They unyoked the horses and
galloped after them."
  "Well, what do you say, Fomich- start mowing or wait a bit?"
  "Well, now! Our way's to wait till St. Peter's Day. But you always
mow sooner. Well, to be sure, please God, the hay's good. There'll
be plenty for the beasts."
  "What do you think about the weather?"
  "That's in God's hands. Maybe even the weather will favor us."
  Levin walked up to his brother.
  Sergei Ivanovich had caught nothing, but he was not bored, and
seemed in the most cheerful frame of mind. Levin saw that,
stimulated by his conversation with the doctor, he wanted to talk.
Levin, on the other hand, would have liked to get home as soon as
possible, to give orders about getting together the mowers for next
day, and to set at rest his doubts about the mowing, which greatly
absorbed him.
  "Well, let's be going," he said.
  "Why be in such a hurry? Let's stay a little. But how wet you are!
Even though one catches nothing, it's fine. That's the best thing
about every part of sport, that one has to do with nature. How
exquisite this steely water is!" said Sergei Ivanovich. "These
riverside banks always remind me of the riddle- do you know it? 'The
grass says to the river: we quiver and we quiver.'"
  "I don't know the riddle," answered Levin cheerlessly.
                             III.

  "Do you know I've been thinking about you," said Sergei Ivanovich.
"It's beyond everything what's being done in the district, according
to what this doctor tells me. He's a very intelligent fellow. And as
I've told you before, I tell you again: it's not right for you not
to go to the meetings, and to keep out of the Zemstvo affairs
entirely. If decent people won't go into it, of course it's bound to
go all wrong. We pay the money, and it all goes in salaries, and there
are no schools, nor district dressers, nor midwives, nor pharmacies-
nothing."
  "Well, I did try, you know," Levin said gently and unwillingly. "I
can't! And so there's no help for it."
  "But why can't you? I must own I can't make it out. Indifference,
incapacity- I won't admit; surely it's not simply laziness?"
  "None of those things. I've tried, and I see I can do nothing," said
Levin.
  He had hardly grasped what his brother was saying. Looking toward
the plowland across the river, he made out something black, but he
could not distinguish whether it was a horse or the bailiff on
horseback.
  "Why is it you can do nothing? You made an attempt and didn't
succeed, as you think, and you give in. How can you have so little
ambition?"
  "Ambition!" said Levin, stung to the quick by his brother's words;
"I don't understand. If they'd told me at college that other people
understood the integral calculus, and I didn't, then ambition would
have come in. But in this case one wants first to be convinced that
one has certain abilities for this sort of business, and especially
that all this business is of great importance."
  "What! Do you mean to say it's not of importance?" said Sergei
Ivanovich, stung to the quick in his turn by his brother's considering
of no importance anything that interested him, and still more at his
obviously paying little attention to what he was saying.
  "I don't think it important; it does not take hold of me- I can't
help it," answered Levin, making out that what he saw was the bailiff,
and that the bailiff seemed to be letting the peasants go off the
plowed land. They were turning the plow over. "Can they have
finished plowing?" he wondered.
  "Come, really though," said the elder brother, with a frown on his
handsome, clever face, "there's a limit to everything. It's very
well to be original and genuine, and to dislike everything
hypocritical- I know all about that; but really, what you're saying
either has no meaning, or it has a very wrong meaning. How can you
think it a matter of no importance whether 'the people,' whom you love
as you assert..."
  "I never did assert it," thought Konstantin Levin.
  "...die without help? The ignorant peasant women starve the
children, and the people stagnate in darkness, and are helpless in the
hands of every village clerk, while you have at your disposal a
means of helping them, and don't help them because to your mind it's
of no importance!"
  And Sergei Ivanovich put before him the dilemma: Either you are so
undeveloped that you can't see all that you can do, or you won't
sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever it is, to do it.
  Konstantin Levin felt that there was no course open to him but to
submit, or to confess to a lack of zeal for the public good. And
this mortified him and hurt his feelings.
  "It's both," he said resolutely; "I don't see that it is
possible..."
  "What! Is it impossible, if the money were properly laid out, to
provide medical aid?"
  "Impossible, as it seems to me.... For the four thousand square
verstas of our district, what with our undersnow waters, and the
storms, and the work in the fields, I don't see how it is possible
to provide medical aid all over. And besides, I don't believe in
medicine."
  "Oh, well, that's unfair.... I can quote to you thousands of
instances.... But the schools, at least?"
  "Why have schools?"
  "What do you mean? Can there be two opinions of the advantage of
education? If it's a good thing for you, it's a good thing for
everyone."
  Konstantin Levin felt himself morally pinned against a wall, and
so he became heated, and unconsciously blurted out the chief cause
of his indifference to public business.
  "Perhaps it may all be very good; but why should I worry myself
about establishing dispensaries which I shall never make use of, and
schools to which I shall never send my children, to which even the
peasants don't want to send their children, and to which I've no
very firm faith that they ought to send them?" said he.
  Sergei Ivanovich was for a minute surprised at this unexpected
view of the subject; but he promptly made a new plan of attack.
  He was silent for a little, drew out a hook, threw it in again,
and turned to his brother smiling.
  "Come, now.... In the first place, the dispensary is needed. We
ourselves sent for the district doctor for Agathya Mikhailovna."
  "Oh, well, but I fancy her wrist will never be straight again."
  "That remains to be proved.... Next, the peasant who can read and
write is as a workman of more use and value to you."
  "No; you can ask anyone you like," Konstantin Levin answered with
decision, "the man that can read and write is much inferior as a
workman. And mending the highroads is an impossibility; and as soon as
they put up bridges they're stolen."
  "Still, that's not the point," said Sergei Ivanovich, frowning. He
disliked contradiction, and still more, arguments that were
continually skipping from one thing to another, introducing new and
disconnected points, so that there was no knowing to which to reply.
"Let me say. Do you admit that education is a benefit for the people?"
  "Yes, I admit it," said Levin without thinking, and he was conscious
immediately that he had said what he did not think. He felt that if he
admitted that, it would be proved that he had been talking meaningless
rubbish. How it would be proved he could not tell, but he knew that
this would inevitably be logically proved to him, and he awaited the
proofs.
  The argument turned out to be far simpler than Konstantin Levin
had expected.
  "If you admit that it is a benefit," said Sergei Ivanovich, "then,
as an honest man, you cannot help caring about it and sympathizing
with the movement, and so wishing to work for it."
  "But I still do not admit this movement to be good," said Konstantin
Levin, reddening.
  "What! But you just said now..."
  "That's to say, I don't admit it's being either good or possible."
  "That you can't tell without making the trial."
  "Well, supposing that is so," said Levin, though he did not
suppose so at all, "supposing that is so, still I don't see, all the
same, why I should worry myself about it."
  "How so?"
  "No; since we are talking, explain it to me from the philosophical
point of view," said Levin.
  "I can't see where philosophy comes in," said Sergei Ivanovich, in a
tone, Levin fancied, as though he did not admit his brother's right to
talk about philosophy. And that irritated Levin.
  "I'll tell you, then," he said with heat, "I imagine the
mainspring of all our actions is, after all, self-interest. Now in the
Zemstvo institutions I, as a nobleman, see nothing that could
conduce to my prosperity. The roads are not better and could not be
better; my horses carry me well enough over bad ones. Doctors and
dispensaries are of no use to me. A justice of the peace is of no
use to me- I never appeal to him, and never shall appeal to him. The
schools are of no good to me, but positively harmful, as I told you.
For me the Zemstvo institutions simply mean the liability of paying
eighteen kopecks for every dessiatina, of driving into the town,
sleeping with bedbugs, and listening to all sorts of idiocy and
blather, and self-interest offers me no inducement."
  "Excuse me," Sergei Ivanovich interposed with a smile,
"self-interest did not induce us to work for the emancipation of the
serfs, yet we did work for it."
  "No!" Konstantin Levin broke in with still greater heat; "the
emancipation of the serfs was a different matter. There
self-interest did come in. One longed to throw off that yoke that
crushed us- all the decent people among us. But to be a member of
the Zemstvo and discuss how many street cleaners are needed, and how
sewers shall be constructed in the town in which I don't live- to
serve on a jury and try a peasant who has stolen a flitch of bacon,
and listen for six hours at a stretch to all sorts of jabber from
the counsel for the defense and the prosecution, and the president
cross-examining my old simpleton Alioshka: 'Do you admit, prisoner
at the bar, the fact of the removal of the bacon'- 'Eh?'"
  Konstantin Levin had warmed to his subject, and began mimicking
the president and the half-witted Alioshka: it seemed to him that it
was all to the point.
  But Sergei Ivanovich shrugged his shoulders.
  "Well, what do you mean to say, then?"
  "I simply mean to say that those rights that touch me... my
interest, I shall always defend to the best of my ability; that when
raids were made on us students, and the police read our letters, I was
ready to defend those rights to the utmost, to defend my rights to
education and freedom. I can understand compulsory military service,
which affects my children, my brothers, and myself- I am ready to
deliberate on what concerns me; but deliberating on how to spend forty
thousand roubles of Zemstvo's money, or judging the half-witted
Alioshka- that I don't understand, and I can't do it."
  Konstantin Levin spoke as though the floodgates of his speech had
burst open. Sergei Ivanovich smiled.
  "But tomorrow it'll be your turn to be tried; would it have suited
your tastes better to be tried in the old criminal court?"
  "I'm not going to be tried. I shan't murder anybody, and I've no
need of it. Well, I tell you what," he went on, flying off again to
a subject quite beside the point, "our district self-government and
all the rest of it- it's just like the birch saplings we stick in
the ground, as we would do it on Trinity Day, to look like a copse
which has grown up of itself in Europe, and I can't gush over these
birch saplings and believe in them."
  Sergei Ivanovich merely shrugged his shoulders, as though to express
his wonder how the birch saplings had come into their argument at that
point, though he did really understand at once what his brother meant.
  "Excuse me, but you know one really can't argue in that way," he
observed.
  But Konstantin Levin wanted to justify himself for the failing, of
which he was conscious, of a lack of zeal for the public welfare,
and he went on.
  "I imagine," Konstantin said, "that no sort of activity is likely to
be lasting if it is not founded on self-interest- that's a universal
principle, a philosophical principle," he said, repeating the word
"philosophical" with determination, as though wishing to show that
he had as much right as anyone else to talk of philosophy.
  Sergei Ivanovich smiled. "He too has a philosophy of his own at
the service of his natural tendencies," he thought.
  "Come, you'd better let philosophy alone," he said. "The chief
problem of the philosophy of all ages consists precisely in finding
that indispensable connection which exists between individual and
social interests. But that's not to the point; what is to the point is
a correction I must make in your comparison. The birches are not
simply stuck in, but some are sown and some are planted, and one
must deal carefully with them. It's only those peoples that have an
intuitive sense of what's of importance and significance in their
institutions, and know how to value them, who have a future before
them- it's only those peoples that one can truly call historical."
  And Sergei Ivanovich carried the subject into the regions of
philosophical history where Konstantin Levin could not follow him, and
showed him all the incorrectness of his outlook.
  "As for your dislike of it- excuse my saying so- that's simply our
Russian sloth and old serfowners' ways, and I'm convinced that in
you it's a temporary error and will pass."
  Konstantin was silent. He felt himself vanquished on all sides,
but he felt at the same time that what he wanted to say was
unintelligible to his brother. Only he could not make up his mind
whether it was unintelligible because he was not capable of expressing
his meaning clearly, or because his brother would not or could not
understand him. But he did not pursue the speculation, and, without
replying, he fell to musing on a quite different and personal matter.
  Sergei Ivanovich wound up the last line, unhitched the horse, and
they drove off.
                             IV.

  The personal matter that absorbed Levin during his conversation with
his brother was this. Once, the year previous, he had gone to look
at the mowing, and being made very angry by the bailiff he had had
recourse to his favorite means for regaining his temper- he had
taken a scythe from a peasant and begun mowing.
  He liked the work so much that he had several times tried his hand
at mowing since. He had cut the whole of the meadow in front of his
house, and this year, ever since the early spring, he had cherished
a plan for mowing for whole days together with the peasants. Ever
since his brother's arrival he had been in doubt as to whether to
mow or not. He was loath to leave his brother alone all day long,
and he was afraid his brother would laugh at him about it. But as he
drove into the meadow, and recalled the sensations of mowing, he
came near deciding that he would go mowing. After the irritating
discussion with his brother, he pondered over this intention again.
  "I must have physical exercise, or my temper'll certainly be
ruined," he thought, and he determined he would go mowing, however
awkward he might feel about it with his brother or the peasants.
  Toward evening Konstantin Levin went to his countinghouse, gave
directions as to the work to be done, and sent about the village to
summon the mowers for the morrow, to cut the hay in Kalinov meadow,
the largest and best of his grasslands.
  "And send my scythe, please, to Tit, for him to set it, and bring it
round tomorrow. I may do some mowing myself, too," he said, trying not
to be embarrassed.
  The bailiff smiled and said:
  "Yes, sir."
  At tea the same evening Levin said to his brother too.
  "I fancy the fine weather will last," said he. "Tomorrow I shall
start mowing."
  "I'm so fond of that form of field labor," said Sergei Ivanovich.
  "I'm awfully fond of it. I sometimes mow myself with the peasants,
and tomorrow I want to try mowing the whole day."
  Sergei Ivanovich lifted his head, and looked with curiosity at his
brother.
  "How do you mean? Just like one of the peasants, all day long?"
  "Yes, it's very pleasant," said Levin.
  "It's splendid as exercise, only you'll hardly be able to stand it,"
said Sergei Ivanovich, without a shade of irony.
  "I've tried it. It's hard work at first, but you get into it. I dare
say I shall manage to keep it up...."
  "Oh, so that's it! But tell me, how do the peasants look at it? I
suppose they laugh in their sleeves at their master's being such a
queer fish?"
  "No, I don't think so; but it's so delightful, and at the same
time such hard work, that one has no time to think about it."
  "But how will you do about dining with them? To send you a bottle of
Lafitte and roast turkey out there would be a little awkward."
  "No, I'll simply come home at the time of their noonday rest."
  Next morning Konstantin Levin got up earlier than usual, but he
was detained giving directions on the farm, and when he reached the
mowing grass the mowers were already at their second swath.
  From the uplands he could get a view of the shaded cut part of the
meadow below, with the grayish swaths and the black heaps of coats,
taken off by the mowers at the place from which they had started
cutting.
  Gradually, as he rode toward the meadow, the peasants came into
sight, some in coats, some in their shirts, mowing, one behind another
in a long string, each swinging his scythe in his own way. He
counted forty-two of them.
  They were mowing slowly over the uneven, low-lying parts of the
meadow, where there had been an old dam. Levin recognized some of
his own men. Here was old Iermil in a very long white smock, bending
forward to swing a scythe; there was a young fellow, Vaska, who had
been a coachman of Levin's, taking every swath with a wide sweep.
Here, too, was Tit, Levin's preceptor in the art of mowing, a thin
little peasant. He went on ahead, and cut his wide swath without
bending, as though playing with his scythe.
  Levin got off his mare, and fastening her up by the roadside went to
meet Tit, who took a second scythe out of a bush and gave it him.
  "It's ready, sir; it's like a razor- it cuts of itself," said Tit,
taking off his cap with a smile and giving him the scythe.
  Levin took the scythe, and began trying it. As they finished their
swaths, the mowers, hot and good-humored, came out into the road one
after another, and smirking, greeted the master. They all stared at
him, but no one made any remark, till a tall old man, with a wrinkled,
beardless face, wearing a short sheepskin jacket, came out into the
road and accosted him.
  "Look'ee now, master, once take hold of the rope, there's no letting
go!" he said, and Levin heard smothered laughter among the mowers.
  "I'll try not to let it go," he said, taking his stand behind Tit,
and waiting for the time to begin.
  "Mind'ee," repeated the old man.
  Tit made room, and Levin started behind him. The grass was short
close to the road, and Levin, who had not done any mowing for a long
while, and was disconcerted by the eyes fastened upon him, cut badly
for the first moments, though he swung his scythe vigorously. Behind
him he heard voices:
  "It's not set right; handle's too high; see how he has to stoop to
it," said one.
  "Press more on the heel of the scythe," said another.
  "Never mind, he'll get on all right," the old man resumed. "See,
he's made a start.... You swing it too wide, you'll tire yourself
out.... The master, sure, does his best for himself! But see the grass
missed out! For such work us fellows would catch it!"
  The grass became lusher, and Levin, listening without answering,
followed Tit, trying to do the best he could. They moved a hundred
paces. Tit kept moving on, without stopping, nor showing the slightest
weariness, but Levin was already beginning to fear he would not be
able to keep it up- so tired was he.
  He felt as he swung his scythe that he was at the very end of his
strength, and was making up his mind to ask Tit to stop. But at that
very moment Tit stopped of his own accord, and, stooping down,
picked up some grass, rubbed his scythe, and began whetting it.
Levin straightened himself, and drawing a deep breath looked round.
Behind him came a peasant, and he too was evidently tired, for he
stopped at once without waiting to mow up to Levin, and began whetting
his scythe. Tit sharpened his scythe and Levin's, and they went on.
  The next time it was just the same. Tit moved on with sweep after
sweep of his scythe, without stopping or showing signs of weariness.
Levin followed him, trying not to get left behind, and he found it
harder and harder: the moment came when he felt he had no strength
left, but at that very moment Tit stopped and whetted the scythes.
  So they mowed the first row. And this long row seemed particularly
hard work to Levin; but when the end was reached, and Tit, shouldering
his scythe, began with deliberate stride returning on the tracks
left by his heels in the cut grass, and Levin walked back in the
same way over the space he had cut, in spite of the sweat that ran
in streams over his face and fell in drops down his nose, and drenched
his back as though he had been soaked in water, he felt very happy.
What delighted him particularly was that now he knew he would be
able to hold out.
  His pleasure was only disturbed by his swath not being well cut.
"I will swing less with my arm and more with my whole body," he
thought, comparing Tit's swath, which looked as if it had been cut
along a surveyor's cord, with his own scattered and irregularly
lying grass.
  The first swath, as Levin noticed, Tit had mowed especially quickly,
probably wishing to put his master to the test, and the swath happened
to be a long one. The next swaths were easier, but still Levin had
to strain every nerve not to drop behind the peasants.
  He thought of nothing, wished for nothing, save not to be left
behind the peasants, and to do his work as well as possible. He
heard nothing save the swish of scythes, and saw before him Tit's
upright figure mowing away, the crescent-shaped curve of the cut
grass, the grass and flowers slowly and rhythmically falling before
the blade of his scythe, and ahead of him the end of the swath,
where would come the rest.
  Suddenly, in the midst of his toil, without understanding what it
was or whence it came, he felt a pleasant sensation of chill on his
hot, moist shoulders. He glanced at the sky in the interval for
whetting the scythes. A heavy, lowering storm cloud had blown up,
and big raindrops were falling. Some of the peasants went to their
coats and put them on; others- just like Levin himself- merely
shrugged their shoulders, enjoying the pleasant coolness of it.
  Another swath, and yet another swath followed- long swaths and short
swaths, with good grass and with poor grass. Levin lost all sense of
time, and could not have told whether it were late or early now. A
change began to come over his work, which gave him immense
satisfaction. In the midst of his toil there were moments during which
he forgot what he was doing, and it all came easy to him, and at those
same moments his swath was almost as smooth and well cut as Tit's. But
as soon as he recollected what he was doing, and began trying to do
better, he was at once conscious of all the difficulty of his task,
and the swath was badly mown.
  On finishing yet another swath he would have gone back to the top of
the meadow again to begin the next, but Tit stopped, and going up to
the old man said something in a low voice to him. They both looked
at the sun. "What are they talking about, and why doesn't he go back?"
thought Levin, without guessing that the peasants had been mowing no
less than four hours without stopping, and that it was time for
their lunch.
  "Lunch, sir," said the old man.
  "Is it really time? Lunch it is, then."
  Levin gave his scythe to Tit, and, together with the peasants, who
were crossing the long stretch of mown grass, slightly sprinkled
with rain, to get their bread from the heap of coats, he went toward
his horse. Only then did he suddenly awake to the fact that he had
been wrong about the weather and that the rain was drenching his hay.
  "The hay will be spoiled," he said.
  "Not a bit of it, sir; mow in the rain, and you'll rake in fine
weather!" said the old man.
  Levin untied his horse and rode home to his coffee.
  Sergei Ivanovich was just getting up. When he had drunk his
coffee, Levin rode back again to the mowing before Sergei Ivanovich
had had time to dress and come down to the dining room.
                             V.

  After lunch Levin was not in the same place in the string of
mowers as before, but stood between the old man who had accosted him
jocosely, and now invited him to be his neighbor, and a young peasant,
who had only been married in the autumn, and who was mowing this
summer for the first time.
  The old man, holding himself erect, moved in front, with his feet
turned out, taking long, regular strides, and with a precise and
regular action which seemed to cost him no more effort than swinging
one's arms in walking, as though it were in play, he laid down the
high, even swath of grass. It was as though it were not he but the
sharp scythe of itself swishing through the juicy grass.
  Behind Levin came the lad Mishka. His comely, youthful face, with
a twist of fresh grass bound round his hair, was all working with
effort; but whenever anyone looked at him he smiled. He would
clearly have died sooner than own it was hard work for him.
  Levin kept between them. In the very heat of the day the mowing
did not seem such hard work to him. The perspiration with which he was
drenched cooled him, while the sun, that burned his back, his head,
and his arms, bare to the elbow, gave a vigor and dogged energy to his
labor; and more and more often now came those moments of
unconsciousness, when it was possible not to think of what one was
doing. The scythe cut of itself. These were happy moments. Still
more delightful were the moments when they reached the stream where
the swaths ended, and the old man rubbed his scythe with the wet,
thick grass, rinsed its blade in the fresh water of the stream, ladled
out a little in a whetstone case, and offered Levin a drink.
  "What do you say to my kvass, eh? Good, eh?" he would say, winking.
  And truly Levin had never drunk any liquor as good as this warm
water with green bits floating in it, and a taste of rust from the tin
whetstone case. And immediately after this came the delicious, slow
saunter, with his hand on the scythe, during which he could wipe
away the streaming sweat, take deep breaths of air, and look about
at the long string of mowers, and at what was happening around in
the forest and the field.
  The longer Levin mowed, the oftener he felt the moments of
unconsciousness in which it seemed that it was not his hands which
swung the scythe, but that the scythe was moving together with
itself a body full of life and consciousness of its own; and as though
by magic, without thinking of it, the work turned out regular and
well-finished of itself. These were the most blissful moments.
  It was only hard work when he had to break off the motion, which had
become unconscious, and to think; when he had to mow round a hummock
or an unweeded tuft of sorrel. The old man did this easily. When a
hummock came he changed his action, and at one time with the heel, and
at another with the tip of his scythe, clipped the hummock round
both sides with short strokes. And while he did this he kept looking
about and watching what came into his view: at one moment he picked
a wild berry and ate it or offered it to Levin, then he flung away a
twig with the blade of the scythe, then he looked at a quail's nest,
from which the bird flew just under the scythe, or caught a snake that
crossed his path, and lifting it on the scythe as though on a fork
showed it to Levin and threw it away.
  For both Levin and the young peasant behind him, such changes of
position were difficult. Both of them, repeating over and over again
the same strained movement, were in a perfect frenzy of toil, and were
incapable of shifting their position and at the same time watching
what was before them.
  Levin did not notice how time was passing. If he had been asked
how long he had been working he would have said half an hour- yet it
was getting on to dinnertime. As they were walking back over the cut
grass, the old man called Levin's attention to the little girls and
boys who were coming from different directions, hardly visible through
the long grass, and along the road toward the mowers, carrying sacks
of bread that stretched their little arms, and lugging small
pitchers of kvass, stopped up with rags.
  "Look'ee at the little doodlebugs crawling!" he said, pointing to
them, and he shaded his eyes with his hand to look at the sun.
  They mowed two more swaths; the old man stopped.
  "Come, master, dinnertime!" he said decidedly. And on reaching the
stream the mowers moved off across the swaths toward their pile of
coats, where the children who had brought their dinners were sitting
waiting for them. The peasants gathered- those who came from afar
under their telegas, those who lived near under a willow bush, covered
with grass.
  Levin sat down by them; he felt disinclined to go away.
  All constraint with the master had disappeared long ago. The
peasants got ready for dinner. Some washed, the young lads bathed in
the stream, others made a place comfortable for a rest, untied their
sacks of bread, and uncovered the pitchers of kvass. The old man
crumbled up some bread in a cup, stirred it with the handle of a
spoon, poured water on it from his whetstone case, broke up some
more bread, and having seasoned it with salt, he turned to the east to
say his prayer.
  "Come, master, taste my sop," said he, kneeling down before the cup.
  The sop was so good that Levin gave up the idea of going home for
dinner. He ate with the old man, and talked to him about his family
affairs, taking the keenest interest in them, and told him about his
own affairs and all the circumstances that could be of interest to the
old man. He felt much nearer to him than to his brother, and could not
help smiling at the affection he felt for this man. When the old man
got up again, said his prayer, and lay down under a bush, putting some
grass under his head for a pillow, Levin did the same, and, in spite
of the clinging flies that were so persistent in the sunshine, and the
midges that tickled his hot face and body, he fell asleep at once
and only waked when the sun had passed to the other side of the bush
and reached him. The old man had been awake a long while, and was
sitting up whetting the scythes of the younger lads.
  Levin looked about him and hardly recognized the place, everything
was so changed. The immense stretch of meadow had been mown and was
sparkling with a peculiar fresh brilliance, with its lines of
already sweet-smelling grass in the slanting rays of the evening
sun. And the bushes about the river, mowed around, and the river
itself, not visible before, now gleaming, like steel in its bends, and
the moving, ascending peasants, and the sharp wall of grass of the
unmown part of the meadow, and the hawks hovering over the stripped
meadow- all was perfectly new. Raising himself, Levin began
considering how much had been cut and how much more could still be
done that day.
  The work done was exceptionally great for forty-two men. They had
cut the whole of the big meadow, which had, in the years of corvee,
taken thirty scythes two days to mow. Only the corners remained to do,
where the swaths were short. But Levin felt a longing to get as much
mowing done that day as possible, and was vexed with the sun sinking
so quickly in the sky. He felt no weariness; all he wanted was to
get his work done more and more quickly, and as much of it as
possible.
  "Could we cut the Mashkin Upland too?- what do you think?" he said
to the old man.
  "As God wills- the sun's not high. A little vodka for the lads?"
  At the afternoon rest, when they were sitting down again, and
those who smoked had lighted their pipes, the old man told the men
that "the Mashkin Upland's to be cut- there'll be vodka."
  "Why not cut it? Come on, Tit! We'll look sharp! We can eat at
night. Come on!" voices cried out, and eating up their bread, the
mowers went back to work.
  "Come, lads, keep it up!" said Tit, and ran on ahead almost at a
trot.
  "Get along, get along!" said the old man, hurrying after him and
easily overtaking him, "I'll mow thee down, look out!"
  And young and old mowed away, as though they were racing with one
another. But however fast they worked, they did not spoil the grass,
and the swaths were laid just as neatly and exactly. The little
piece left uncut in the corner was mown in five minutes. The last of
the mowers were just ending their swaths while the foremost snatched
up their coats onto their shoulders, and crossed the road toward the
Mashkin Upland.
  The sun was already sinking among the trees when they went with
their jingling whetstone cases into the wooded ravine of the Mashkin
Upland. The grass was up to their waists in the middle of the
hollow, lush, tender, and feathery, spotted here and there among the
trees with wild heartsease.
  After a brief consultation- whether to take the swaths lengthwise or
diagonally- Prokhor Iermilin, also a doughty mower, a huge,
black-haired peasant, went on ahead. He went up to the top, turned
back again and started mowing, and they all proceeded to form in
line behind him, going downhill through the hollow and uphill right up
to the edge of the forest. The sun sank behind the forest. The dew was
falling by now; the mowers were in the sun only on the hillside, but
below, where a mist was rising, and on the opposite side, they mowed
into the fresh, dewy shade. The work went rapidly.
  The spicily fragrant grass cut with a succulent sound, was at once
laid in high swaths. The mowers from all sides, brought closer
together in the short swath, kept urging one another on to the sound
of jingling whetstone cases, and clanging scythes, and the hiss of the
whetstones sharpening them, and good-humored shouts.
  Levin still kept between the young peasant and the old man. The
old man, who had put on his short sheepskin jacket, was just as
good-humored, jocose, and free in his movements. Among the trees
they were continually cutting with their scythes the so-called
"birch mushrooms," swollen fat in the succulent grass. But the old man
bent down every time he came across a mushroom, picked it up and put
it in his bosom. "Another present for my old woman," he would say as
he did so.
  Easy as it was to mow the wet, lush grass, it was hard work going up
and down the steep sides of the ravine. But this did not trouble the
old man. Swinging his scythe just as ever, and moving his feet in
their big, plaited bast sandals, with firm short steps, he climbed
slowly up the steep place, and though his breeches hanging out below
his smock, and his whole frame, trembled with effort, he did not
miss one blade of grass or one mushroom on his way, and kept making
jokes with the peasants and Levin. Levin walked after him and often
thought he must fall, as he climbed with a scythe up a steep
hillock, where it would have been hard work to clamber even without
the scythe. But he climbed up and did what he had to do. He felt as
though some external force were moving him.
                             VI.

  The Mashkin Upland was mown, the last swaths finished, the
peasants had put on their coats and were gaily trudging home. Levin
got on his horse, and, parting regretfully from the peasants, rode
homeward. On the hillside he looked back; he could not see them in the
mist that had risen from the valley; he could only hear their rough,
good-humored voices, their laughter, and the sound of clanking
scythes.
  Sergei Ivanovich had long ago finished dinner, and was drinking iced
lemonade in his own room, looking through the reviews and papers which
he had just received by post, when Levin rushed into the room, talking
merrily, with his wet and matted hair sticking to his forehead, and
his back and chest grimed and moist.
  "We mowed the whole meadow! Oh, it is fine, wonderful! And how
have you been getting on?" said Levin, completely forgetting the
disagreeable conversation of the previous day.
  "Dear me! What you look like!" said Sergei Ivanovich, for the
first moment looking round with some dissatisfaction. "And the door-
do shut the door!" he cried. "You must have let in a dozen at least."
  Sergei Ivanovich could not endure flies, and in his own room he
never opened the window except at night, and carefully kept the door
shut.
  "Not one, on my honor. But if I have, I'll catch them. You
wouldn't believe what a pleasure mowing is! How have you spent the
day?"
  "Very well. But have you really been mowing the whole day? I
expect you're as hungry as a wolf. Kouzma has got everything ready for
you."
  "No, I don't feel hungry even. I had something to eat there. But
I'll go and wash."
  "Yes, go along, go along, and I'll come to you directly," said
Sergei Ivanovich, shaking his head as he looked at his brother. "Go
along, make haste," he added smiling, and, gathering up his books,
he prepared to go too. He, too, felt suddenly good-humored and
disinclined to leave his brother's side. "But what did you do while it
was raining?"
  "Rain? Why, there was scarcely a drop. I'll come directly. So you
had a good day too? That's first-rate." And Levin went off to change
his clothes.
  Five minutes later the brothers met in the dining room. Although
it seemed to Levin that he was not hungry, and he sat down to dinner
simply so as not to hurt Kouzma's feelings, yet when he began to eat
the dinner struck him as extraordinarily good. Sergei Ivanovich
watched him with a smile.
  "Oh, by the way, there's a letter for you," said he. "Kouzma,
bring it from below, please. And mind you shut the doors."
  The letter was from Oblonsky. Levin read it aloud. Oblonsky wrote to
him from Peterburg: "I have had a letter from Dolly; she's at
Ergushovo, and everything seems going wrong there. Do ride over and
see her, please; help her with advice; you know all about it. She will
be so glad to see you. She's quite alone, poor thing. My mother-in-law
and all of them are still abroad."
  "That's capital! I will certainly ride over to her," said Levin. "Or
we'll go together. She's such a good woman, isn't she?"
  "They're not far from here, then?"
  "Thirty verstas. Or perhaps forty. But a capital road. It will be
a capital drive."
  "I shall be delighted," said Sergei Ivanovich, still smiling.
  The sight of his younger brother's appearance had immediately put
him in a good humor.
  "Well, you have an appetite!" he said, looking at his dark-red,
sunburned face and neck bent over the plate.
  "Splendid! You can't imagine what an effective remedy it is for
every sort of foolishness. I want to enrich medicine with a new
word: Arbeitskur."
  "Well, but you don't need it, I should fancy."
  "No- but for all sorts of nervous invalids."
  "Yes, it ought to be tried. I had meant to come to the mowing to
look at you, but it was so unbearably hot that I got no further than
the forest. I sat there a little, and went on by the forest to the
village, met your old nurse, and sounded her as to the peasant's
view of you. As far as I can make out, they don't approve of this. She
said: 'It's not a gentleman's work.' Altogether, I fancy that in the
people's ideas there are very clear and definite notions of certain,
as they call it, 'gentlemanly' lines of action. And they don't
sanction the gentlefolk's moving outside bounds clearly laid down in
their ideas."
  "Maybe so; but anyway, it's a pleasure such as I have never known in
my life. And there's no harm in it, you know. Is there?" answered
Levin. "I can't help it if they don't like it. Though I do believe
it's all right. Eh?"
  "Altogether," pursued Sergei Ivanovich, "you're satisfied with
your day?"
  "Quite satisfied. We cut the whole meadow. And I made friends with
such a splendid old man there! You can't fancy how delightful he was!"
  "Well, so you're satisfied with your day. And so am I. First, I
solved two chess problems, and one a very pretty one- a pawn
opening. I'll show it to you. And then- I thought over our
conversation of yesterday."
  "Eh! Our conversation of yesterday?" said Levin, blissfully dropping
his eyelids and drawing deep breaths after finishing his dinner, and
absolutely incapable of recalling what their conversation of yesterday
had been about.
  "I think you are partly right. Our difference of opinion amounts
to this: that you make the mainspring self-interest, while I contend
that interest in the common weal is bound to exist in every man of a
certain degree of advancement. Possibly you are right too- that action
founded on material interest would be more desirable. You are
altogether, as the French say, too prime-sautiere a nature; you must
have intense, energetic action, or nothing."
  Levin listened to his brother and did not understand a single
word, and did not want to understand. He was only afraid his brother
might ask him some question which would make it evident he had not
heard.
  "So that's what I think it is, my dear boy," said Sergei
Ivanovich, touching him on the shoulder.
  "Yes, of course. But, do you know? I won't stand up for my view,"
answered Levin, with a guilty, childlike smile. "Whatever was it I was
disputing about?" he wondered. "Of course, I'm right, and he's
right, and it's all first-rate. Only I must go round to the
countinghouse and see to things." He got up, stretching and smiling.
  Sergei Ivanovich smiled too.
  "If you want to go out, let's go together," he said, disinclined
to be parted from his brother, who seemed positively breathing out
freshness and energy. "Come, we'll go to the countinghouse, if you
have to go there."
  "Oh, heavens!" shouted Levin, so loudly that Sergei Ivanovich was
quite frightened.
  "What, what is the matter?
  "How's Agathya Mikhailovna's hand?" said Levin, slapping himself
on the head. "I'd positively forgotten her."
  "It's much better."
  "Well, anyway, I'll run down to her. Before you've time to get
your hat on, I'll be back."
  And he ran downstairs, clattering with his heels like a spring
rattle.
                             VII.

  Stepan Arkadyevich had gone to Peterburg to perform the most natural
and essential official duty- so familiar to everyone in the government
service, though incomprehensible to outsiders- that duty but for which
one could hardly be in government service: of reminding the ministry
of his existence; and having, for the due performance of this rite,
taken all the available cash from home, was gaily and agreeably
spending his days at the races and in the summer villas. Meanwhile
Dolly and the children had moved into the country, to cut down
expenses as much as possible. She had gone to Ergushovo, the estate
that had been her dowry, and the one where in spring the forest had
been sold. It was nearly fifty verstas from Levin's Pokrovskoe.
  The big old house at Ergushovo had been pulled down long ago, and
the old Prince had had the wing done up and added to. Twenty years
before, when Dolly was a child, the wing had been roomy and
comfortable, though, like all wings, it stood sideways to the entrance
avenue, and to the south. But by now this wing was old and
dilapidated. When Stepan Arkadyevich had gone down in the spring to
sell the forest, Dolly had begged him to look over the house and order
what repairs might be needed. Stepan Arkadyevich, like an unfaithful
husbands indeed, was very solicitous for his wife's comfort, and he
had himself looked over the house, and given instructions about
everything that he considered necessary. What he considered
necessary was to cover all the furniture with new cretonne, to put
up curtains, to weed the garden, to make a little bridge on the
pond, and to plant flowers. But he forgot many other essential
matters, the want of which greatly distressed Darya Alexandrovna later
on.
  In spite of Stepan Arkadyevich's efforts to be an attentive father
and husband, he never could keep in his mind that he had a wife and
children. He had bachelor tastes, and it was in accordance with them
that he shaped his life. On his return to Moscow he informed his
wife with pride that everything was ready, that the house would be a
pretty toy, and that he most certainly advised her to go. His wife's
staying away in the country was very agreeable to Stepan Arkadyevich
from every point of view: it did the children good, it decreased
expenses, and it left him more at liberty. Darya Alexandrovna regarded
staying in the country for the summer as essential for the children,
especially for the little girl, who had not succeeded in regaining her
strength after the scarlatina, and also as a means of escaping the
petty humiliations, the little bills owing to the wood merchant, the
fishmonger, the shoemaker, which made her miserable. Besides this, she
was pleased to go away to the country because she was dreaming of
getting her sister Kitty to stay with her there. Kitty was to be
back from abroad in the middle of the summer, and bathing had been
prescribed for her. Kitty wrote that no prospect was so alluring as to
spend the summer with Dolly at Ergushovo, full of childhood
associations for both of them.
  The first days of her existence in the country were very hard for
Dolly. She used to stay in the country as a child, and the
impression she had retained of it was that the country was a refuge
from all the unpleasantness of the town, that life there, though not
luxurious- Dolly could easily make up her mind to that- was cheap
and comfortable; that there was plenty of everything, everything was
cheap, everything could be got, and children were happy. But now,
coming to the country as the head of a family, she perceived that it
was all utterly unlike what she had fancied.
  The day after their arrival there was a heavy fall of rain and in
the night the water came through in the corridor and in the nursery,
so that the beds had to be carried into the drawing room. There was no
kitchenmaid to be found; of the nine cows, it appeared from the
words of the cowherd woman that some were about to calve, others had
just calved, others were old, and others again hard-uddered; there was
neither butter nor milk enough even for the children. There were no
eggs. They could get no fowls; old, purplish, stringy roosters were
all they had for roasting and boiling. Impossible to get women to
scrub the floors- all were potato hoeing. Driving was out of the
question, because one of the horses was restive, and bolted in the
shafts. There was no place where they could bathe; the whole of the
riverbank was trampled by the cattle and open to the road; even
walks were impossible, for the cattle strayed into the garden
through a gap in the hedge, and there was one terrible bull, who
bellowed, and therefore might be expected to gore somebody. There were
no proper cupboards for their clothes; what cupboards there were
either would not close at all, or flew open whenever anyone passed
by them. There were no pots and kettles; there was no boiler in the
washhouse, nor even an ironing board in the maids' room.
  Finding instead of peace and rest all these, from her point of view,
fearful calamities, Darya Alexandrovna was at first in despair. She
exerted herself to the utmost, felt the hopelessness of the
position, and was every instant suppressing the tears that started
into her eyes. The bailiff, a retired quartermaster, whom Stepan
Arkadyevich had taken a fancy to and had appointed bailiff on
account of his handsome and respectful appearance as a hall porter,
showed no sympathy for Darya Alexandrovna's woes. He would say
respectfully, "Nothing can be done, the peasants are such a wretched
lot," and did nothing to help her.
  The position seemed hopeless. But in the Oblonskys' household, as in
all families indeed, there was one inconspicuous but most valuable and
useful person- Matriona Philimonovna. She soothed her mistress,
assured her that everything would come round (it was her expression,
and Matvei had borrowed it from her), and without fuss or hurry
proceeded to set to work herself.
  She had immediately made friends with the bailiff's wife, and on the
very first day she drank tea with her and the bailiff under the
acacias, and reviewed all the circumstances of the position. Very soon
Matriona Philimonovna had established her club, so to say, under the
acacias, and there it was, in this club, consisting of the bailiff's
wife, the village elder, and the countinghouse clerk, that the
difficulties of existence were gradually smoothed away, and in a
week's time everything actually had come round. The roof was mended, a
kitchenmaid was found- a crony of the village elder's- hens were
bought, the cows began giving milk, the garden hedge was stopped up
with stakes, the carpenter made a mangle, hooks were put in the
cupboards, and they ceased to fly open spontaneously and an ironing
board covered with army cloth was placed across from the arm of a
chair to the chest of drawers, and there was a smell of flatirons in
the maids' room.
  "Just see, now, and you were quite in despair," said Matriona
Philimonovna, pointing to the ironing board.
  They even rigged up a bathing shed of straw hurdles. Lily began to
bathe, and Darya Alexandrovna began to realize, if only in part, her
expectations, if not of a peaceful, at least of a comfortable, life in
the country. Peaceful with six children Darya Alexandrovna could not
be. One would fall ill, another might easily become so, a third
would be without something necessary, a fourth would show symptoms
of a bad disposition, and so on. Rare indeed were the brief periods of
peace. But these cares and anxieties were for Darya Alexandrovna the
sole happiness possible. Had it not been for them, she would have been
left alone to brood over her husband who did not love her. And
besides, hard though it was for the mother to bear the dread of
illness, the illnesses themselves, and the grief of seeing signs of
evil propensities in her children- the children themselves were even
now repaying her in small joys for her pains. Those joys were so small
that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments
she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but sand; but there were
good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but gold.
  Now, in the solitude of the country, she began to be more and more
frequently aware of those joys. Often, looking at them, she would make
every possible effort to persuade herself that she was mistaken,
that she as a mother was partial to her children. All the same, she
could not help saying to herself that she had charming children, all
six of them in different ways, but a set of children such as is not
often to be met with- and she was happy in them, and proud of them.
                             VIII.

  Toward the end of May, when everything had been more or less
satisfactorily arranged, she received her husband's answer to her
complaints of the disorganized state of things in the country. He
wrote begging her forgiveness for not having thought of everything
before, and promised to come down at the first chance. This chance did
not present itself, and till the beginning of June Darya
Alexandrovna stayed alone in the country.
  On the Sunday in St. Peter's week Darya Alexandrovna drove to mass
to have all her children take the sacrament. Darya Alexandrovna in her
intimate, philosophical talks with her sister, her mother, and her
friends very often astonished them by the freedom of her views in
regard to religion. She had a strange religion, all her own, of the
transmigration of souls, in which she had firm faith, troubling
herself little about the dogmas of the Church. But in her family she
was strict in carrying out all that was required by the Church- and
not merely in order to set an example, but with all her heart. The
fact that the children had not been at the sacrament for nearly a year
worried her extremely, and with the full approval and sympathy of
Matriona Philimonovna she decided that this should take place now,
in the summer.
  For several days before Darya Alexandrovna was busily deliberating
on how to dress all the children. Frocks were made, or altered and
washed, seams and flounces were let out, buttons were sewn on and
ribbons got ready. One dress, Tania's, which the English governess had
undertaken, cost Darya Alexandrovna much loss of temper. The English
governess in altering it had made the seams in the wrong place, had
taken up the sleeves too much, and altogether spoiled the dress. It
was so narrow on Tania's shoulders that it was quite painful to look
at her. But Matriona Philimonovna had the happy thought of putting
in gussets, and adding a little shoulder-cape. The dress was set
right, but there was nearly a quarrel with the English governess. In
the morning, however, all was happily arranged, and about nine
o'clock- the time at which they had asked the priest to wait for
them for the mass- the children in their new dresses stood with
beaming faces on the step before the carriage, waiting for their
mother.
  In the carriage, instead of the restive Raven, they had harnessed,
thanks to the representations of Matriona Philimonovna, the
bailiff's horse, Brownie, and Darya Alexandrovna, delayed by anxiety
over her own attire, came out and got in, dressed in a white muslin
gown.
  Darya Alexandrovna had done her hair, and dressed with care and
excitement. In the old days she had dressed for her own sake, to
look pretty and be admired; later on, as she got older, dress became
more and more distasteful to her; she saw that she was losing her good
looks. But now she began to feel pleasure and interest in dress again.
Now she did not dress for her own sake, nor for the sake of her own
beauty, but simply that, as the mother of those exquisite creatures,
she might not spoil the general effect. And looking at herself for the
last time in the looking glass she was satisfied with herself. She
looked well. Not as well as she wished to look in the old days, at a
ball, but well for the object she now had in view.
  In the church there was no one but the peasants, the servants, and
their womenfolk. But Darya Alexandrovna saw, or fancied she saw, the
sensation produced by her children and herself. The children were
not only beautiful to look at in their smart little dresses, but
they were charming in the way they behaved. Aliosha, it is true, did
not stand quite correctly; he kept turning round, trying to look at
his little jacket from behind; but all the same he was wonderfully
sweet. Tania behaved like a grown-up person, and looked after the
little ones. And the smallest, Lily, was bewitching in her naive
astonishment at everything, and it was difficult not to smile when,
after taking the sacrament, she said in English, "Please, some more."
  On the way home the children felt that something solemn had
happened, and were very sedate.
  Everything went happily at home too; but at lunch Grisha began
whistling, and, what was worse, was disobedient to the English
governess, and was forbidden to have any tart. Darya Alexandrovna
would not have let things go as far as the punishment on such a day
had she been present; but she had to support the English governess's
authority, and she upheld her decision that Grisha should have no
tart. This rather spoiled the general good humor.
  Grisha cried, declaring that Nikolinka had whistled too, yet was not
punished, and that he wasn't crying for the tart- he didn't care-
but at being unjustly treated. This was really too tragic, and Darya
Alexandrovna made up her mind to persuade the English governess to
forgive Grisha, and she went to speak to her. But on her way, as she
passed the drawing room, she beheld a scene, filling her heart with
such pleasure that the tears came into her eyes, and she forgave the
delinquent herself.
  The culprit was sitting at the window in the corner of the drawing
room; beside him was standing Tania with a plate. On the pretext of
wanting to give some dinner to her dolls, she had asked the
governess's permission to take her share of tart to the nursery, and
had taken it instead to her brother. While still weeping over the
injustice of his punishment, he was eating the tart, and kept saying
through his sobs, "Eat yourself; let's eat it together... together."
  Tania had at first been under the influence of her pity for
Grisha, then of a sense of her noble action, and tears were standing
in her eyes too; but she did not refuse, and ate her share.
  On catching sight of their mother they were dismayed, but, looking
into her face, they saw they were not doing wrong. They burst out
laughing, and, with their mouths full of tart, they began wiping their
smiling lips with their hands, and smearing their radiant faces all
over with tears and jam.
  "Mercy! Your new white frock- Tania! Grisha!" said their mother,
trying to save the frock, but with tears in her eyes, smiling a
blissful, rapturous smile.
  The new frocks were taken off, and orders were given for the
little girls to have their blouses put on, and the boys their old
jackets, and the wide droshky to be harnessed- with Brownie, to the
bailiff's annoyance, again in the shafts- to drive out for mushroom
picking and bathing. A roar of delighted shrieks arose in the nursery,
and never ceased till they had set off for the bathing place.
  They gathered a whole basketful of mushrooms; even Lily found a
birch mushroom. It had always happened before that Miss Hoole found
them and pointed them out to her; but this time she found a big one
quite by herself, and there was a general scream of delight; "Lily has
found a mushroom!"
  Then they reached the river, put the horses under the birch trees,
and went to the bathing place. The coachman, Terentii, hitched the
horses, who kept whisking away the horseflies, to a tree, and,
treading down the grass, lay down in the shade of a birch and smoked
his shag, while the never-ceasing shrieks of delight of the children
floated across to him from the bathing place.
  Though it was hard work to look after all the children and
restrain their pranks, though it was difficult, too, to keep one's
head and not mix up all the stockings, little breeches, and shoes
for the different legs, and to undo and to do up again all the tapes
and buttons, Darya Alexandrovna, who had always liked bathing herself,
and believed it to be very good for the children, enjoyed nothing so
much as bathing with all the children. To go over all those fat little
legs, pulling on their stockings, to take in her arms and dip those
little naked bodies, and to hear their screams of delight and alarm,
to see the breathless faces with wide-open, scared, and happy eyes
of all her splashing cherubs, was a great pleasure to her.
  When half the children had been dressed, some peasant women in
holiday dress, out picking herbs, came up to the bathing shed and
stopped shyly. Matriona Philimonovna called one of them and handed her
a sheet and a shirt that had dropped into the water for her to dry
them, and Darya Alexandrovna began to talk to the women. At first they
laughed behind their hands and did not understand her questions, but
soon they grew bolder and began to talk, winning Darya
Alexandrovna's heart at once by the genuine admiration of the children
that they showed.
  "My, what a beauty! As white as sugar," said one, admiring Tanechka,
and shaking her head, "but thin...."
  "Yes, she has been ill."
  "Lookee, they've been bathing him too," said another, pointing to
the breast baby.
  "No; he's only three months old," answered Darya Alexandrovna with
pride.
  "You see!"
  "And have you any children?"
  "I've had four; I've two living- a boy and a girl. I weaned her last
carnival."
  "How old is she?"
  "Why, more than one year old."
  "Why did you nurse her so long?"
  "It's our custom; for three fasts...."
  And the conversation became most interesting to Darya
Alexandrovna. What sort of time did she have? What was the matter with
the boy? Where was her husband? Did it often happen?
  Darya Alexandrovna felt disinclined to leave the peasant women, so
interesting to her was their conversation, so completely identical
were all their interests. What pleased her most of all was that she
saw clearly what all the women admired more than anything was her
having so many children, and such fine ones. The peasant women even
made Darya Alexandrovna laugh, and offended the English governess,
because she was the cause of the laughter she did not understand.
One of the younger women kept staring at the Englishwoman, who was
dressing after all the rest, and when she put on her third petticoat
she could not refrain from the remark, "My, she keeps putting on and
putting on, and she'll never have done!" she said, and they all went
off into peals of laughter.
                             IX.

  On the drive home, as Darya Alexandrovna, with all her children
round her, their heads still wet from their baths, and a kerchief tied
over her own head, was getting near the house, the coachman said:
"There's some gentleman coming: the master of Pokrovskoe, I do
believe."
  Darya Alexandrovna peeped out in front, and was delighted when she
recognized in the gray hat and gray coat the familiar figure of
Levin walking to meet them. She was glad to see him at any time, but
at this moment she was specially glad he should see her in all her
glory. No one was better able to appreciate her grandeur than Levin.
  Seeing her, he found himself face to face with one of the pictures
of his daydream of family life.
  "You're like a hen with your brood, Darya Alexandrovna."
  "Ah, how glad I am to see you!" she said, holding out her hand to
him.
  "Glad to see me- but you didn't let me know. My brother's staying
with me. I got a note from Stiva that you were here."
  "From Stiva?" Darya Alexandrovna asked with surprise.
  "Yes; he writes that you are here, and that he thinks you might
allow me to be of use to you," said Levin, and as he said it he became
suddenly embarrassed, and, stopping abruptly, he walked on in
silence by the droshky, snapping off the buds of the lime trees and
nibbling them. He was embarrassed through a sense that Darya
Alexandrovna would be annoyed by receiving from an outsider help
that should by rights have come from her own husband. Darya
Alexandrovna certainly did not like this little way of Stepan
Arkadyevich's of foisting his domestic duties on others. And she was
at once aware that Levin was aware of this. It was just for this
fineness of perception, for this delicacy, that Darya Alexandrovna
liked Levin.
  "I know, of course," said Levin, "that this simply means that you
would like to see me, and I'm exceedingly glad. Though I can fancy
that, used to town housekeeping as you are, you must feel you are in
the wilds here, and if there's anything wanted, I'm altogether at your
disposal."
  "Oh, no!" said Dolly. "At first things were rather uncomfortable,
but now we've settled everything capitally- thanks to my old nurse,"
she said, indicating Matriona Philimonovna, who, seeing that they were
speaking of her, smiled brightly and cordially to Levin. She knew him,
and knew that he would be a good match for her young lady, and was
very keen to see the matter settled.
  "Won't you get in, sir, we'll make room on this side!" she said to
him.
  "No, I'll walk. Children, who'd like to race the horses with me?"
  The children knew Levin very little, and could not remember when
they had seen him, but they experienced in regard to him none of
that strange feeling of shyness and hostility which children so
often experience toward hypocritical, grown-up people, and for which
they are so often and miserably punished. Hypocrisy in anything
whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the
least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it,
however ingeniously it may be disguised. Whatever faults Levin had,
there was not a trace of hypocrisy in him, and so the children
showed him the same friendliness that they saw in their mother's face.
On his invitation, the two elder ones at once jumped out to him and
ran with him as simply as they would have done with their nurse, or
Miss Hoole, or their mother. Lily, too, began begging to go to him,
and her mother handed her over to him; he sat her on his shoulder
and ran along with her.
  "Don't be afraid, don't be afraid, Darya Alexandrovna!" he said,
smiling good-humoredly to the mother; "there's no chance of my hurting
or dropping her."
  And, looking at his strong, agile, assiduously careful and extremely
strained movements, the mother felt her mind at rest, and smiled gaily
and approvingly as she watched him.
  Here, in the country, with children, and with Darya Alexandrovna,
with whom he was in sympathy, Levin was in a mood not infrequent
with him, of childlike lightheartedness that she particularly liked in
him. As he ran with the children, he taught them gymnastic feats,
set Miss Hoole laughing with his queer English accent, and talked to
Darya Alexandrovna of his pursuits in the country.
  After dinner, Darya Alexandrovna, sitting alone with him on the
balcony, began to speak of Kitty.
  "You know, Kitty's coming here, and is going to spend the summer
with me."
  "Really," he said, flushing; and at once, to change the
conversation, he said: "Then I'll send you two cows, shall I? If you
insist on a bill you shall pay me five roubles a month- if you
aren't ashamed."
  "No, thank you. We can manage very well now."
  "Oh, well, then, I'll have a look at your cows, and if you'll
allow me, I'll give directions about their food. Everything depends on
their food."
  And Levin, to turn the conversation, explained to Darya Alexandrovna
the theory of cowkeeping, based on the principle that the cow is
simply a machine for the transformation of food into milk, and so on.
  He talked of this, and passionately longed to hear more of Kitty,
and, at the same time, was afraid of hearing it. He dreaded the
breaking up of the inward peace he had gained with such effort.
  "Yes, but still all this has to be looked after, and who is there to
look after it?" Darya Alexandrovna responded reluctantly.
  She had by now got her household matters so satisfactorily arranged,
thanks to Matriona Philimonovna, that she was disinclined to make
any change in them; besides, she had no faith in Levin's knowledge
of farming. General principles, as to the cow being a machine for
the production of milk, she looked on with suspicion. It seemed to her
that such principles could only be a hindrance in farm management.
It all seemed to her a far simpler matter: all that was needed, as
Matriona Philimonovna had explained, was to give Brindle and
Whitebreast more food and drink, and not to let the cook carry all the
kitchen slops to the laundrymaid's cow. That was clear. But general
propositions as to feeding on meal and on grass were doubtful and
obscure. And, what was most important, she wanted to talk about Kitty.
                             X.

  "Kitty writes to me that there's nothing she longs for so much as
quiet and solitude," Dolly said after the silence that had followed.
  "And how is she- better?" Levin asked in agitation.
  "Thank God, she's quite well again. I never believed her lungs
were affected."
  "Oh, I'm very glad!" said Levin, and Dolly fancied she saw something
touching, helpless, in his face as he said this and looked silently
into her face.
  "Let me ask you, Konstantin Dmitrievich," said Darya Alexandrovna,
smiling her kindly and rather mocking smile, "why are you angry with
Kitty?"
  "I? I'm not angry with her," said Levin.
  "Yes, you are. Why was it you did not come to see us or them when
you were in Moscow?"
  "Darya Alexandrovna," he said, blushing up to the roots of his hair,
"I wonder really that with your kind heart you don't feel this. How it
is you feel no pity for me, if nothing else, when you know..."
  "What do I know?"
  "You know that I proposed and was refused," said Levin, and all
the tenderness he had been feeling for Kitty a minute before was
replaced by a feeling of anger for the slight he had suffered.
  "What makes you suppose I know?"
  "Because everybody knows it...."
  "That's just where you are mistaken; I did not know it, though I had
guessed it was so."
  "Well, now you know it."
  "All I knew was that something had happened that made her dreadfully
miserable, and that she begged me never to speak of it. And if she
would not tell me, she would certainly not speak of it to anyone else.
But what did pass between you? Tell me."
  "I have told you."
  "When was it?"
  "When I was at their house the last time."
  "Do you know," said Darya Alexandrovna, "I am awfully, awfully sorry
for her. You suffer only from pride...."
  "Perhaps so," said Levin, "but..."
  She interrupted him.
  "But she, poor girl... I am awfully, awfully sorry for her. Now I
see it all."
  "Well, Darya Alexandrovna, you must excuse me," he said, getting up.
"Good-by, Darya Alexandrovna, till we meet again."
  "No, wait a minute," she said, clutching him by the sleeve. "Wait
a minute, sit down."
  "Please, please, don't let us talk of this," he said, sitting
down, and at the same time feeling rise up and stir within his heart a
hope he had believed to be buried.
  "If I did not like you," she said, and tears came into her eyes; "if
I did not know you, as I do know you..."
  The feeling that had seemed dead revived more and more, rose up
and took possession of Levin's heart.
  "Yes, I understand it all now," said Darya Alexandrovna. "You
can't understand it; for you men, who are free and make your own
choice, it's always clear whom you love. But a girl's in a position of
suspense, with all a woman's or maiden's modesty, a girl who sees
you men from afar, who takes everything on trust- a girl may have, and
often has, such a feeling that she cannot tell what to say."
  "Yes, if the heart does not speak...."
  "No, the heart does speak; but just consider: you men have views
about a girl, you come to the house, you make friends, you
criticize, you wait to see if you have found what you love, and
then, when you are sure you love her, you propose..."
  "Well, that's not quite it."
  "Anyway you propose, when your love is ripe, or when the balance has
completely turned between the two you are choosing from. But a girl is
not asked. She is expected to make her choice, and yet she cannot
choose- she can only answer 'yes' or 'no.'"
  "Yes, to choose between me and Vronsky," thought Levin, and the dead
thing that had come to life within him died again, and only weighed on
his heart and set it aching.
  "Darya Alexandrovna," he said, "that's how one chooses a new
dress, or some purchase or other- not love. The choice has been
made, and so much the better.... And there can be no repetition."
  "Ah, pride, pride!" said Darya Alexandrovna, as though despising him
for the baseness of this feeling in comparison with that other feeling
which only women know. "At the time when you proposed to Kitty she was
just in a position in which she could not answer. She was in doubt.
Doubt between you and Vronsky. Him she was seeing every day, and you
she had not seen for a long while. Supposing she had been older...
I, for instance, in her place, could have felt no doubt. I always
disliked him, and my dislike proved to be justified."
  Levin recalled Kitty's answer. She had said: "No, that cannot
be...."
  "Darya Alexandrovna," he said dryly, "I appreciate your confidence
in me; I believe you are making a mistake. But whether I am right or
wrong, that pride you so despise makes any thought of Katerina
Alexandrovna out of the question for me; you understand- utterly out
of the question."
  "I will only say one thing more: you know that I am speaking of my
sister, whom I love as I love my own children. I don't say she cared
for you; all I meant to say is that her refusal at that moment
proves nothing."
  "I don't know!" said Levin, jumping up. "you only knew how you are
hurting me. It's just as if a child of yours were dead, and they
were to say to you: He would have been like this and like that, and he
might have lived, and how happy you would have been in him. But he's
dead, dead, dead!..."
  "How absurd you are!" said Darya Alexandrovna, looking with mournful
tenderness at Levin's excitement. "Yes, I see it all more and more
clearly," she went on musingly. "So you won't come to see us, then,
when Kitty's here?"
  "No, I shan't come. Of course I won't avoid meeting Katerina
Alexandrovna; but, as far as I can, I will try to save her the
annoyance of my presence."
  "You are very, very absurd," repeated Darya Alexandrovna, looking
with tenderness into his face. "Very well then, let it be as though we
had not spoken of this. What have you come for, Tania?" she said in
French to the little girl who had come in.
  "Where's my spade, mamma?"
  "I speak French, and you must too."
  The little girl tried to say it in French, but could not remember
the French for spade; the mother prompted her, and then told her in
French where to look for the spade. And this made a disagreeable
impression on Levin.
  Everything in Darya Alexandrovna's house and children struck him now
as by no means so charming as a little while before.
  "And why does she talk French with the children?" he thought. "How
unnatural and false it is! And the children feel it so: Learning
French and unlearning sincerity," he thought to himself, unaware
that Darya Alexandrovna had thought all that over twenty times
already, and yet, even at the cost of some loss of sincerity, believed
it necessary to teach her children French in that way.
  "But why are you going? Do stay a little."
  Levin stayed to tea; but his good humor had vanished, and he felt
ill at ease.
  After tea he went out into the hall to order his horses to be put
in, and, when he came back, he found Darya Alexandrovna greatly
disturbed, with a troubled face, and tears in her eyes. While Levin
had been outside, an incident had occurred which had all at once
shattered all the happiness she had been feeling that day, and her
pride in her children. Grisha and Tania had been fighting over a ball.
Darya Alexandrovna, hearing a scream in the nursery, ran in and saw
a terrible sight. Tania was pulling Grisha's hair, while he, with a
face hideous with rage, was beating her with his fists wherever he
could get at her. Something snapped in Darya Alexandrovna's heart when
she saw this. It was as if darkness had swooped down upon her life;
she felt that these children of hers, that she was so proud of, were
not merely most ordinary, but positively bad, ill-bred children,
with coarse, brutal propensities- wicked children.
  She could not talk or think of anything else, and she could not help
speaking to Levin of her misery.
  Levin saw she was unhappy and tried to comfort her, saying that it
showed nothing bad, that all children fight; but, even as he said
it, he was thinking in his heart: "No, I won't be artificial and
talk French with my children; but my children won't be like that.
All one has to do is not spoil children, not to distort their
nature, and they'll be delightful. No, my children won't be like
that."
  He said good-by and drove away, and she did not try to detain him.
                             XI.

  In the middle of July the elder of the village on Levin's sister's
estate, about twenty verstas from Pokrovskoe, came to Levin to
report about the hay, and how things were going there. The chief
source of income on his sister's estate was from the water meadows. In
former years the hay had been bought by the peasants for twenty
roubles the dessiatina. When Levin took over the management of the
estate, he thought on examining the grasslands that they were worth
more, and he fixed the price at twenty-five roubles the dessiatina.
The peasants would not give that price, and, as Levin suspected,
kept off other purchasers. Then Levin had driven over himself, and
arranged to have the grass cut, partly by hired labor, partly at a
payment of a certain proportion of the crop. The peasants of this
village put every hindrance they could in the way of this new
arrangement, but it was carried out, and the first year the meadows
had yielded a profit almost double. Two years ago and the previous
year the peasants had maintained the same opposition to the
arrangement, and the hay had been cut on the same system. This year
the peasants were doing all the mowing for a third of the hay crop,
and the village elder had come now to announce that the hay had been
cut, and that, fearing rain, he had invited the countinghouse clerk
over, had divided the crop in his presence, and had raked together
eleven stacks as the owner's share. From the vague answers to his
question how much hay had been cut on the principal meadow, from the
hurry of the village elder who had made the division, without asking
leave, from the whole tone of the peasant, Levin perceived that
there was something wrong in the division of the hay, and made up
his mind to drive over himself to look into the matter.
  Arriving by dinnertime at the village, and leaving his horse at
the cottage of an old friend of his, the husband of his brother's
wet nurse, Levin went to see the old man in his beehouse, wanting to
find out from him the truth about the hay. Parmenich, a talkative,
comely old man, gave Levin a very warm welcome, showed him all he
was doing, told him everything about his bees and the swarms of that
year; but gave vague and unwilling answers to Levin's inquiries
about the mowing. This confirmed Levin still more in his suspicions.
He went to the hayfields and examined the stacks. The haystacks
could not possibly contain fifty wagonloads each, and to convict the
peasants Levin ordered the wagons that had carried the hay to be
brought up directly, to lift one stack, and carry it into the barn.
There turned out to be only thirty-two loads in the stack. In spite of
the village elder's assertions about the compressibility of hay, and
its having settled down in the stacks, and his swearing that
everything had been done in fear of God, Levin stuck to his point that
the hay had been divided without his orders, and that, therefore, he
would not accept that hay as fifty loads to a stack. After a prolonged
dispute the matter was decided by the peasants taking, as their share,
these eleven stacks, reckoning them as fifty loads each, and
apportioning the owner's share anew. The arguments and the division of
the haycocks lasted the whole afternoon. When the last of the hay
had been divided, Levin, entrusting the superintendence of the rest to
the countinghouse clerk, sat down on a haycock marked off by a stake
of willow, and looked admiringly at the meadow swarming with peasants.
  In front of him, in the bend of the river beyond the little marsh,
moved a bright-colored line of peasant women, merrily chattering
with their ringing voices, and the scattered hay was being rapidly
formed into gray winding rows over the pale green aftermath. After the
women came the men with pitchforks, and from the gray rows there
were growing up broad, high, soft haycocks. To the left telegas were
rumbling over the meadow that had been already cleared, and one
after another the haycocks vanished, flung up in huge forkfuls, and in
their place there were rising heavy cartloads of fragrant hay
hanging over the horses' hindquarters.
  "What weather for haying! What hay it'll be!" said an old man,
squatting down beside Levin. "It's tea, not hay It's like scattering
grain to the ducks, the way they pick it up!" he added, pointing to
the growing haycocks. "Since dinnertime they've carried a good half of
it."
  "The last load, eh?" he shouted to a young peasant, who drove by,
standing in the front of an empty telega box, shaking the reins of
hemp.
  "The last, dad!" the lad shouted back, pulling in the horse, and,
smiling, he looked round at a bright, rosy-cheeked peasant girl who
sat in the telega box, smiling too, and drove on.
  "Who's that? Your son?" asked Levin.
  "My dear youngest," said the old man with a tender smile.
  "What a fine fellow!"
  "The lad's all right."
  "Married already?"
  "Yes, it's two years last St. Philip's day."
  "Any children?"
  "Children, indeed! Why, for over a year he was innocent as a babe
himself, and bashful too," answered the old man. "What hay this is!
It's tea indeed!" he repeated, wishing to change the subject.
  Levin looked more attentively at Vanka Parmenov and his wife. They
were loading a haycock onto the wagon not far from him. Ivan
Parmenov was standing on the wagon, taking, laying in place, and
stamping down the huge bundles of hay, which his pretty young wife
deftly handed up to him, at first in armfuls, and then on the
pitchfork. The young wife worked easily, merrily, and deftly. The
close-packed hay did not once break away by her fork. First she tedded
it, stuck the fork into it, then with a rapid, supple movement
leaned the whole weight of her body on it, and at once with a bend
of her back under the red belt she drew herself up, and arching her
full bosom under the long white apron, with a deft turn swung the fork
in her arms, and flung the bundle of hay high onto the wagon. Ivan,
obviously doing his best to save her every minute of unnecessary
labor, made haste, opening wide his arms to clutch the bundle and
lay it in the wagon. As she raked together what was left of the hay,
the young wife shook off the bits of hay that had fallen on her
neck, and, arranging the red kerchief that was gone backward baring
her white brow, not browned by the sun, she crept under the wagon to
tie up the load. Ivan directed her how to fasten the cord to the
crosspiece, and at something she said he laughed aloud. In the
expressions of both faces was to be seen vigorous, young, freshly
awakened love.
                             XII.

  The load was tied on. Ivan jumped down and took the quiet, sleek
horse by the bridle. The young wife flung the rake up on the load;
with a bold step, swinging her arms, she went to join the women, who
were forming a ring for the haymakers' dance. Ivan drove off to the
road and fell into line with the other loaded wagons. The peasant
women, with their rakes on their shoulders, gay with bright flowers,
and chattering with ringing, merry voices, walked behind the hay
wagon. One wild untrained female voice broke into a song, and sang
it alone through a verse, and then the same verse was unanimously
taken up and repeated by half a hundred strong healthy voices, of
all sorts, coarse and fine.
  The women, all singing, began to come close to Levin, and he felt as
though a storm were swooping down upon him with a thunder of
merriment. The storm swooped down, enveloped him and the haycock on
which he was lying, and the other haycocks, and wagonloads, and the
whole meadow and distant fields all seemed to be shaking and singing
to the measures of this wild merry song, with its shouts and
whistles and clapping. Levin felt envious of this health and
mirthfulness; he longed to take part in the expression of this joy
of life. But he could do nothing, and had to lie and look on and
listen. When the peasants, with their singing, had vanished out of
sight and hearing, a weary feeling of despondency at his own
isolation, his physical inactivity, his alienation from this world,
came over Levin.
  Some of the very peasants who had been most active in wrangling with
him over the hay, some whom he had treated with contumely, and who had
tried to cheat him- those very peasants had greeted him
good-humoredly, and evidently had not, were incapable of having, any
feeling of rancor against him, any regret, any recollection even of
having tried to deceive him. All that was drowned in a sea of merry
common labor. God gave the day, God gave the strength. And the day and
the strength were consecrated to labor, and that labor was its own
reward. For whom the labor? What would be its fruits? These were
idle considerations- beside the point.
  Often Levin had admired this life, often he had a sense of envy of
the men who led this life; but today, for the first time, especially
under the influence of what he had seen in the attitude of Ivan
Parmenov to his young wife, the idea presented itself definitely to
his mind that it was in his power to exchange the dreary,
artificial, idle, and individualistic life he was leading for this
laborious, pure, and generally delightful life.
  The old man who had been sitting beside him had long ago gone
home; the people had all gone their different ways. Those who lived
near had gone home, while those who came from afar were gathered
into a group for supper, and to spend the night in the meadow.
Levin, unobserved by the peasants, still lay on the haycock, and still
looked on, and listened, and mused. The peasants who remained for
the night in the meadow scarcely slept all the short summer night.
At first there was the sound of merry talk and general laughing over
the supper, then singing again, and laughter.
  All the long day of toil had left no trace in them save lightness of
heart. Before the early dawn all was hushed. Nothing was to be heard
but the night sounds of the frogs that never ceased in the marsh,
and the horses snorting in the mist that rose over the meadow before
morning. Rousing himself, Levin got up from the haycock, and,
looking at the stars, he saw that the night was over.
  "Well, what am I going to do? How am I to set about it?" he said
to himself, trying to express to himself all the thoughts and feelings
he had passed through in this brief night. All the thoughts and
feelings he had passed through fell into three separate trains of
thought. One was the renunciation of his old life, of his utterly
useless education. This renunciation gave him satisfaction, and was
easy and simple. Another series of thoughts and mental images
related to the life he longed to live now. The simplicity, the purity,
the sanity of this life he felt clearly, and he was convinced he would
find in it its content, its peace, and its dignity, of the lack of
which he was so miserably conscious. But a third series of ideas
turned upon the question of how to effect this transition from the old
life to the new. And there nothing took clear shape for him. "A
wife. Work and the necessity of work. Leave Pokrovskoe? Buy land?
Become a member of a peasant community? Marry a peasant girl? How am I
to set about it?" he asked himself again, and could not find an
answer. "I haven't slept all night, though, and I can't think it out
clearly," he said to himself. "I'll work it out later. One thing's
certain- this night has decided my fate. All my old dreams of home
life were absurd, not the real thing," he told himself. "It's all ever
so much simpler and better...."
  "How beautiful!" he thought, looking at the strange, as it were,
mother-of-pearl shell of white fleecy cloudlets resting right over his
head in the middle of the sky. "How exquisite it all is in this
exquisite night! And when was there time for that cloud shell to form?
Just now I looked at the sky, and there was nothing in it- only two
white streaks. Yes, and so imperceptibly, too, my views of life
changed!"
  He went out of the meadow and walked along the highroad toward the
village. A slight wind arose, and the sky looked gray and sullen.
The gloomy moment had come that usually precedes the dawn, the full
triumph of light over darkness.
  Shrinking from the cold, Levin walked rapidly, looking at the
ground. "What's that? Someone coming," he thought, catching the tinkle
of bells, and lifting his head. Forty paces from him a carriage and
four with the luggage on its top was driving toward him along the
grassy highroad on which he was walking. The shaft horses were
tilted against the shafts by the ruts, but the dexterous driver
sitting on the box held the shaft over the ruts, so that the wheels
ran on the smooth part of the road.
  This was all Levin noticed, and without wondering who it could be,
he gazed absently at the coach.
  In the coach was an old lady dozing in one corner, and at the
window, evidently only just awake, sat a young girl holding in both
hands the ribbons of a white cap. With a face full of light and
thought, full of a subtle, complex inner life, that was remote from
Levin, she was gazing from the window at the glow of the sunrise.
  At the very instant when this apparition was vanishing, the truthful
eyes glanced at him. She recognized him, and her face lighted up
with wondering delight.
  He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in all
the world. There was only one creature in the world that could
concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was
she. It was Kitty. He comprehended that she was driving to Ergushovo
from the railway station. And everything that had been stirring
Levin during this sleepless night, all the resolutions he had made,
all vanished at once. He recalled with horror his dreams of marrying a
peasant girl. There only, in this carriage that had crossed over to
the other side of the road, and was rapidly disappearing- there only
could he find the solution of the riddle of his life, which had
weighed so agonizingly upon him of late.
  She did not look out again. The sound of the carriage springs was no
longer audible, the bells could scarcely be heard. The barking of dogs
showed the carriage had reached the village, and all that was left was
the empty fields all round, the village in front, and he himself
isolated and apart from it all, wandering lonely along the deserted
highroad.
  He glanced at the sky, expecting to find there the cloud shell he
had been admiring and taking as the symbol of the ideas and feelings
of that night. There was nothing in the sky in the least like a shell.
There, in the remote heights above, a mysterious change had been
accomplished. There was no trace of a shell, and there was stretched
over fully half the sky an even cover of tiny, and ever tinier,
cloudlets. The sky had grown blue and bright; and with the same
softness, but with the same remoteness, it met his questioning gaze.
  "No," he said to himself, "however good that life of simplicity
and toil may be, I cannot go back to it. I love her."
                             XIII.

  None but those who were most intimate with Alexei Alexandrovich knew
that, while on the surface the coldest and most rational of men, he
had one weakness quite opposed to the general trend of his
character. Alexei Alexandrovich could not hear or see a child or woman
crying without being moved. The sight of tears threw him into a
state of nervous agitation, and he utterly lost all power of
reflection. The head clerk of his board and the secretary were aware
of this, and used to warn women who came with petitions on no
account to give way to tears, if they did not want to ruin their
chances. "He will get angry, and will not listen to you," they used to
say. And, as a fact, in such cases the emotional disturbance set up in
Alexei Alexandrovich by the sight of tears found expression in hasty
anger. "I can do nothing. Kindly leave the room!" he would usually
shout in such cases.
  When, returning from the races, Anna had informed him of her
relations with Vronsky, and immediately afterward had burst into
tears, hiding her face in her hands, Alexei Alexandrovich, for all the
fury aroused in him against her, was aware at the same time of a
rush of that emotional disturbance always produced in him by tears.
Conscious of it, and conscious that any expression of his feelings
at that minute would be out of keeping with the situation, he tried to
suppress every manifestation of life in himself, and so neither
stirred nor looked at her. This was what had caused that strange
expression of deathlike rigidity in his face which had so impressed
Anna.
  When they reached the house he helped her to get out of the
carriage, and, making an effort to master himself, took leave of her
with his usual urbanity, and uttered that phrase that bound him to
nothing; he said that tomorrow he would let her know his decision.
  His wife's words, confirming his worst suspicions, had sent a
cruel pang to the heart of Alexei Alexandrovich. That pang was
intensified by the strange feeling of physical pity for her engendered
by her tears. But when he was all alone in the carriage Alexei
Alexandrovich, to his surprise and delight, felt complete relief
both from this pity and from the doubts and agonies of jealousy.
  He experienced the sensations of a man who has had a tooth out after
suffering long from toothache. After a fearful agony and a sense of
something huge, bigger than the head itself, being torn out of his
jaw, the sufferer, hardly able to believe in his own good luck,
feels all at once that what has so long envenomed his existence and
enchained his attention, exists no longer, and that he can live and
think again, and take an interest in other things besides his tooth.
This feeling Alexei Alexandrovich was experiencing. The agony had been
strange and terrible, but now it was over; he felt that he could
live again and think of something other than his wife.
  "No honor, no heart, no religion; a corrupt woman. I always knew
it and always saw it, though I tried to deceive myself to spare
her," he said to himself. And it actually seemed to him that he always
had seen it: he recalled incidents of their past life, in which he had
never seen anything wrong before- now these incidents proved clearly
that she had always been a corrupt woman. "I made a mistake in linking
my life to hers; but there was nothing wrong in my mistake, and so I
cannot be unhappy. It's not I who am to blame," he told himself,
"but she. But I have nothing to do with her. She does not exist for
me."
  All that would befall her and her son, toward whom his sentiments
were as much changed as toward her, ceased to interest him. The only
thing that interested him now was the question in what way he could
best, with most propriety and comfort for himself, and so with most
justice, shake clear the mud with which she had spattered him in her
fall, and then proceed along his path of active, honorable, and useful
existence.
  "I cannot be made unhappy by the fact that a contemptible woman
has committed a crime. I have only to find the best way out of the
difficult position in which she has placed me. And I shall find it,"
he said to himself, frowning more and more. "I'm neither the first nor
the last." And to say nothing of historical instances dating from
Menelaus, recently revived in the memory of all by La Belle Helene,
a whole list of contemporary examples of husbands with unfaithful
wives in the highest society rose before Alexei Alexandrovich's
imagination. "Daryalov, Poltavsky, Prince Karibanov, Count Paskudin,
Dram... Yes, even Dram... such an honest, capable fellow...
Semionov, Chagin, Sigonin," Alexei Alexandrovich remembered.
"Admitting that a certain quite irrational ridicule falls to the lot
of these men, yet I never saw anything but a misfortune in it, and
always felt sympathy for it," Alexei Alexandrovich said to himself,
though indeed this was not the fact, and he had never felt sympathy
for misfortunes of that kind, but the more often he had heard of
instances of unfaithful wives betraying their husbands, the more
highly he had thought of himself. "It is a misfortune which may befall
anyone. And this misfortune has befallen me. The only thing to be done
is to make the best of the situation." And he began passing in
review the methods of proceeding of men who had been in the same
position that he was in.
  "Daryalov fought a duel...."
  The duel had particularly fascinated the thoughts of Alexei
Alexandrovich in his youth, just because he was physically a
fainthearted man, and was himself well aware of the fact. Alexei
Alexandrovich could not without horror contemplate the idea of a
pistol aimed at himself, and never made use of any weapon in his life.
This horror had in his youth set him often pondering on dueling, and
picturing himself in a position in which he would have to expose his
life to danger. Having attained success and an established position in
the world, he had long ago forgotten this feeling; but the habitual
bent of feeling reasserted itself, and dread of his own cowardice
proved even now so strong that Alexei Alexandrovich spent a long while
thinking over the question of dueling in all its aspects, and
hugging the idea of a duel, though he was fully aware beforehand
that he would never under any circumstances fight one.
  "There's no doubt our society is still so barbarous (it's not the
same in England) that very many"- and among these were those whose
opinion Alexei Alexandrovich particularly valued- "look favorably on
the duel; but what result is attained by it? Suppose I call him
out," Alexei Alexandrovich went on to himself, and vividly picturing
the night he would spend after the challenge, and the pistol aimed
at him, he shuddered, and knew that he never would do it- "suppose I
call him out. Suppose I am taught," he went on musing, "I am placed, I
press the trigger," he said to himself, closing his eyes, "and it
turns out I have killed him," Alexei Alexandrovich said to himself,
and he shook his head as though to dispel such silly ideas. "What
sense is there in murdering a man in order to define one's relation to
a guilty wife and son? I should still have to decide what I ought to
do with her. But what is more probable, and what would doubtlessly
occur- I should be killed or wounded. I, the innocent person, should
be the victim- killed or wounded. It's even more senseless. But, apart
from that, a challenge to fight would be an act hardly honest on my
side. Don't I know beforehand that my friends would never allow me
to fight a duel- would never allow the life of a statesman, needed
by Russia, to be exposed to danger? What would come of it? It would
come of it that, knowing beforehand that the matter would never come
to real danger, it would amount to my simply trying to gain a
certain sham reputation by such a challenge. That would be
dishonest, that would be false, that would be deceiving myself and
others. A duel is quite impossible, and no one expects it of me. My
aim is simply to safeguard my reputation, which is essential for the
uninterrupted pursuit of my public duties." Official duties, which had
always been of great consequence in Alexei Alexandrovich's eyes,
seemed of special importance to his mind at this moment.
  Considering and rejecting the duel, Alexei Alexandrovich turned to
divorce- another solution selected by several of the husbands he
remembered. Passing in mental review all the instances he knew of
divorces (there were plenty of them in the very highest society with
which he was very familiar), Alexei Alexandrovich could not find a
single example in which the object of divorce was that which he had in
view. In all these instances the husband had practically ceded or sold
his unfaithful wife, and the very party who, being in fault, had not
the right to contract a marriage, had formed counterfeit,
pseudo-matrimonial ties with a new husband. In his own case, Alexei
Alexandrovich saw that a legal divorce, that is to say, one in which
only the guilty wife would be repudiated, was impossible of
attainment. He saw that the complex conditions of the life they led
made the coarse proofs of his wife's guilt, required by the law, out
of the question; he saw that a certain refinement in that life would
not admit of such proofs being brought forward, even if he had them,
and that to bring forward such proofs would damage him in the public
estimation more than it would her.
  An attempt at divorce could lead to nothing but a public scandal,
which would be a perfect godsend to his enemies for calumny and
attacks on his high position in society. His chief object, to define
the position with the least amount of disturbance possible, would
not be attained by divorce either. Moreover, in the event of
divorce, or even of an attempt to obtain a divorce, it was obvious
that the wife broke off all relations with the husband and threw in
her lot with the lover. And, in spite of the complete, as he supposed,
contempt and indifference he now felt for his wife, at the bottom of
his heart Alexei Alexandrovich still had one feeling left in regard to
her- a disinclination to see her free to throw in her lot with
Vronsky, so that her crime would be to her advantage. The mere
notion of this so exasperated Alexei Alexandrovich, that directly it
rose to his mind he groaned with inward agony, and got up and
changed his place in the carriage, and for a long while after he sat
with scowling brows, wrapping his numbed and bony legs in the fleecy
rug.
  "Apart from formal divorce, one might still do as Karibanov,
Paskudin, and that good fellow Dram did- that is, separate from
one's wife," he went on thinking, when he had regained his
composure. But this step too presented the same drawback of public
scandal as a divorce, and, what was more, a separation, quite as
much as a regular divorce, flung his wife into the arms of Vronsky.
"No, it's out of the question, out of the question!" he said aloud,
twisting his rug about him again. "I cannot be unhappy, but neither
she nor he ought to be happy."
  The feeling of jealousy, which had tortured him during the period of
uncertainty, had passed away at the instant when, with agony, the
tooth had been extracted by his wife's words. But that feeling had
been replaced by another- the desire, not merely that she should not
triumph, but that she should get due punishment for her crime. He
did not acknowledge this feeling, but at the bottom of his heart he
longed for her to suffer for having destroyed his peace of mind, and
having dishonored him. And once again going over the conditions
inseparable from a duel, a divorce, a separation, and once again
rejecting them, Alexei Alexandrovich felt convinced that there was
only one solution- to keep her with him, concealing what had
happened from the world, and using every measure in his power to break
off the intrigue, and still more- though this he did not admit to
himself- to punish her. "I must communicate to her my decision;
that, thinking over the terrible position in which she has placed
her family, all other solutions will be worse for both sides than an
external status quo, and that such I agree to retain, on the strict
condition of obedience on her part to my wishes- that is to say,
cessation of all intercourse with her lover." When this decision had
been finally adopted, another weighty consideration occurred to Alexei
Alexandrovich in support of it. "By such a course only shall I be
acting in accordance with the dictates of religion," he told
himself. "In adopting this course, I am not casting off a guilty wife,
but giving her a chance of amendment; and, indeed, difficult as the
task will be to me, I shall devote part of my energies to her
reformation and salvation." Though Alexei Alexandrovich was
perfectly aware that he could not exert any moral influence over his
wife, that such an attempt at reformation could lead to nothing but
falsity; though in passing through these difficult moments he had
not once thought of seeking guidance in religion; yet now, when his
conclusion corresponded, as it seemed to him, with the requirements of
religion, this religious sanction to his decision gave him complete
satisfaction, and to some extent restored his peace of mind. He was
pleased to think that, even in such an important crisis in life, no
one would be able to say that he had not acted in accordance with
the principles of that religion whose banner he had always held
aloft amid the general coolness and indifference. As he pondered
over subsequent developments, Alexei Alexandrovich did not see,
indeed, why his relations with his wife should not remain
practically the same as before. No doubt, she could never regain his
esteem, but there was not, and there could not be, any sort of
reason why his existence should be troubled, and why he should
suffer because she was a bad and faithless wife. "Yes, time will pass-
time, which arranges all things; and the old relations will be
reestablished," Alexei Alexandrovich told himself; so far
reestablished, that is, that I shall not be sensible of a break in the
continuity of my life. She is bound to be unhappy, but I am not to
blame, and so I cannot be unhappy."
                             XIV.

  As he neared Peterburg, Alexei Alexandrovich not only adhered
entirely to his decision, but was even composing in his head the
letter he would write to his wife. Going into the hall Alexei
Alexandrovich glanced at the letters and papers brought from his
Ministry and directed that they should be brought to him in his study.
  "The horses can be taken out, and I will see no one," he said in
answer to the porter, with a certain pleasure, indicative of his
agreeable frame of mind, emphasizing the words, "see no one."
  In his study Alexei Alexandrovich walked up and down twice, and
stopped at an immense writing table, on which six candles had
already been lighted by the valet who had preceded him. He cracked his
knuckles, and sat down, sorting out his writing appurtenances. Putting
his elbows on the table, he bent his head on one side, thought a
minute, and began to write, without pausing for a second. He wrote
without using any form of address to her, and wrote in French,
making use of the plural "vous," which has not the same note of
coldness as the corresponding Russian form.

  "At our last conversation, I notified you of my intention of
communicating to you my decision in regard to the subject of that
conversation. Having carefully considered everything, I am writing now
with the object of fulfilling that promise. My decision is as follows.
Whatever your conduct may have been, I do not consider myself
justified in breaking the ties in which we are bound by a Higher
Power. The family cannot be broken up by a whim, a caprice, or even by
the sin of one of the partners in the marriage, and our life must go
on as it has done in the past. This is essential for me, for you,
and for our son. I am fully persuaded that you have repented, and do
repent, of what has called forth the present letter, and that you will
co-operate with me in eradicating the cause of our estrangement, and
forgetting the past. In the contrary event, you can conjecture what
awaits you and your son. All this I hope to discuss more in detail
in a personal interview. As the season is drawing to a close, I
would beg you to return to Peterburg as quickly as possible- not later
than Tuesday. All necessary preparations shall be made for your
arrival here. I beg you to note that I attach particular
significance to compliance with this request.
                                           "A. Karenin

  "P.S.- I enclose the money which may be needed for your expenses."

  He read the letter through and felt pleased with it, and
especially because he had remembered to enclose money: there was not a
harsh word, not a reproach in it, nor was there undue indulgence. Most
of all, it was a golden bridge for a return. Folding the letter and
smoothing it with a massive ivory knife, and putting it in an envelope
with the money, he rang the bell with the gratification it always
afforded him to use the well-arranged appointments of his writing
table.
  "Give this to a messenger to be delivered to Anna Arkadyevna
tomorrow, at the summer villa," he said, getting up.
  "Certainly, Your Excellency; is tea to be served in the study?"
  Alexei Alexandrovich ordered tea to be brought to the study, and
playing with the massive paper knife, he moved to his easy chair, near
which there had been placed ready for him a lamp and the French work
on les tables Eugubines that he had begun. Over the easy chair there
hung in a gold frame an oval portrait of Anna, a fine painting by a
celebrated artist. Alexei Alexandrovich glanced at it. The
unfathomable eyes gazed ironically and insolently at him, as they
did that night of their last explanation. Insufferably insolent and
challenging was the effect in Alexei Alexandrovich's eyes of the black
lace about the head, admirably touched in by the painter, the black
hair and handsome white hand the fourth finger of which was covered
with rings. After looking at the portrait for a minute, Alexei
Alexandrovich shuddered so that his lips quivered and produced "brrr,"
and turned away. He made haste to sit down in his easy chair and
opened the book. He tried to read, but he could not revive the very
vivid interest he had felt before in Eugubine inscriptions. He
looked at the book and thought of something else. He thought not of
his wife, but of a complication that had arisen in his official
life, which at the time constituted the chief interest of it. He
felt that he had penetrated more deeply than ever before into this
intricate affair, and that he had originated a leading idea- he
could say it without self-flattery- calculated to clear up the whole
business, to strengthen him in his official career, to discomfit his
enemies, and thereby to be of the greatest benefit to the State.
Directly the servant had set the tea and left the room, Alexei
Alexandrovich got up and went to the writing table. Moving into the
middle of the table a portfolio of current papers, with a scarcely
perceptible smile of self-satisfaction, he took a pencil from a rack
and plunged into the perusal of a complex report relating to the
present complication. The complication was of this nature: Alexei
Alexandrovich's characteristic quality as a politician, that special
individual qualification that every rising functionary possesses,
the qualification that with his unflagging ambition, his reserve,
his honesty, and his self-confidence had made his career, was his
contempt for red tape, his cutting down of correspondence, his
direct contact, wherever possible, with the living fact, and his
economy. It happened that the famous Commission of the 2nd of June had
set on foot an inquiry into the irrigation of lands in the Zaraisky
province, which fell under Alexei Alexandrovich's department, and
was a glaring example of fruitless expenditure and paper reforms.
Alexei Alexandrovich was aware of the truth of this. The irrigation of
these lands in the Zaraisky province had been initiated by the
predecessor of Alexei Alexandrovich's predecessor. And vast sums of
money had actually been spent, and were still being spent, on this
business, and utterly unproductively, and the whole business could
obviously lead to nothing whatever. Alexei Alexandrovich had perceived
this at once on entering office, and would have liked to lay hands
on the business. But at first, when he did not yet feel secure in
his position, he knew it would affect too many interests, and would be
imprudent; later on he had been engrossed in other questions, and
had simply forgotten this case. It went of itself, like all such
cases, by the mere force of inertia. (Many people gained their
livelihood by this business, especially one highly conscientious and
musical family: all the daughters played on stringed instruments,
and Alexei Alexandrovich knew the family and had stood godfather to
one of the elder daughters.) The raising of this question by a hostile
Ministry was in Alexei Alexandrovich's opinion a dishonorable
proceeding, seeing that in every Ministry there were things similar
and worse, which no one inquired into, for well-known reasons of
official etiquette. However, now that the gauntlet had been thrown
down to him, he had boldly picked it up and demanded the appointment
of a special commission to investigate and verify the working of the
Commission of Irrigation of the lands in the Zaraisky province; but in
compensation he gave no quarter to the enemy either. He demanded
also the appointment of another special commission to inquire into the
question of the Native Tribes Organization. The question of the Native
Tribes had been brought up incidentally in the Committee of the 2nd of
June, and had been pressed forward actively by Alexei Alexandrovich,
as one admitting of no delay on account of the deplorable condition of
the native tribes. In the Committee this question had been a ground of
contention between several Ministries. The Ministry hostile to
Alexei Alexandrovich proved that the condition of the native tribes
was exceedingly flourishing, that the proposed reconstruction might be
the ruin of their prosperity, and that if there were anything wrong,
it arose mainly from the failure on the part of Alexei Alexandrovich's
Ministry to carry out the measures prescribed by law. Now Alexei
Alexandrovich intended to demand: First, that a new commission
should be formed which should be empowered to investigate the
condition of the native tribes on the spot; secondly, if it should
appear that the condition of the native tribes actually was such as it
appeared to be from the official data in the hands of the Committee,
that another new scientific commission should be appointed to
investigate the deplorable condition of the native tribes from the-
(a) political, (b) administrative, (c) economic, (d) ethnographical,
(e) material, and (f) religious points of view; thirdly, that evidence
should be required from the rival Ministry of the measures that had
been taken during the last ten years by that Ministry for averting the
disastrous conditions in which the native tribes were now placed; and,
fourthly and finally, that that Ministry be asked to explain why it
had, as appeared from the reports submitted before the Committee,
under Nos. 17,015 and 18,308, dated December 5, 1863, and June 7, 1864
respectively, acted in direct contravention of the intention of the
basic and organic law, T... Statute 18, and the note to Statute 36.
A flush of eagerness suffused the face of Alexei Alexandrovich as he
rapidly wrote out a synopsis of these ideas for his own benefit.
Having filled a sheet of paper, he got up, rang, and sent a note to
the head clerk to look up certain necessary facts for him. Getting
up and walking about the room, he glanced again at the portrait,
frowned, and smiled contemptuously. After reading a little more of the
book on Eugubine inscriptions, and renewing his interest in it, Alexei
Alexandrovich went to bed at eleven o'clock, and recollecting as he
lay in bed the incident with his wife, he saw it now in by no means so
gloomy a light.
                             XV.

  Though Anna had obstinately and with exasperation contradicted
Vronsky- when he told her their position was impossible, and persuaded
her to lay open everything to her husband- at the bottom of her
heart she regarded her own position as false and dishonorable, and she
longed with her whole soul to change it. On the way home from the
races she had told her husband the truth in a moment of excitement,
and in spite of the agony she had suffered in doing so, she was glad
of it. After her husband had left her, she told herself that she was
glad, that now everything was made clear, and at least there would
be no more lying and deception. It seemed to her beyond doubt that her
position was now made clear forever. It might be bad, this new
position, but it would be clear; there would be no indefiniteness or
falsehood about it. The pain she had caused herself and her husband in
uttering those words would be rewarded now by everything being made
clear, she thought. That evening she saw Vronsky, but she did not tell
him of what had passed between her and her husband, though, to make
the position clear, it was necessary to tell him.
  When she woke up next morning the first thing that rose to her
mind was what she had said to her husband, and those words seemed to
her so awful that she could not conceive now how she could have
brought herself to utter those strange, coarse words, and could not
imagine what would come of it. But the words were spoken, and Alexei
Alexandrovich had gone away without saying anything. "I saw Vronsky
and did not tell him. At the very instant he was going away I would
have turned him back and told him, but I changed my mind, because it
was strange that I had not told him the first minute. Why was it I
wanted to tell him and didn't?" And in answer to this question a
burning blush of shame spread over her face. She knew what had kept
her from it, she knew that she had been ashamed. Her position, which
had seemed to her simplified the night before, suddenly struck her now
as not only not simple, but as absolutely hopeless. She felt terrified
at the disgrace, of which she had not even thought before. Directly
she thought of what her husband would do, the most terrible ideas came
to her mind. She had a vision of being turned out of the house, of her
shame being proclaimed to all the world. She asked herself where she
should go when she was turned out of the house, and she could not find
an answer.
  When she thought of Vronsky, it seemed to her that he did not love
her, that he was already beginning to be tired of her, that she
could not offer herself to him, and she felt bitter against him for
it. It seemed to her that the words that she had spoken to her
husband, and had continually repeated in her imagination, she had said
to everyone, and everyone had heard them. She could not bring
herself to look those of her own household in the face. She could
not bring herself to call her maid, and still less go downstairs and
see her son and his governess.
  The maid, who had been listening at her door for a long while,
came into her room of her own accord. Anna glanced inquiringly into
her face, and blushed with a scared look. The maid begged her pardon
for coming in, saying that she had fancied the bell rang. She
brought her clothes and a note. The note was from Betsy. Betsy
reminded her that Liza Merkalova and Baroness Stoltz were coming to
play croquet with her that morning with their adorers, Kaluzhsky and
old Stremov. "Come, if only as a study in characters. I shall expect
you," she finished.
  Anna read the note and heaved a deep sigh.
  "Nothing- I need nothing," she said to Annushka, who was rearranging
the bottles and brushes on the dressing table. "You may go. I'll dress
at once and come down. I need nothing, nothing."
  Annushka went out, but Anna did not begin dressing, and sat in the
same position, her head and hands hanging listlessly, and every now
and then she shivered all over, was apparently about to make some
gesture, utter some word, and sank back into lifelessness again. She
repeated continually, "My God! my God!" But neither "God" nor "my" had
any meaning to her. The idea of seeking help in her difficulty in
religion was as remote from her as seeking help from Alexei
Alexandrovich himself, although she had never had doubts of the
faith in which she had been brought up. She knew that the support of
religion was possible only upon condition of renouncing what made up
for her the whole meaning of life. She was not simply miserable, she
began to feel alarm at the new spiritual condition, never
experienced before, in which she found herself. She felt as though
everything were beginning to be double in her soul, just as objects
sometimes appear double to overtired eyes. She hardly knew at times
what it was she feared, and what she hoped for. Whether she feared
or desired what had happened, or what was going to happen, and exactly
what she longed for, she could not have said.
  "Ah, what am I doing!" she said to herself, feeling a sudden
thrill of pain in both sides of her head. When she came to herself,
she saw that she was holding her hair in both hands, each side of
her temples, and she was pressing them. She jumped up, and began
walking about.
  "The coffee is ready, and mademoiselle and Seriozha are waiting,"
said Annushka, coming back again and finding Anna in the same
position.
  "Seriozha? What about Seriozha?" Anna asked, with sudden
eagerness, recollecting her son's existence for the first time that
morning.
  "He's been naughty, I think," answered Annushka with a smile.
  "In what way?"
  "Some peaches were lying on the table in the corner room. I think he
ate one of them on the sly."
  The recollection of her son suddenly roused Anna from the helpless
condition in which she found herself. She recalled the partly sincere,
though greatly exaggerated, role of the mother living for her child,
which she had taken up of late years, and she felt with joy that in
the plight in which she found herself she had a dominion independent
of any position she would be placed in by her relations to her husband
or to Vronsky. This dominion was her son. In whatever position she
might be placed, she could not abandon her son. Her husband might
put her to shame and turn her out, Vronsky might grow cold to her
and go on living his own life apart (she thought of him again with
bitterness and reproach); she could not leave her son. She had an
aim in life. And she must act; act to secure the position of her
son, so that he might not be taken from her. Quickly indeed, as
quickly as possible, she must take action before he was taken from
her. She must take her son and go away. Here was the one thing she had
to do now. She must be calm, and get out of this insufferable
position. The thought of immediate action binding her to her son, of
going away somewhere with him, gave her this calming.
  She dressed quickly, went downstairs, and with resolute steps walked
into the drawing room, where she found, as usual, waiting for her, the
coffee, Seriozha, and his governess. Seriozha, all in white, with
his back and head bent, was standing at a table under a looking glass,
and with an expression of intense concentration which she knew well,
and in which he resembled his father, he was doing something to the
flowers he carried.
  The governess had a particularly severe expression. Seriozha
screamed shrilly, as he often did, "Ah, mamma!" and stopped,
hesitating whether to go to greet his mother and put down the flowers,
or to finish making the wreath and go with the flowers.
  The governess, after saying good morning, began a long and
detailed account of Seriozha's naughtiness, but Anna did not hear her;
she was considering whether she would take her with her or not. "No, I
won't take her," she decided. "I'll go alone with my son."
  "Yes, it's very wrong," said Anna, and taking her son by the
shoulder she looked at him, not severely, but with a timid glance that
bewildered and delighted the boy, and she kissed him. "Leave him to
me," she said to the astonished governess, and without letting go of
her son, she sat down at the table, where coffee was set ready for
her.
  "Mamma! I... I didn't..." he said, trying to make out from her
expression what was in store for him in regard to the peaches.
  "Seriozha," she said, as soon as the governess had left the room,
"that was wrong, but you'll never do it again, will you?... You love
me?"
  She felt that the tears were coming into her eyes. "Can I help
loving him?" she said to herself, looking deeply into his scared and
at the same time delighted eyes. "And can he ever join his father in
punishing me? Is it possible he will not feel for me?" Tears were
already flowing down her face, and to hide them she got up abruptly
and almost ran out on the terrace.
  After the thundershowers of the last few days, cold, bright
weather had set in. The air was cold in the bright sun that filtered
through the freshly washed leaves.
  She shivered, both from the cold and from the inward horror which
had clutched her with fresh force in the open air.
  "Run along, run along to Mariette," she said to Seriozha, who had
followed her out, and she began walking up and down on the straw
matting of the terrace. "Can it be that they won't forgive me, won't
understand how it all could not have been otherwise?" she said to
herself.
  Standing still, and looking at the tops of the aspen trees waving in
the wind, with their freshly washed, brightly shining leaves in the
cold sunshine, she knew that they would not forgive her, that everyone
and everything would be merciless to her now as was that sky, that
green. And again she felt that everything was doubling in her soul. "I
mustn't, mustn't think," she said to herself. "I must get ready. To go
where? When? Whom to take with me? Yes- to Moscow, by the evening
train. Annushka and Seriozha, and only the most necessary things.
But first I must write to them both." She went quickly indoors into
her boudoir, sat down at the table, and wrote to her husband:
  "After what has happened I cannot remain any longer in your house. I
am going away, and taking my son with me. I don't know the law; and so
I don't know with which of the parents the son should remain; but I
take him with me because I cannot live without him. Be generous, leave
him to me."
  Up to this point she wrote rapidly and naturally, but the appeal
to his generosity, a quality she did not recognize in him, and the
necessity of winding up the letter with something touching, pulled her
up.
  "Of my fault and my remorse I cannot speak, because..."
  She stopped again, finding no connection in her ideas. "No," she
said to herself, "there's no need of anything," and tearing up the
letter, she wrote it again, leaving out the allusion to generosity,
and sealed it up.
  Another letter had to be written to Vronsky. "I have told my
husband," she wrote, and she sat a long while unable to write more. It
was so coarse, so unfeminine. "And what more am I to write him?" she
said to herself. Again a flush of shame spread over her face; she
recalled his composure, and a feeling of anger against him impelled
her to tear the sheet with the phrase she had written into tiny
bits. "No need of anything," she said to herself, and closing her
blotting case she went upstairs, told the governess and the servants
that she was going that day to Moscow, and at once set to work to pack
up her things.
                             XVI.

  All the rooms of the summer villa were full of porters, gardeners,
and footmen, going to and fro carrying out things. Cupboards and
chests were open; twice they had to run to a store for cord; pieces of
newspaper were cluttering the floor. Two trunks, some bags and
strapped-up plaids had been carried down into the hall. The carriage
and two hired cabs were waiting at the steps. Anna, forgetting her
inward agitation in the work of packing, was standing at a table in
her boudoir, packing her traveling bag, when Annushka called her
attention to the clatter of some carriage driving up. Anna looked
out of the window and saw Alexei Alexandrovich's messenger on the
steps, ringing at the front doorbell.
  "Run and find out what it is," she said, and, with a calm sense of
being prepared for anything, she sat down in a low chair, folding
her hands on her knees. A footman brought in a thick packet directed
in Alexei Alexandrovich's hand.
  "The messenger has orders to wait for an answer," he said.
  "Very well," she said, and as soon as he had left the room she
tore open the letter with trembling fingers. A packet of unfolded
banknotes done up with a band fell out of it. She extricated the
letter and began reading it from the end. "Preparations shall be
made for your arrival here... I attach particular significance to
compliance...." she read. She ran through it backward, read it all
through, and once more read the letter all through again, from the
beginning. When she had finished, she felt that she was cold all over,
and that a fearful calamity, such as she had not expected, had burst
upon her.
  In the morning she had regretted that she had spoken to her husband,
and wished for nothing so much as that those words might be
unspoken. And here this letter regarded them as unspoken, and gave her
what she had wanted. But now this letter seemed to her more awful than
anything she had been able to conceive.
  "He's right!" she said. "Of course, he's always right; he's a
Christian, he's generous! Yes, vile, base creature! And no one
understands it except me, and no one ever will; and I can't explain
it. They say he's so religious, so high-principled, so upright, so
clever; but they don't see what I've seen. They don't know how he
has crushed my life for eight years, crushed everything that was
living in me- he has not once even thought that I'm a live woman who
must have love. They don't know how at every step he's humiliated
me, and been just as pleased with himself. Haven't I striven-
striven with all my strength- to find something to give meaning to
my life? Haven't I struggled to love him, to love my son when I
could not love my husband? But the time came when I knew that I
couldn't cheat myself any longer, that I was alive, that I was not
to blame, that God has made me so that I must love and live. And now
what does he do? If he'd killed me, if he'd killed him, I could have
borne anything, I could have forgiven anything; but, no, he..."
  "How was it I didn't guess what he would do? He's doing just
what's natural to his mean character. He'll keep himself in the right,
while he'll drive me, in my ruin, still lower, still to worse ruin..."
  "'You can conjecture what awaits you and your son,'" she recalled
a part of his letter. "That's a threat to take away my child, and most
likely according to their stupid law he can. But I know very well
why he says it. He doesn't believe even in my love for my child, or he
despises it (just as he always used to ridicule it). He despises
that feeling in me, but he knows that I won't abandon my child, that I
can't abandon my child, that there could be no life for me without
my child, even with him whom I love; but that if I abandoned my
child and ran away from him, I should be acting like the most
infamous, basest of women. He knows that, and knows that I am
incapable of doing that."
  "Our life must go on as it has done in the past," she recalled
another sentence in his letter. "That life was miserable enough in the
old days; it has been awful of late. What will it be now? And he knows
all that; he knows that I can't repent breathing, repent loving; he
knows that it can lead to nothing but lying and deceit; but he wants
to go on torturing me. I know him; I know that he's at home and is
happy in deceit, like a fish swimming in the water. No, I won't give
him that happiness. I'll break through the spider's web of lies in
which he wants to catch me, come what may. Anything's better than
lying and deceit."
  "But how? My God! my God! Was ever a woman so miserable as I am?..."
  "No; I will break through it, I will break through it!" she cried,
jumping up and keeping back her tears. And she went to the writing
table to write him another letter. But at the bottom of her heart
she felt that she was not strong enough to break through anything,
that she was not strong enough to get out of her old position, however
false and dishonorable it might be.
  She sat down at the writing table, but instead of writing she
clasped her hands on the table, and, laying her head on them, burst
into tears, with sobs and heaving breast, like a child crying. She was
weeping because her dream of her position being made clear and
definite had been annihilated forever. She knew beforehand that
everything would go on in the old way, and far worse, indeed, than
in the old way. She felt that her position in the world she enjoyed,
and which had seemed to her of so little consequence in the morning,
was now precious to her, that she would not have the strength to
exchange it for the shameful position of a woman who has abandoned
husband and child to join her lover; that however much she might
struggle, she could not be stronger than herself. She would never know
freedom in love, but would remain forever a guilty wife, with the
menace of detection hanging over her at every instant; deceiving her
husband for the sake of a shameful connection with a man living
apart and away from her, whose life she could never share. She knew
that this was how it would be, and at the same time it was so awful
that she could not even conceive what it would end in. And she cried
without restraint, as children cry when they are punished.
  The sound of a footman's steps forced her to rouse herself, and,
hiding her face from him, she pretended to be writing.
  "The messenger asks if there's any answer," the footman informed
her.
  "Any answer? Yes," said Anna. "Let him wait. I'll ring."
  "What can I write?" she thought. "What can I decide upon alone? What
do I know? What do I want? What is there I care for?" Again she felt
that her soul was beginning to double. She was terrified again at this
feeling, and clutched at the first pretext for doing something which
might divert her thoughts from herself. "I ought to see Alexei" (so
she called Vronsky in her thoughts); "no one but he can tell me what I
ought to do. I'll go to Betsy's, perhaps I shall see him there," she
said to herself, completely forgetting that, when she had told him the
day before that she was not going to Princess Tverskaia's he had
said that in that case he should not go either. She went up to the
table, wrote to her husband: "I have received your letter.- A.";
and, ringing the bell, gave it to the footman.
  "We are not going," she said to Annushka, as she came in.
  "Not going at all?"
  "No; don't unpack till tomorrow, and let the carriage wait. I'm
going to the Princess."
  "Which dress am I to get ready?"
                             XVII.

  The croquet party to which the Princess Tverskaia had invited Anna
was to consist of two ladies and their adorers. These two ladies
were the chief representatives of a select new Peterburg circle,
nicknamed, in imitation of some imitation, les sept merveilles du
monde. These ladies belonged to a circle which, though of the
highest society, was utterly hostile to that in which Anna moved.
Moreover, old Stremov, one of the most influential people in
Peterburg, and the admirer of Liza Merkalova, was Alexei
Alexandrovich's enemy in the political world. From all these
considerations Anna had not meant to go, and the hints in Princess
Tverskaia's note referred to her refusal. But now Anna was eager to
go, in the hope of seeing Vronsky.
  Anna arrived at Princess Tverskaia's earlier than the other guests.
  At the very moment of her entry, Vronsky's footman, with his side
whiskers combed out, and looking like a Kammerjunker, went in too.
He stopped at the door, and, taking off his cap, let her pass. Anna
recognized him, and only then recalled that Vronsky had told her the
day before that he would not come. Most likely he was sending a note
to say so.
  As she took off her outer garment in the hall, she heard the footman
say, rolling his r's even like a Kammerjunker: "From the Count for the
Princess," as he handed over the note.
  She longed to question him as to where his master was. She longed to
turn back and send him a letter to come and see her, or to go
herself to see him. But none of the three courses was possible.
Already she heard bells ringing ahead of her to announce her
arrival, and Princess Tverskaia's footman was standing at the open
door waiting for her to pass into the inner rooms.
  "The Princess is in the garden; she will be informed immediately.
Would you be pleased to walk into the garden?" announced another
footman in another room.
  The position of uncertainty, of indecision, was still the same as at
home- worse, in fact, since it was impossible to take any step,
impossible to see Vronsky, and she had to remain here among outsiders,
in company so uncongenial to her present mood. But she was wearing a
dress that she knew suited her. She was not alone; all around was that
luxurious setting of idleness that she was used to, and she felt
less wretched than at home. She was not forced to think what she had
to do. Everything would be done of itself. On meeting Betsy coming
toward her in a white gown that struck her by its elegance, Anna
smiled to her just as she always did. Princess Tverskaia was walking
with Tushkevich and a young lady, a relation, who, to the great joy of
her parents in the provinces, was spending the summer with the
fashionable Princess.
  There was probably something unusual about Anna, for Betsy noticed
it at once.
  "I slept badly," answered Anna, looking intently at the footman
who came to meet them, and, as she supposed, brought Vronsky's note.
  "How glad I am you've come!" said Betsy. "I'm tired, and was just
longing to have some tea before they come. You might go," she turned
to Tushkevich, "with Masha, and try the croquet ground over there,
where they've been clipping it. We shall have time to talk a little
over tea, we'll have a cozy chat, eh?" she said in English to Anna,
with a smile, pressing the hand which held a parasol.
  "Yes, especially as I can't stay very long with you. I'm forced to
go on to old Madame Vrede. I've been promising to go for a century,"
said Anna, to whom lying, alien as it was to her nature, had become
not merely simple and natural in society, but a positive source of
satisfaction. Why she said this, which she had not thought of a second
before, she could not have explained. She had said it simply from
the reflection that as Vronsky would not be here, she had better
secure her own freedom, and try to see him somehow. But why she had
spoken of old Hoffraulein Vrede, whom she had to go and see, as she
had to see many other people, she could not have explained; and yet,
as it afterward turned out, had she cudgeled her brains for the most
cunning subterfuge to meet Vronsky, she could have thought of
nothing better.
  "No. I'm not going to let you go for anything," answered Betsy,
looking intently into Anna's face. "Really, if I were not fond of you,
I should feel offended. One would think you were afraid my society
would compromise you.- Tea in the small dining room, please," she
said, half closing her eyes, as she always did when addressing the
footman.
  Taking the note from him, she read it.
  "Alexei is playing us false," she said in French; "he writes that he
can't come," she added, in a tone as simple and natural as though it
could never enter her head that Vronsky could mean anything more to
Anna than a game of croquet. Anna knew that Betsy knew everything,
but, hearing how she spoke of Vronsky before her, she almost felt
persuaded for a minute that she knew nothing.
  "Ah!" said Anna indifferently, as though not greatly interested in
the matter; and she went on, smiling: "How can you or your friends
compromise anyone?"
  This playing with words, this hiding of a secret, had a great
fascination for Anna, as, indeed, it has for all women. And it was not
the necessity of concealment, not the purpose for which the
concealment was contrived, but the process of concealment itself which
attracted her.
  "I can't be more catholic than the Pope," she said. "Stremov and
Liza Merkalova- why, they're the cream of the cream of society.
Besides, they're received everywhere, and I"- she laid special
stress on the I- "have never been strict and intolerant. It's simply
that I haven't the time."
  "No; you don't care, perhaps, to meet Stremov? Let him and Alexei
Alexandrovich tilt at each other in the Committee- that's no affair of
ours. But, in society, he's the most amiable man I know, and an ardent
croquet player. You shall see. And, in spite of his absurd position as
Liza's lovesick swain at his age, you ought to see how he carries
off the absurd position. He's very nice. Don't you know Sappho Stoltz?
Oh, that's a new type- quite new!"
  Betsy went on with all this chatter, yet, at the same time, from her
good-humored, shrewd glance, Anna felt that she partly guessed her
plight, and was hatching something for her benefit. They were in the
little boudoir.
  "I must write to Alexei, though," and Betsy sat down to the table,
scribbled a few lines, and put the note in an envelope. "I'm telling
him to come to dinner. I've one lady extra to dinner with me, and no
man to take her in. Look what I've said- will that persuade him?
Excuse me, I must leave you for a minute. Would you seal it up,
please, and send it off? she said from the door; "I have to give
some directions."
  Without a moment's hesitation, Anna sat down to the table with
Betsy's letter, and, without reading it, wrote below: "It's
essential for me to see you. Come to the Vrede garden. I shall be
there at six o'clock." She sealed it up, and, Betsy coming back, in
her presence handed the note for transmittal.
  At tea, which was brought them on a little tea table in the cool
little drawing room, a cozy chat promised by Princess Tverskaia before
the arrival of her visitors really did come off between the two women.
They criticized the people they were expecting, and the conversation
fell upon Liza Merkalova.
  "She's very sweet, and I always liked her," said Anna.
  "You ought to like her. She raves about you. Yesterday she came up
to me after the races and was in despair at not finding you. She
says you're a real heroine of romance, and that if she were a man
she would do all sorts of mad things for your sake. Stremov says she
does that as it is."
  "But do tell me, please- I never could make it out," said Anna,
after being silent for some time, speaking in a tone that showed she
was not asking an idle question, but that what she was asking was of
greater importance to her than it should have been, "do tell me,
please: what are her relations with Prince Kaluzhsky- Mishka, as
he's called? I've met them so little. What does it mean?"
  Betsy smiled with her eyes, and looked intently at Anna.
  "It's a new mode," she said. "They've all adopted that mode. They've
flung their caps over the windmills. But there are ways and ways of
flinging them."
  "Yes, but precisely what are her relations with Kaluzhsky?"
  Betsy broke into unexpectedly mirthful and irrepressible laughter, a
thing which rarely happened with her.
  "You're encroaching on Princess Miaghkaia's special domain now.
That's the question of an enfant terrible," and Betsy obviously
tried to restrain herself, but could not, and went off into peals of
that infectious laughter peculiar to people who do not laugh often.
"You'd better ask them," she brought out, between tears of laughter.
  "No; you laugh," said Anna, laughing too, in spite of herself,
"but I never could understand it. I can't understand the husband's
role in it."
  "The husband? Liza Merkalova's husband carries her shawl, and is
always ready to be of use. But no one cares to inquire about what is
really going on. You know, in decent society one doesn't talk or think
even of certain details of the toilet. That's how it is in this case."
  "Will you be at Madame Rolandaky's fete?" asked Anna, to change
the conversation.
  "I don't think so," answered Betsy, and, without looking at her
friend, she began filling the little transparent cups with fragrant
tea. Putting a cup before Anna, she took out a thin cigarette, and,
fitting it into a silver holder, she lighted it. "It's like this,
you see: I'm in a fortunate position," she began, quite serious now,
as she took up her cup. "I understand you, and I understand Liza. Liza
now is one of those naive natures that, like children, don't know
what's good and what's bad. Anyway, she didn't comprehend it when
she was very young. And now she's aware that the lack of comprehension
suits her. Now, perhaps, she doesn't know on purpose," said Betsy,
with a subtle smile. "But, anyway, it suits her. The very same
thing, don't you see, may be looked at tragically, and turned into
misery, or it may be looked at simply, and even humorously. Possibly
you are inclined to look at things too tragically."
  "How I should like to know other people just as I know myself!" said
Anna, seriously and dreamily. "Am I worse than other people, or
better? I think I'm worse."
  "Enfant terrible, enfant terrible!" repeated Betsy. "But here they
are."
                             XVIII.

  They heard the sound of steps and a man's voice, then a woman's
voice and laughter, and immediately thereafter there walked in the
expected guests: Sappho Stoltz, and a young man beaming with excess of
health, the so-called Vaska. It was evident that ample supplies of
beefsteak, truffles, and Burgundy were profitable for his health.
Vaska bowed to the two ladies, and glanced at them, but only for one
second. He walked after Sappho into the drawing room, and followed her
about as though he were chained to her, keeping his sparkling eyes
fixed on her as though he wanted to eat her. Sappho Stoltz was a
blonde beauty with black eyes. She walked with smart little steps in
high-heeled shoes, and shook hands with the ladies vigorously, like
a man.
  Anna had never met this new star of fashion, and was struck by her
beauty, the exaggerated extreme to which her dress was carried, and
the boldness of her manners. On her head there was such an echafaudage
of soft, golden hair- her own and false mixed- that her head was equal
in size to the elegantly rounded bust, of which so much was exposed in
front. The impulsive abruptness of her movements was such that at
every step the lines of her knees and the upper part of her legs
were distinctly marked under her dress, and the question involuntarily
rose in one's mind where in the undulating, piled-up mountain of
material at the back the real body of the woman, so small and slender,
so naked in front, and so hidden behind and below, really came to an
end.
  Betsy made haste to introduce her to Anna.
  "Only fancy, we all but ran over two soldiers," she began telling
them at once, using her eyes, smiling and twitching away her train,
which she at first threw too much to one side. "I drove here with
Vaska... Ah, to be sure, you don't know each other." And, mentioning
his surname, she introduced the young man, and, reddening, broke
into a ringing laugh at her mistake- that is, at her having called him
Vaska before a stranger. Vaska bowed once more to Anna, but he said
nothing to her. He addressed Sappho: "You've lost your bet. We got
here first. Pay up," said he, smiling.
  Sappho laughed still more festively.
  "Not just now," said she.
  "It's all one, I'll have it later."
  "Very well, very well. Oh, yes," she turned suddenly to Princess
Betsy: "I am a nice person... I positively forgot it.... I've
brought you a visitor. And here he comes."
  The unexpected young visitor, whom Sappho had brought with her,
and whom she had forgotten, was, however, a personage of such
consequence that, in spite of his youth, both the ladies rose on his
entrance.
  He was a new admirer of Sappho's. Like Vaska, he now dogged her
footsteps.
  Soon after Prince Kaluzhsky arrived, and Liza Merkalova with
Stremov. Liza Merkalova was a thin brunette, with an Oriental, languid
type of face, and charming- as everyone used to say- ineffable eyes.
The tone of her dark dress (Anna immediately observed and
appreciated the fact) was in perfect harmony with her style of beauty.
Liza was as soft and loose as Sappho was tight and shackled.
  But to Anna's taste Liza was far more attractive. Betsy had said
to Anna that she had adopted the pose of an unsophisticated child, but
when Anna saw her she felt this was not the truth. She really was
unsophisticated, spoiled, yet a sweet and irresponsible woman. It is
true that her tone was the same as Sappho's; that, like Sappho, she
had two men, one young and one old, tacked on to her, and devouring
her with their eyes. But there was something in her higher than her
surroundings. There was in her the glow of the real diamond among
paste. This glow shone out in her charming, truly ineffable eyes.
The weary, and at the same time passionate, glance of those eyes,
encircled by dark rings, impressed one by its perfect sincerity.
Everyone looking into those eyes fancied he knew her wholly, and,
knowing her, could not but love her. At the sight of Anna, her whole
face lighted up at once with a smile of delight.
  "Ah, how glad I am to see you!" she said, going up to her.
"Yesterday, at the races, I wanted just to get to you, but you'd
gone away. I did so want to see you, especially yesterday. Wasn't it
awful?" she said, looking at Anna with eyes that seemed to lay bare
all her soul.
  "Yes; I had no idea it would be so thrilling," said Anna, blushing.
  The company got up at this moment to go into the garden.
  "I'm not going," said Liza, smiling and settling herself close to
Anna. "You won't go either, will you? Who wants to play croquet?"
  "Oh, I like it," said Anna.
  "There, how do you manage never to be bored by things? One has but
to look at you, to be joyful. You're alive, but I'm bored."
  "How can you be bored? Why, you live among the merriest people in
Peterburg," said Anna.
  "Possibly the people who are not of our set are even more bored; but
we are not amused ourselves- I certainly am not, but awfully,
awfully bored."
  Sappho, smoking a cigarette, went off into the garden with the two
young men. Betsy and Stremov remained at the tea table.
  "You bored?" said Betsy. "Sappho says they enjoyed themselves
tremendously at your house last night."
  "Ah, how dreary it all was!" said Liza Merkalova. "We all drove back
to my place after the races. And always the same people, always the
same. Always the same thing. We lounged about on sofas all the
evening. What's enjoyable about that? No; do tell me how you manage
never to be bored?" she said, addressing Anna again. "One has but to
look at you and one sees a woman who may be happy or unhappy, but
who isn't bored. Tell me- how do you do it?"
  "I do nothing," answered Anna, blushing at these searching
questions.
  "That's the best way," Stremov put in.
  Stremov was a man of fifty, partly gray, but still vigorous in
appearance, very ugly, but with a characteristic and intelligent face.
Liza Merkalova was his wife's niece, and he spent all his leisure
hours with her. On meeting Anna Karenina, since he was Alexei
Alexandrovich's enemy in the government, he tried, like a shrewd man
and a man of the world, to be particularly cordial with her, the
wife of his enemy.
  "Nothing," he put in with a subtle smile, "that's the very best way.
I told you long ago," he said, turning to Liza Merkalova, "that, in
order not to be bored, you mustn't think you're going to be bored.
Just as you mustn't be afraid of not being able to fall asleep, if
you're afraid of sleeplessness. That's precisely what Anna
Arkadyevna has just said."
  "I should be very glad if I had said it, for it's not only clever
but true," said Anna, smiling.
  "No, do tell me why it is one can't go to sleep, and one can't
help being bored?"
  "To sleep well one should work, and to enjoy oneself one should also
work."
  "What am I to work for when my work is of no use to anybody? And I
can't, and won't, knowingly make a pretense at it."
  "You're incorrigible," said Stremov, without looking at her, and
he spoke again to Anna.
  As he rarely met Anna, he could say nothing but banalities to her,
but he said those banalities, when was she returning to Peterburg, and
how fond Countess Lidia Ivanovna was of her- with an expression
which suggested that he longed with his whole soul to please her,
and show his regard for her- and even more than that.
  Tushkevich came in, announcing that the party were awaiting the
other players to begin croquet.
  "No, don't go away, please don't," pleaded Liza Merkalova, hearing
that Anna was going. Stremov joined in her entreaties.
  "It's too violent a transition," he said, "to go from such company
to old Madame Vrede. And, besides, you will only give her a chance for
talking scandal, while here you will arouse other feelings, of the
finest and directly opposed to scandal," he said to her.
  Anna pondered for an instant in uncertainty. This shrewd man's
flattering words, the naive, childlike affection shown her by Liza
Merkalova, and all the worldly atmosphere she was used to- it was
all so easy, while that which was in store for her was so difficult,
that she was for a minute in uncertainty: should she remain, should
she put off a little longer the painful moment of explanation? But,
remembering what was in store for her when she would be alone at home,
if she did not come to some decision; remembering that gesture-
terrible even in memory- when she had clutched her hair in both hands,
she said good-by and went away.
                             XIX.

  In spite of Vronsky's apparently frivolous life in society, he was a
man who hated disorder. In early youth, in the Corps of Pages, he
had experienced the humiliation of a refusal, when he had tried, being
in difficulties, to borrow money, and since then he had never once put
himself in the same position again.
  In order to keep his affairs in some sort of order, he was wont,
about five times a year (more or less frequently, according to
circumstances), to shut himself up alone and put all his affairs
into definite shape. This he would call his day of washing up or faire
la lessive.
  On waking up late in the morning after the races, Vronsky put on a
white linen coat, and, without shaving or taking his bath, he
distributed about the table money, bills, and letters, and set to
work. Petritsky, who knew he was ill-tempered on such occasions, on
waking up and seeing his comrade at the writing table, quietly dressed
and went out without getting in his way.
  Every man who knows to the minutest details all the complexity of
the conditions surrounding him, cannot help imagining that the
complexity of these conditions, and the difficulty of making them
clear, is something exceptional and personal, peculiar to himself, and
never supposes that others are surrounded by just as complicated an
array of personal affairs as he is. So indeed it seemed to Vronsky.
And not without inward pride, and not without reason, he thought
that any other man would long ago have been in difficulties, and would
have been forced to some dishonorable course, if he had found
himself in such a difficult position. But Vronsky felt that now
especially it was essential for him to clear up and define his
position if he were to avoid getting into difficulties.
  What Vronsky attacked first, as being the easiest, was his pecuniary
position. Writing out on note paper in his minute handwriting all that
he owed, he added up the amount and found that his debts amounted to
seventeen thousand and some odd hundreds, which he left out for the
sake of clearness. Reckoning up his cash and the balance in his
bankbook, he found that he had left one thousand eight hundred
roubles, and nothing coming in before the New Year. Reckoning over
again his list of debts, Vronsky copied it, dividing it into three
classes. In the first class he put the debts which he would have to
pay at once, or for which he must in any case have the money ready
so that on demand for payment there would not be a moment's delay in
paying. Such debts amounted to about four thousand: one thousand
five hundred for a horse, and two thousand five hundred as surety
for a young comrade, Venevsky, who had lost that sum to a
cardsharper in Vronsky's presence. Vronsky had wanted to pay the money
at the time (he had that amount then), but Venevsky and Iashvin had
insisted that they would pay and not Vronsky, who had not played. So
far, so good; but Vronsky knew that in this dirty business, though his
only share in it was undertaking by word of mouth to be surety for
Venevsky, it was absolutely necessary for him to have the two thousand
five hundred roubles, so as to be able to fling it at the cheat, and
have no more words with him. And so, for this first and most important
division, he must have four thousand roubles. The second class-
eight thousand roubles- consisted of less important debts. These
were principally accounts owing in connection with his race horses, to
the purveyor of oats and hay, the Englishman, the saddler, and so
on. He would have to pay some two thousand roubles on these debts too,
in order to be quite free from anxiety. The last class of debts- to
shops, to hotels, to his tailor- were such as need not be
considered. So that he needed at least six thousand roubles, and he
only had one thousand eight hundred for current expenses. For a man
with one hundred thousand roubles of revenue, which was what
everyone fixed as Vronsky's income, such debts, one would suppose,
could hardly be embarrassing; but the fact was that he was far from
having one hundred thousand. His father's immense property, which
alone yielded a yearly income of two hundred thousand, was left
undivided between the brothers. At the time when the elder brother,
with a mass of debts, had married Princess Varia Chirkova, the
daughter of a Dekabrist without any fortune whatever, Alexei had given
up to his elder brother almost the whole income from his father's
estate, reserving for himself only twenty-five thousand a year from
it. Alexei had said at the time to his brother that the sum would be
sufficient for him until he married, which he would probably never do.
And his brother, who was in command of one of the most expensive
regiments, and was only just married, could not decline the gift.
His mother, who had her own separate property, had allowed Alexei
every year twenty thousand in addition to the twenty-five thousand
he had reserved, and Alexei had spent it all. Of late his mother,
incensed with him on account of his love affair and his leaving
Moscow, had given up sending him the money. And, in consequence of
this, Vronsky, who had been in the habit of living on the scale of
forty-five thousand a year, having only received twenty thousand
that year, now found himself in difficulties. To get out of these
difficulties, he could not apply to his mother for money. Her last
letter, which he had received the day before, had particularly
exasperated him by the hints it contained that she was quite ready
to help him to succeed in the world and in the army, but not to lead a
life which scandalized all good society. His mother's attempt to buy
him stung him to the quick and made him feel colder than ever toward
her. But he could not draw back from the generous word when it was
once uttered, even though he felt now, vaguely foreseeing certain
eventualities in his liaison with Madame Karenina, that his generous
word had been spoken thoughtlessly, and that, even though he were
not married, he might need all the hundred thousand of income. But
it was impossible to draw back. He had only to recall his brother's
wife, to remember how that sweet, delightful Varia sought, at every
convenient opportunity, to remind him that she remembered his
generosity and appreciated it, to grasp the impossibility of taking
back his gift. It was as impossible as beating a woman, or stealing,
or lying. One thing only could and ought to be done, and Vronsky
determined upon it without an instant's hesitation: to borrow money
from a moneylender, ten thousand roubles, a proceeding which presented
no difficulty; to cut down his expenses generally, and to sell his
race horses. Resolving on this, he promptly wrote a note to Rolandaky,
who had more than once sent to him with offers to buy horses from him.
Then he sent for the Englishman and the moneylender, and divided
what money he had according to the accounts he intended to pay. Having
finished this business, he wrote a cold and cutting answer to his
mother. Then he took out of his notebook three notes of Anna's, read
them again, burned them, and, remembering their conversation on the
previous day, he sank into deep thought.
                             XX.

  Vronsky's life was particularly happy in that he had a code of
principles, which defined with unfailing certitude what he ought and
what he ought not to do. This code of principles covered only a very
small circle of contingencies, but then the principles were never
doubtful, and Vronsky, as he never went outside that circle, had never
had a moment's hesitation about doing what he ought to do. These
principles laid down as invariable rules: that one must pay a
cardsharper, but need not pay a tailor; that one must never tell a lie
to a man, but one may to a woman; that one must never cheat anyone,
but one may a husband; that one must never pardon an insult, but one
may give one and so on. These principles were possibly not
reasonable and not good, but they were of unfailing certainty, and, so
long as he adhered to them, Vronsky felt that his heart was at peace
and he could hold his head up. But of late, in regard to his relations
with Anna, Vronsky had begun to feel that his code of principles did
not fully cover all possible contingencies, and to foresee in the
future difficulties and perplexities for which he could find no
guiding clue.
  His present relation to Anna and to her husband was to his mind
clear and simple. It was clearly and precisely defined in the code
of principles by which he was guided.
  She was an honorable woman who had bestowed her love upon him, and
he loved her, and therefore she was in his eyes a woman who had a
right to the same respect, or even more, than a lawful wife. He
would have had his hand chopped off before he would have allowed
himself by a word, by a hint, to humiliate her, or even to fall
short of the fullest respect a woman could look for.
  His attitude toward society, too, was clear. Everyone might know,
might suspect it, but no one might dare to speak of it. If any did
speak, he was ready to force all who might do so to be silent and to
respect the nonexistent honor of the woman he loved.
  His attitude to the husband was the clearest of all. From the moment
that Anna loved Vronsky, he had regarded his own right over her as the
one thing unassailable. Her husband was simply a superfluous and
tiresome person. No doubt he was in a pitiable position, but how could
that be helped? The one thing the husband had a right to was to demand
satisfaction with a weapon in his hand, and Vronsky was prepared for
this at any minute.
  But of late new inner relations had arisen between her and him,
which frightened Vronsky by their indefiniteness. Only the day
before she had told him that she was with child. And he felt that this
fact, and what she expected of him, called for something not fully
defined in that code of principles by which he had hitherto steered
his course in life. And he had been indeed caught unawares, and, at
the first moment when she spoke to him of her position, his heart
had prompted him to beg her to leave her husband. He had said that,
but now, thinking things over he saw clearly that it would be better
to manage avoiding that; and at the same time, as he told himself
this, he was afraid whether such an avoidance were not wrong.
  "If I told her to leave her husband, it would mean uniting her
life with mine; am I prepared for that? How can I take her away now,
when I have no money? Supposing I could arrange... But how can I
take her away while I'm in the service? If I say it, I ought to be
prepared to do it; that is, I ought to have the money and to retire
from the army."
  And he grew thoughtful. The question whether to retire from the
service or not brought him to the other, and perhaps the chief
though hidden, interest of his life, of which none knew but he.
  Ambition was the old dream of his youth and childhood, a dream which
he did not confess even to himself, though it was so strong that now
this passion was even doing battle with his love. His first steps in
the world and in the service had been successful, but two years before
he had made a great mistake. Anxious to show his independence, and for
the sake of advancement, he had refused a post that had been offered
him, hoping that this refusal would heighten his value; but it
turned out that he had been too bold, and he was passed over. And
having, whether he liked or not, taken up for himself the position
of an independent man, he carried it off with great tact and good
sense, behaving as though he bore no grudge against anyone, nor
regarding himself as injured in any way, and caring for nothing but to
be left alone since he was enjoying himself. In reality he had
ceased to enjoy himself as long ago as the year before, when he had
gone to Moscow. He felt that this independent attitude of a man who
might have done anything, but cared to do nothing, was already
beginning to pall, that many people were beginning to fancy that he
was not really capable of anything but being a straightforward,
good-natured fellow. His connection with Madame Karenina, by
creating so much sensation and attracting general attention, had given
him a fresh distinction, which had soothed his gnawing worm of
ambition for a while; but a week ago that worm had been roused up
again with fresh force. The friend of his childhood, a man of the same
set, of the same coterie, his comrade in the Corps of Pages,
Serpukhovskoy, who had left school with him, and had been his rival in
class, in gymnastics, in their scrapes and their dreams of glory,
had come back a few days before from Central Asia, where he had gained
two steps up in rank, and an order rarely bestowed upon generals so
young.
  As soon as he arrived in Peterburg, people began to talk about him
as a newly risen star of the first magnitude. A schoolfellow of
Vronsky's and of the same age, he was a general and was expecting a
command which might have influence on the course of political
events; while Vronsky, though he was independent and brilliant, and
beloved by a charming woman, was simply a cavalry captain who was
readily allowed to be as independent as ever he liked. "Of course, I
don't envy Serpukhovskoy and never could envy him; but his advancement
shows me that one has only to watch one's opportunity, and the
career of a man like me may be very rapidly made. Three years ago he
was in just the same position as I am. If I retire, I burn my ships.
If I remain in the army, I lose nothing. She said herself she did
not wish to change her position. And with her love I cannot feel
envious of Serpukhovskoy." And, slowly twirling his mustaches, he
got up from the table and walked about the room. His eyes shone
particularly brightly, and he felt in that firm, calm, and happy frame
of mind which always came after he had thoroughly faced his
position. Everything was straight and clear, just as after former days
of striking balances. He shaved, took a cold bath, dressed, and went
out.
                             XXI.

  "I've come to fetch you. Your lessive lasted a good time today,"
said Petritsky. "Well, is it over?"
  "It's over," answered Vronsky, smiling with his eyes only, and
twirling the tips of his mustaches as circumspectly as though after
the perfect order into which his affairs had been brought any overbold
or rapid movement might disturb it.
  "You're always just as if you'd come out of a bath after it," said
Petritsky. "I've come from Gritzka" (that was what they called the
colonel);- "you're expected there."
  Vronsky, without answering, looked at his comrade, thinking of
something else.
  "Yes; is that music at his place?" he said, listening to the
familiar bass sounds of trumpets, of polkas and waltzes, floating
across to him. "What's the fete?"
  "Serpukhovskoy's come."
  "Aha!" said Vronsky. "Why, I didn't know."
  The smile in his eyes gleamed more brightly than ever.
  Having once made up his mind that he was happy in his love, that
he sacrificed his ambition to it- at any rate, having taken up this
role- Vronsky was incapable of feeling either envious of
Serpukhovskoy, or vexed at him for not having come to him first upon
coming to the regiment. Serpukhovskoy was a good friend, and he was
delighted he had come.
  "Ah, I'm very glad!"
  The colonel, Demin, had taken a large country house. The whole party
was on the wide lower balcony. In the courtyard the first objects that
met Vronsky's eyes were a band of singers in short white linen
jackets, standing near a barrel of vodka, and the robust, good-humored
figure of the colonel surrounded by officers. He had gone out as far
as the first step of the balcony and was loudly shouting to drown
out the band playing an Offenbach quadrille, waving his arms and
giving some orders to a few soldiers standing on one side. A group
of soldiers, a quartermaster, and several subalterns came up to the
balcony with Vronsky. The colonel returned to the table, went out
again on the steps with a tumbler in his hand, and proposed the toast,
"To the health of our former comrade, the gallant general, Prince
Serpukhovskoy. Hurrah!"
  The colonel was followed by Serpukhovskoy, who came out on the steps
smiling, with a glass in his hand.
  "You always get younger, Bondarenko," he said to the rosy-cheeked,
smart-looking sergeant standing just before him, still
youngish-looking though doing his second term of service.
  It was three years since Vronsky had seen Serpukhovskoy. He looked
more robust, had let his whiskers grow, but was still the same
graceful creature, whose face and figure were even more striking
from their fineness and nobility than their beauty. The only change
Vronsky detected in him was that subdued, continual beaming which
settles on the faces of men who are successful and are sure of the
recognition of their success by everyone. Vronsky knew that radiant
air, and immediately observed it in Serpukhovskoy.
  As Serpukhovskoy came down the steps he saw Vronsky. A smile of
pleasure lighted up his face. He tossed his head upward and waved
the glass in his hand, greeting Vronsky, and showing him by the
gesture that he could not come to him before kissing the sergeant
who stood craning forward his lips ready to be kissed.
  "Here he is!" shouted the colonel. "Iashvin told me you were in
one of your gloomy tempers."
  Serpukhovskoy kissed the moist, fresh lips of the brave sergeant,
and, wiping his mouth with his handkerchief, walked up to Vronsky.
  "How glad I am!" he said, squeezing his hand and drawing him to
one side.
  "You look after him," the colonel shouted to Iashvin, pointing to
Vronsky; and he went down below to the soldiers.
  "Why weren't you at the races yesterday? I expected to see you
there," said Vronsky, scrutinizing Serpukhovskoy.
  "I did go, but late. I beg your pardon," he added, and turned to the
adjutant: "Please have this distributed from me, each man as much as
it comes to."
  And he hurriedly took three notes for a hundred roubles each from
his pocketbook, and blushed.
  "Vronsky! Have a bite or a drink?" asked Iashvin. "Hi, something for
the Count to eat! There- drink that."
  The spree at the colonel's lasted a long while.
  There was a great deal of drinking. They swung Serpukhovskoy and
tossed him in the air. Then they did the same to the colonel. Then, to
the accompaniment of the band, the colonel himself danced with
Petritsky. Then the colonel, who began to show signs of weakening, sat
down on a bench in the courtyard and began demonstrating to Iashvin
the superiority of Russia over Prussia, especially in cavalry
attack, and there was a lull in the revelry for a moment.
Serpukhovskoy went into the house to the bathroom to wash his hands
and found Vronsky there- Vronsky was sousing his head with water. He
had taken off his coat and put his red hairy neck under the tap, and
was rubbing it and his head with his hands. When he had finished,
Vronsky sat down by Serpukhovskoy. They both sat down in the
bathroom on a lounge, and a conversation began which was very
interesting to both of them.
  "I've always been hearing about you through my wife," said
Serpukhovskoy. "I'm glad you've been seeing her pretty often."
  "She's friendly with Varia, and they're the only women in
Peterburg I care about seeing," answered Vronsky, smiling. He smiled
because he foresaw the topic the conversation would turn to, and he
was glad of it.
  "The only ones?" Serpukhovskoy queried, smiling.
  "Yes; and I heard news of you, but not only through your wife," said
Vronsky, checking Serpukhovskoy's hint by assuming a stern expression.
"I was greatly delighted to hear of your success, but not a bit
surprised. I expected even more."
  Serpukhovskoy smiled. Such an opinion of him was obviously agreeable
to him, and he did not think it necessary to conceal it.
  "Well, I, on the contrary, expected less- I'll own up frankly. But
I'm glad, very glad. I'm ambitious- that's my weakness, and I
confess to it."
  "Perhaps you wouldn't confess to it if you hadn't been
successful," said Vronsky.
  "I don't suppose so," said Serpukhovskoy, smiling again. "I won't
say life wouldn't be worth living without it, but it would be dull. Of
course I may be mistaken, but I fancy I have a certain capacity for
the line I've chosen, and that if there is to be power of any sort
in my hands, it will be better than in the hands of a good many people
I know," said Serpukhovskoy, with beaming consciousness of success;
"and so the nearer I get to it, the better pleased I am."
  "Perhaps that is true for you, but not for everyone. I used to think
so too, but now I see and think life worth living not only for that."
  "There it comes! there it comes!" said Serpukhovskoy laughing. "Ever
since I heard about you, about your refusal, I began... Of course, I
approved of what you did. But there are ways of doing everything.
And I think your action was good in itself, but you didn't do it in
quite the way you should have done."
  "What's done can't be undone, and you know I never go back on what
I've done. And, besides, I'm very well off."
  "Very well off- for the time. But you're not satisfied with that.
I wouldn't say this to your brother. He's a charming child, like our
host here. There he goes!" he added, listening to the roar of a
"hurrah!"- "and he's happy; that does not satisfy you."
  "I didn't say it did."
  "Yes, but that's not the only thing. Such men as you are wanted."
  "By whom?"
  "By whom? By society, by Russia. Russia needs men, she needs a
party, or else everything goes and will go to the dogs."
  "How do you mean? Bertenev's party against the Russian communists?"
  "No," said Serpukhovskoy, frowning with vexation at being
suspected of such an absurdity. "Tout ca est une blague. That has
always been, and always will be. There are no communists. But
intriguing people have to invent a noxious, dangerous party. It's an
old trick. No, what's wanted is a powerful party of independent men,
like you and me."
  "But why so?" Vronsky mentioned a few men who were in power. "Why
aren't they independent men?"
  "Simply because they have not, or have not had from birth, an
independent fortune, they've not had a name, they weren't born close
to the sun as we were. They can be bought either by money or by favor.
And they have to find a support for themselves in inventing a trend.
And they bring forward some notion, some trend that they don't believe
in, that does harm; and the whole policy is really only a means to a
house at the expense of the crown and so much income. Cela n'est pas
plus fin que ca, when you get a peep at their cards. I may be inferior
to them, more stupid perhaps, though I don't see why I should be
inferior to them. But you and I have one important, certain
advantage over them, in being more difficult to buy. And such men
are more needed than ever."
  Vronsky listened attentively, but he was not so much interested by
the meaning of the words as by the attitude of Serpukhovskoy, who
was already contemplating a struggle with the existing powers, and
already had his likes and dislikes in that world, while his own
interest in his service did not go beyond the interests of his
squadron. Vronsky felt, too, how powerful Serpukhovskoy might become
through his unmistakable faculty for thinking things out and for
taking things in, through his intelligence and gift of eloquence, so
rarely met with in the world in which he moved. And, ashamed as he was
of the feeling, he felt envious.
  "Still I haven't the one thing of paramount importance for that," he
answered; "I haven't the desire for power. I had it once, but it's
gone."
  "Excuse me, that's not true," said Serpukhovskoy smiling.
  "Yes, it's true, it's true- now to be truthful!" Vronsky added.
  "Yes, it's true now, that's another thing; but that now won't last
forever."
  "Perhaps," answered Vronsky.
  "You say perhaps," Serpukhovskoy went on, as though guessing his
thoughts, "but I say for certain. And that's what I wanted to see
you for. Your action was just what it should have been. I see that,
but you ought not to persevere in it. I only ask you to give me
carte blanche. I'm not going to offer you my protection.... Though,
indeed, why shouldn't I protect you?- you've protected me often
enough! I should hope our friendship rises above all that sort of
thing. Yes," he said, smiling to him as tenderly as a woman, "give
me carte blanche, retire from the regiment, and I'll get you in
imperceptibly."
  "But you must understand that I want nothing," said Vronsky, "except
to leave things just as they were."
  Serpukhovskoy got up and stood facing him.
  "You said, leave things just as they were. I understand what that
means. But listen: we're the same age, you've known a greater number
of women perhaps than I have." Serpukhovskoy's smile and gestures told
Vronsky that he mustn't be afraid, that he would be tender and careful
in touching the sore place. "But I'm married, and believe me, in
getting to know one's wife thoroughly, if one loves her, as someone
has said, one gets to know all women better than if one knew thousands
of them."
  "We're coming directly!" Vronsky shouted to an officer, who looked
into the room and called them to the colonel.
  Vronsky was longing now to hear Serpukhovskoy to the end, and know
what he would say to him.
  "And here's my opinion for you. Women are the chief stumbling
block in a man's career. It's hard to love a woman and do anything.
There's only one way of having love conveniently without its being a
hindrance- that's marriage. Now, how am I to tell you what I mean?"
said Serpukhovskoy, who liked similes. "Wait, wait a minute! Yes, just
as you can only carry a fardeau yet do something with your hands
when the fardeau is tied on your back- and that's marriage. And that's
what I felt when I was married. My hands were suddenly set free. But
if you drag that fardeau about with you without marriage, your hands
will always be so full that you can do nothing. Look at Mazankov, at
Krupov. They've ruined their careers for the sake of women."
  "What women!" said Vronsky, recalling the Frenchwoman and the
actress with whom the two men he had mentioned were connected.
  "The firmer the woman's footing in society, the worse it is.
That's much the same as not merely carrying the fardeau in your
arms, but tearing it away from someone else."
  "You have never loved," Vronsky said softly, looking straight before
him and thinking of Anna.
  "Perhaps. But you remember what I've said to you. And another thing-
women are all more materialistic than men. We make something immense
out of love, but they are always terre-a-terre."
  "Directly, directly!" he cried to a footman who came in. But the
footman had not come to call them again, as he supposed. The footman
brought Vronsky a note.
  "A man brought it from Princess Tverskaia."
  Vronsky opened the letter, and flushed crimson.
  "My head's begun to ache; I'm going home," he said to Serpukhovskoy.
  "Oh, good-by then. You give me carte blanche!"
  "We'll talk about it later on; I'll look you up in Peterburg."
                             XXII.

  It was six o'clock already, and so, in order to be there quickly,
and at the same time not to drive with his own horses, known to
everyone, Vronsky got into Iashvin's hackney coach and told the
coachman to drive as quickly as possible. It was a roomy,
old-fashioned coach, with seats for four. He sat in one corner,
stretched his legs out on the front seat, and sank into deep thought.
  A vague sense of the clearness to which his affairs had been
brought, a vague recollection of the friendliness and flattery of
Serpukhovskoy, who had considered him a man who was needed, and,
most of all, the anticipation of the meeting before him- all blended
into a general, joyous sense of life. This feeling was so strong
that he could not help smiling. He dropped his legs, crossed one leg
over the other knee, and, taking it in his hand, felt the springy
muscle of the calf, where it had been grazed the day before by his
fall, and, leaning back he drew several deep breaths.
  "I'm happy, very happy!" he said to himself. He had often before had
this sense of physical joy in his own body, but he had never felt so
fond of himself, of his own body, as at that moment. He enjoyed the
slight ache in his strong leg, he enjoyed the muscular sensation of
movement in his chest as he breathed. The bright, cold August day,
which had made Anna feel so hopeless, seemed to him keenly
stimulating, and refreshed his face and neck that still tingled from
the cold water. The scent of brilliantine on his mustaches struck
him as particularly pleasant in the fresh air. Everything he saw
from the carriage window, everything in that cold pure air, in the
pale light of the sunset, was as fresh, and gay, and strong as he
was himself: the roofs of the houses shining in the rays of the
setting sun, the sharp outlines of fences and angles of buildings, the
figures of passers-by and carriages that met him now and then, the
motionless green of the trees and grass, the fields with evenly
drawn furrows of potatoes, and the slanting shadows that fell from the
houses, and trees, and bushes, and even from the rows of potatoes-
everything was bright like a pretty landscape freshly painted and
varnished.
  "Get on, get on!" he said to the driver, putting his head out of the
window, and pulling a three-rouble note out of his pocket he handed it
to the man as he looked round. The driver's hand fumbled with
something at the lamp, the whip cracked, and the coach rolled
rapidly along the smooth highroad.
  "I want nothing, nothing but this happiness," he thought, staring at
the bone button of the bell in the space between the windows, and
picturing to himself Anna just as he had seen her last time. "And as I
go on, I love her more and more. Here's the garden of the Vrede's
crown villa. Whereabouts will she be? Where? How? Why did she fix on
this place to meet me, and why does she write in Betsy's letter?" he
thought, now for the first time wondering at it. But there was now
no time for wonder. He called to the driver to stop before reaching
the avenue, and opening the door, jumped out of the carriage as it was
moving, and went up the avenue that led to the house. There was no one
in the avenue; but, looking round to the right, he caught sight of
her. Her face was hidden by a veil, but he drank in with glad eyes the
special movement in walking, peculiar to her alone, the slope of her
shoulders, and the setting of her head, and at once a sort of electric
shock ran all over him. With fresh force he felt conscious of himself,
from the springy movements of his legs to the movements of his lungs
as he breathed, and something set his lips twitching.
  Joining him, she pressed his hand tightly.
  "You're not angry because I sent for you? I absolutely had to see
you," she said; and the serious and set line of her lips, which he saw
under the veil, transformed his mood at once.
  "I angry? But how have you come- where?"
  "Never mind," she said, laying her hand on his arm, "come along, I
must talk to you."
  He saw that something had happened, and that the interview would not
be a joyous one. In her presence he had no will of his own: without
knowing the grounds of her distress, he already felt the same distress
unconsciously passing over him.
  "What is it? What?" he asked her, squeezing her hand with his elbow,
and trying to read her thoughts in her face.
  She walked on a few steps in silence, gathering up her courage; then
suddenly she stopped.
  "I did not tell you yesterday," she began, breathing quickly and
painfully, "that coming home with Alexei Alexandrovich I told him
everything... told him I could not be his wife, that... and told him
everything."
  He heard her, unconsciously bending his whole figure down to her
as though hoping in this way to soften the hardness of her position
for her. But directly she had said this he suddenly drew himself up,
and a proud and hard expression came over his face.
  "Yes, yes, that's better, a thousand times better! I know how
painful it was," he said. But she was not listening to his words-
she was reading his thoughts from the expression of his face. She
could not guess that that arose from the first idea that presented
itself to Vronsky- that a duel was now inevitable. The idea of a
duel had never crossed her mind, and so she put a different
interpretation on this passing expression of hardness.
  When she got her husband's letter, she knew then at the bottom of
her heart that everything would go on in the old way, that she would
not have the strength of will to forego her position, to abandon her
son, and to join her lover. The morning spent at Princess
Tverskaia's had confirmed her still more in this. But this interview
was still of the utmost gravity for her. She hoped that this interview
would transform her position, and save her. If on hearing this news he
were to say to her resolutely, passionately, without an instant's
wavering: "Throw up everything and come with me! she would give up her
son and go away with him. But this news had not produced on him the
effect she had expected; he simply seemed resentful of some affront.
  "It was not in the least painful for me. It happened of itself," she
said irritably, "and see..." She pulled her husband's letter out of
her glove.
  "I understand, I understand," he interrupted her, taking the letter,
but not reading it, and trying to soothe her. "The one thing I
longed for, the one thing I prayed for, was to cut short this
position, so as to devote my life to your happiness."
  "Why do you tell me that?" she said. "Do you suppose I can doubt it?
If I doubted..."
  "Who's that coming?" said Vronsky suddenly, pointing to two ladies
walking toward them. "Perhaps they know us!" and he hurriedly turned
off, drawing her after him into a side path.
  "Oh, I don't care!" she said. Her lips were quivering. And he
fancied that her eyes looked with strange fury at him from under her
veil. "I tell you that's not the point- I can't doubt that; but see
what he writes me. Read it." She stood still again.
  Again, just as at the first moment of hearing of her rupture with
her husband, Vronsky, on reading the letter, was unconsciously carried
away by the natural sensation aroused in him by his own relation to
the injured husband. Now, while he held his letter in his hands, he
could not help picturing the challenge, which he would most likely
find at home today or tomorrow, and the duel itself, in which, with
the same cold and haughty expression that his face was assuming at
this moment, he would await the injured husband's shot, after having
himself fired into the air. And at that instant there flashed across
his mind the thought of what Serpukhovskoy had just said to him, and
what he had himself been thinking in the morning- that it was better
not to bind himself; and he knew that he could not tell her this
thought.
  Having read the letter, he raised his eyes to her, and there was
no firmness in them. She saw at once that he had been thinking about
it before by himself. She knew that whatever he might say to her, he
would not say all he thought. And she knew that her last hope had
failed her. This was not what she had been looking for.
  "You see the sort of man he is," she said, with a shaking voice;
"he..."
  "Forgive me, but I rejoice at it," Vronsky interrupted. "For God's
sake, let me finish!" he added, his eyes imploring her to give him
time to explain his words. "I rejoice, because things cannot, cannot
possibly remain as he supposes."
  "Why can't they?" Anna said, restraining her tears, and obviously
attaching no sort of consequence to what he said. She felt that her
fate was sealed.
  Vronsky meant that after the duel- inevitable, he thought- things
could not go on as before, but he said something different.
  "It can't go on. I hope that now you will leave him. I hope"- he was
confused, and reddened- "that you will let me arrange and plan our
life. Tomorrow..." he was beginning.
  She did not let him go on.
  "But my child!" she shrieked. "You see what he writes! I should have
to leave him, and I can't and won't do that."
  "But, for God's sake, which is better? To leave your child, or
keep up this degrading situation?"
  "To whom is it degrading?"
  "To all, and most of all to you."
  "You say degrading... Don't say that. These words have no meaning
for me," she said in a shaking voice. She did not want him now to
say what was untrue. She had nothing left her but his love, and she
wanted to love him. "Don't you understand that from the day I loved
you everything has changed for me? For me there is one thing, and
one thing only- your love. If that's mine, I feel so exalted, so
strong, that nothing can be degrading to me. I am proud of my
position, because... proud of being... proud..." She could not say
what she was proud of. Tears of shame and despair choked her
utterance. She stood still and sobbed.
  He felt, too, something swelling in his throat and twitching in
his nose, and for the first time in his life he felt on the point of
weeping. He could not have said exactly what it was touched him so; he
felt sorry for her, and he felt he could not help her, and with that
he knew  that he was to blame for her wretchedness, and that he had
done something wrong.
  "Isn't a divorce possible?" he said feebly. She shook her head,
without answering. "Couldn't you take your son, and still leave him?
  "Yes; but it all depends on him. Now I must go to him," she said
shortly. Her presentiment that all would again go on in the old way
had not deceived her.
  "On Tuesday I shall be in Peterburg, and everything can be settled."
  "Yes," she said. "But don't let us talk any more of it."
  Anna's carriage, which she had sent away, and ordered to come back
to the little gate of the Vrede garden, drove up. Anna said good-by to
Vronsky, and drove home.
                             XXIII.

  On Monday there was the usual session of the Commission of the 2nd
of June. Alexei Alexandrovich walked into the hall where the session
was held, greeted the members and the president, as usual, and sat
down in his place, putting his hand on the papers laid ready before
him. Among those papers lay the necessary evidence and a rough outline
of the speech he intended to make. But he did not really need these
documents. He remembered every point, and did not think it necessary
to go over in his memory what he would say. He knew that when the time
came, and when he saw his enemy facing him, and studiously endeavoring
to assume an expression of indifference, his speech would flow of
itself better than he could prepare it now. He felt that the import of
his speech was of such magnitude that every word of it would have
weight. Meantime, as he listened to the usual report, he had the
most innocent and inoffensive air. No one, looking at his white hands,
with their swollen veins and long fingers, so softly stroking the
edges of the white paper that lay before him, and at the air of
weariness with which his head drooped on one side, would have
suspected that in a few minutes a torrent of words would flow from his
lips that would arouse a fearful storm, set the members shouting and
attacking one another, and force the president to call for order. When
the report was over, Alexei Alexandrovich announced in his subdued,
delicate voice that he had several points to bring before the
meeting in regard to the organization of the native tribes. All
attention was turned upon him. Alexei Alexandrovich cleared his
throat, and, without looking at his opponent, but selecting, as he
always did while he was delivering his speeches, the first person
sitting opposite him, an inoffensive little old man, who never had
an opinion of any sort in the Commission, began to expound his
views. When he reached the point about the basic and organic law,
his opponent jumped up and began to protest. Stremov, who was also a
member of the Commission, and was also stung to the quick, began
defending himself, and an altogether stormy session followed; but
Alexei Alexandrovich triumphed, and his motion was carried, three
new commissions were appointed, and the next day, in a certain
Peterburg circle, nothing else was talked of but this session.
Alexei Alexandrovich's success had been even greater than he had
anticipated.
  Next morning, Tuesday, Alexei Alexandrovich, on awaking, recollected
with pleasure his triumph of the previous day, and he could not help
smiling, though he tried to appear indifferent, when the head clerk,
anxious to flatter him, informed him of the rumors that had reached
him concerning what had happened in the Commission.
  Absorbed in business with the head clerk, Alexei Alexandrovich had
completely forgotten that it was Tuesday, the day fixed by him for the
return of Anna Arkadyevna, and he was surprised and received a shock
of annoyance when a servant came in to inform him of her arrival.
  Anna had arrived in Peterburg early in the morning; the carriage had
been sent to meet her in accordance with her telegram, and so Alexei
Alexandrovich might have known of her arrival. But, when she
arrived, he did not meet her. She was told that he had not yet gone
out, but was busy with the head clerk. She sent word to her husband
that she had come, went to her own room, and occupied herself in
sorting out her things, expecting he would come to her. But an hour
passed; he did not come. She went into the dining room on the
pretext of giving some directions, and spoke loudly on purpose,
expecting him to come out there; but he did not come, though she heard
him go to the door of his study as he parted from the head clerk.
She knew that he should before long go out to his office as usual, and
she wanted to see him before that, so that their attitude to one
another might be defined.
  She walked across the drawing room and went resolutely to him.
When she went into his study he was in official uniform, obviously
ready to go out, sitting at a little table on which he rested his
elbows, looking dejectedly before him. She saw him before he saw
her, and she knew that he was thinking of her.
  On seeing her, he would have risen, but changed his mind, then his
face flushed hotly- a thing Anna had never seen before, and he got
up quickly and went to meet her, looking not at her eyes, but above
them, at her forehead and hair. He went up to her, took her by the
hand, and asked her to sit down.
  "I am very glad you have come," he said, sitting down beside her,
and, obviously wishing to say something, he stuttered. Several times
he attempted to speak, but stopped. In spite of the fact, that in
preparing herself for meeting him, she had schooled herself to despise
and accuse him, she did not know what to say to him, and she felt pity
for him. And so the silence lasted rather long: "Is Seriozha quite
well?" he said, and, without waiting for an answer, he added: "I
shan't be dining at home today, and I must go out directly."
  "I had thought of going to Moscow," she said.
  "No, you did quite, quite right to come," he said, and was silent
again.
  Seeing that he was powerless to begin the conversation, she began
herself.
  "Alexei Alexandrovich," she said, looking at him and without
dropping her eyes under his persistent gaze at her hair, "I'm a guilty
woman, I'm a bad woman, yet I am the same as I was, as I told you
then, and I have come to tell you that I can change nothing."
  "I haven't asked you about that," he said, all at once, resolutely
and with hatred looking her straight in the face; "that was as I had
supposed." Under the influence of anger he apparently regained
complete possession of all his faculties. "But as I told you then, and
have written to you," he said in a thin, shrill voice, "I repeat
now, that I am not bound to know this. I ignore it. Not all wives
are so kind as you, to be in such a hurry to communicate such
agreeable news to their husbands." He laid special emphasis on the
word "agreeable." "I shall ignore it so long as the world knows
nothing of it, so long as my name is not disgraced. And so I simply
inform you that our relations must be just as they have always been,
and that only in the event of your compromising yourself I shall be
obliged to take steps to secure my honor."
  "But our relations cannot be the same as always," Anna began in a
timid voice, looking at him with dismay.
  When she saw once more those composed gestures, heard that shrill,
childlike and sarcastic voice, her aversion for him extinguished her
pity for him, and she felt only afraid; but at all costs she wanted to
make clear her position.
  "I cannot be your wife while I..." she began.
  He laughed a cold and malignant laugh.
  "The manner of life you have chosen is reflected, I suppose, in your
ideas. I have so much of both respect and contempt- I respect your
past and despise your present- that I was far from the
interpretation you put on my words."
  Anna sighed and bowed her head.
  "Though indeed I fail to comprehend how, with the independence you
show," he went on, getting hot, "announcing your infidelity to your
husband and seeing nothing reprehensible in it, apparently, you can
see anything reprehensible in performing a wife's duties in relation
to your husband."
  "Alexei Alexandrovich! What is it you want of me?"
  "I want never to meet that man here, and I want you to conduct
yourself so that neither society, nor the servants, could possibly
reproach you.... I want you not to see him. That's not much, I
think. And in return you will enjoy all the privileges of a faithful
wife without fulfilling her duties. That's all I have to say to you.
Now it's time for me to go. I'm not dining at home." He got up and
moved toward the door.
  Anna got up too. Bowing in silence, he let her pass before him.
                             XXIV.

  The night spent by Levin on the haycock did not pass without an
effect upon him. The way in which he had been managing his land
revolted him and lost all attraction for him. In spite of the
magnificent harvest, never had there been (or, at least, it had
never seemed so to him) so many hindrances and so many quarrels
between him and the peasants as that year, and the origin of these
failures and this hostility was now perfectly comprehensible to him.
The delight he had experienced in the work itself, and the
consequent greater intimacy with the peasants, the envy he felt of
them, of their life, the desire to adopt that life, which had been
to him that night not a dream but an intention, the execution of which
he had thought out in detail- all this had so transformed his view
of the farming of the land as he had managed it, that he could not
take his former interest in it, and could not help seeing that
unpleasant relation between him and the workpeople which was the
foundation of it all. The herd of improved cows such as Pava, the
whole land plowed over and enriched, the nine level fields
surrounded with willow fences, the ninety dessiatinas heavily manured,
drill plows, and all the rest of it- it was all splendid, if only
the work had been done by himself, or by himself and his comrades,
by people in sympathy with him. But he saw clearly now (his work on
a book of agriculture, in which the chief element in husbandry was
to have been the laborer, greatly assisted him in this) that the
sort of farming he was carrying on was nothing but a cruel and
stubborn struggle between him and the laborers, in which there was
on one side- his side- a continual intense effort to change everything
to a pattern he considered better; on the other side, the natural
order of things. And in this struggle he saw that, with immense
expenditure of force on his side, and with no effort or even intention
on the other side, the sole attainment was that the work did not go to
the liking of either side, and that splendid tools, splendid cattle
and land were spoiled with no good to anyone. Worst of all, the energy
expended on this work was not merely wasted. He could not help feeling
now, since the meaning of his system had become clear to him, that the
aim of his energy was a most unworthy one. In reality, what was the
struggle about? He was struggling for every groat (and he could not
help it, for he had only to relax his efforts, and he would not have
had the money to pay his laborers' wages), while they were only
struggling to be able to do their work easily and agreeably- that is
to say, as they were used to doing it. It was for his interests that
every laborer should work as hard as possible, and that while doing so
he should keep his wits about him, so as to try not to break the
winnowing machines, the horse rakes, the threshing machines, that he
should attend to what he was doing. What the laborer wanted was to
work as pleasantly as possible, with rests, and, above all, carelessly
and heedlessly, without thinking. That summer Levin saw this at
every step. He sent the men to mow some clover for hay, picking out
the worst patches where the clover was overgrown with grass and
weeds and of no use for seed; again and again they mowed his best
dessiatinas of seed clover, justifying themselves by the pretext
that the bailiff had told them to, and trying to pacify him with the
assurance that it would make splendid hay; but he knew that it was
because those dessiatinas were so much easier to mow. He sent out a
hay machine for pitching the hay- it was broken at the first row
because it was dull work for a peasant to sit on the seat in front
with the great wings waving above him. And he was told: "Don't
trouble- sure, the womenfolks will pitch it quick enough." The plows
were practically useless, because it never occurred to the laborer
to raise the colter when he turned the plow, and in forcing it
round, he tortured the horse and spoiled the ground- and then begged
Levin not to mind it. The horses were allowed to stray into the
wheat because not a single laborer wanted to be night watchman, and,
in spite of orders to the contrary, the laborers insisted on taking
turns for night duty about the horses; and when Vanka, after working
all day long, fell asleep, he would say, very penitent for his
fault: "Do what you will to me."
  Three of the best heifers were allowed to overeat themselves to
death, by letting them into the clover aftermath without care as to
drenching them, and nothing would make the men believe that they had
been blown out by the clover, but they told Levin, by way of
consolation, that one of his neighbors had lost a hundred and twelve
head of cattle in three days. All this happened, not because anyone
felt ill will to Levin or to his farming; on the contrary, he knew
that they liked him, thinking him a simple gentleman (their highest
praise); but it happened simply because all they wanted was to work
merrily and carelessly, and his interests were not only remote and
incomprehensible to them, but fatally opposed to their most just
claims. Long before, Levin had felt dissatisfaction with his own
position in regard to the land. He saw that his boat leaked, but he
did not look for the leak, perhaps purposely deceiving himself. But
now he could deceive himself no longer. The farming of the land, as he
was managing it, had become not merely unattractive but revolting to
him, and he could take no further interest in it.
  To this now was joined the presence, only thirty verstas off, of
Kitty Shcherbatskaia, whom he longed to see and could not. Darya
Alexandrovna Oblonskaia had invited him, when he was over there, to
come; to come with the object of renewing his proposal to her
sister, who would, so she gave him to understand, accept it now. Levin
himself had felt on seeing Kitty Shcherbatskaia that he had never
ceased to love her; but he could not go over to the Oblonskys',
knowing she was there. The fact that he had proposed to her, and
that she had refused him, had placed an insuperable barrier between
her and him. "I can't ask her to be my wife merely because she can't
be the wife of the man she wanted to marry," he said to himself. The
thought of this made him cold and hostile to her. "I should not be
able to speak to her without a feeling of reproach; I could not look
at her without resentment; and she will only hate me all the more,
as she's bound to. And besides, how can I now, after what Darya
Alexandrovna told me, go to see them? Can I help showing that I know
what she told me? And I shall come to forgive her magnanimously, and
take pity on her! And go through a performance before her of
forgiving, and deigning to bestow my love on her!... Why did Darya
Alexandrovna tell me that? I might have seen her by chance- then
everything would have happened of itself; but, as it is, it's out of
the question- out of the question!"
  Darya Alexandrovna sent him a letter, asking him for a sidesaddle
for Kitty's use. "I'm told you have a sidesaddle," she wrote to him;
"I hope you will bring it over yourself."
  This was more than he could stand. How could a woman of any
intelligence, of any delicacy, put her sister in such a humiliating
position! He wrote ten notes, and tore them all up, and then sent
the saddle without any reply. To write that he would come was
impossible, because he could not come; to write that he could not come
because something prevented him, or that he would be away, would be
still worse. He sent the saddle without any answer; and with a sense
of having done something shameful, he handed over all the now
revolting business of the estate to his bailiff, and set off next
day to a remote district to see his friend Sviiazhsky, who had
splendid marshes for double snipes in his neighborhood, and had lately
written, asking him to keep a long-standing promise to visit him.
The snipe marsh, in the Surovsky district, had long tempted Levin, but
he had continually put off this visit on account of his work on the
estate. Now he was glad to get away from the neighborhood of the
Shcherbatskys, and still more from his farmwork, especially on a
shooting expedition, which always served as the best consolation in
trouble.
                             XXV.

  In the Surovsky district there was neither railway nor mail coach,
and Levin drove there with his own horses in his tarantass.
  He stopped halfway at a well-to-do peasant's to feed his horses. A
bald, well-preserved old man, with a broad, red beard, grizzled on his
cheeks, opened the gate, squeezing against the gatepost to let the
troika pass. Directing the coachman to a place under the shed in the
big, clean, tidy new yard, with charred, wooden plows in it, the old
man asked Levin to come into the room. A cleanly dressed young
housewife, with clogs on her bare feet, was scrubbing the floor in the
new outer room. She was frightened by the dog that ran in after Levin,
and uttered a shriek, but began laughing at her own fright at once
when she was told the dog would not hurt her. Pointing out to Levin
with her bare arm the door into the room, she bent down again,
hiding her handsome face, and went on scrubbing.
  "Would you like a samovar?" she asked.
  "Yes, please."
  The room was a big one, with a tile stove, and a partition
dividing it into two. Under the icons stood a table painted in
patterns, a bench and two chairs. Near the entrance was a dresser full
of crockery. The shutters were closed, there were few flies, and it
was so clean that Levin was anxious that Laska, who had been running
along the road and bathing in puddles, should not muddy the floor, and
ordered her to a place in the corner by the door. After looking
round the room, Levin went out in the back yard. The comely young
housewife in clogs, swinging the empty pails on the yoke, ran on
before him to the well for water.
  "Look sharp, my girl!" the old man shouted after her,
good-humoredly, and he walked up to Levin. "Well, sir, are you going
to Nikolai Ivanovich Sviiazhsky? He comes to us too," he began
chatting, leaning his elbows on the railing of the steps. In the
middle of the old man's account of his acquaintance with Sviiazhsky,
the gates creaked again, and laborers came into the yard from the
fields, with wooden plows and harrows. The horses harnessed to the
plows and harrows were sleek and fat. The laborers were obviously of
the household: two were young men in cotton-print shirts and caps, the
two others were hired laborers in homespun shirts, one an old man, the
other a young fellow.
  Moving off from the steps, the old man went up to the horses and
began unharnessing them.
  "What have they been plowing?" asked Levin.
  "Plowing up the potatoes. We rent a bit of land too. Fedot, don't
let out the gelding, but take it to the trough, and we'll put
another in harness."
  "Oh, father, about the plowshares I ordered- has he brought them
along?" asked the big, robust fellow, obviously the old man's son.
  "There... in the sledge," answered the old man, rolling up the reins
he had taken off, and flinging them on the ground. "You can put them
right, while they have dinner."
  The comely young housewife came into the outer room with the full
pails dragging at her shoulders. More women came on the scene from
somewhere, young and handsome, middle-aged, old and ugly, with
children and without children.
  The samovar was beginning to sing; the laborers and the family,
having disposed of the horses, came in to dinner. Levin, getting his
provisions out of his carriage, invited the old man to take tea with
him.
  "Well, I have had some today already," said the old man, obviously
accepting the invitation with pleasure. "Well, be it so, for company."
  Over their tea Levin heard all about the old man's farming. Ten
years before the old man had rented a hundred and twenty dessiatinas
from the lady who owned them, and a year ago he had bought them and
rented another three hundred from a neighboring landowner. A small
part of the land- the worst part- he let out for rent, while some
forty dessiatinas of arable land he cultivated himself, with his
family and two hired laborers. The old man complained that things were
going badly. But Levin saw that he simply did so from a feeling of
propriety, and that his farm was in a flourishing condition. If it had
been unsuccessful he would not have bought land at a hundred and
five roubles the dessiatina, he would not have married off his three
sons and a nephew, he would not have rebuilt twice after fires, and
each time on a larger scale. In spite of the old man's complaints,
it was evident that he was proud, and justly proud, of his prosperity,
proud of his sons, his nephew, his sons' wives, his horses, and his
cows, and especially of the fact that he was keeping all this
farming going. From his conversation with the old man, Levin
realized he was not averse to new methods either. He had planted a
great many potatoes, and his potatoes, as Levin had seen driving past,
were already past flowering and beginning to ripen, whereas Levin's
were only just coming into flower. He plowed the ground for his
potatoes with a modern plow borrowed from a neighboring landowner.
He sowed wheat. The trifling fact that, thinning out his rye, the
old man used the rye he thinned out for his horses, struck Levin
especially. How many times had Levin seen this splendid fodder wasted,
and tried to get it saved; but always it had turned out to be
impossible. This peasant had done so, and he could not say enough in
praise of it as food for the beasts.
  "What have the wenches to do? They carry it out in bundles to the
roadside, and the cart brings it away."
  "Well, we landowners can't manage well with our laborers," said
Levin, handing him a glass of tea.
  "Thanks," said the old man, and he took the glass, but refused
sugar, pointing to a bit he had left. "There's no getting along with
them," said he. "They're simple waste. Look at Sviiazhsky, for
instance. We know what the land's like- first-rate; yet there's not
much of a crop to boast of. It's not looked after enough- that's all
it is!"
  "But you work your land with hired laborers?"
  "We're all peasants together. We go into everything ourselves. If
a man's no use, he can go, and we can manage by ourselves."
  "Father Finogen wants some tar," said the young woman in the
clogs, coming in.
  "Yes, yes, that's how it is, sir!" said the old man, getting up,
and, crossing himself lingeringly, he thanked Levin and went out.
  When Levin went in the kitchen to call his coachman he saw the whole
family of men at dinner. The women were standing up waiting on them.
The young, robust son was telling something funny, with his mouth full
of buckwheat porridge, and they were all laughing- the woman in the
clogs, who was pouring cabbage soup into a bowl, laughing most merrily
of all.
  Very probably the comely face of the young woman in the clogs had
a good deal to do with the impression of well-being this peasant
household made upon Levin, but the impression was so strong that Levin
could never get rid of it. And all the way from the old peasant's to
Sviiazhsky's he kept recalling this peasant farm as though there
were something in this impression demanding his special attention.
                             XXVI.

  Sviiazhsky was the marshal of his district. He was five years
older than Levin, and had long been married. His sister-in-law, a
young girl Levin liked very much, lived in his house; and Levin knew
that Sviiazhsky and his wife would have greatly liked to marry the
girl to him. He knew this with certainty, as so-called eligible
young men always know it, though he could never have brought himself
to speak of it to anyone; and he also knew that, although he wanted to
get married, and although by every token this very attractive girl
would make an excellent wife, he could no more have married her,
even if he had not been in love with Kitty Shcherbatskaia, than he
could have flown up to the sky. And this knowledge poisoned the
pleasure he had hoped to find in the visit to Sviiazhsky.
  On getting Sviiazhsky's letter with the invitation for shooting,
Levin had immediately thought of this; but, in spite of it, he had
made up his mind that Sviiazhsky's having such views for him was
simply his own groundless supposition, and so he would go,
notwithstanding. Besides, at the bottom of his heart, he had a
desire to try himself, to put himself to the test in regard to this
girl. The Sviiazhskys' home life was exceedingly pleasant, and
Sviiazhsky himself, the best type of Zemstvo man that Levin knew,
was very interesting to him.
  Sviiazhsky was one of those people, always a source of wonder to
Levin, whose convictions, very logical though never original, go one
way by themselves, while their life, exceedingly definite and firm
in its course, goes its way quite apart and almost always in direct
contradiction to their convictions. Sviiazhsky was an extremely
advanced man. He despised the nobility, and believed the mass of the
nobility to be secretly in favor of serfdom, and only concealing their
views out of cowardice. He regarded Russia as a ruined country, rather
after the style of Turkey, and the government of Russia as so bad that
he never permitted himself to criticize its doings seriously, and
yet he was a functionary of that government, and a model marshal of
nobility, and when he drove about he always wore his cap with the
cockade and red band. He considered human life only tolerable
abroad, and went abroad to stay at every opportunity, and at the
same time he carried on a complex and improved system of agriculture
in Russia, and with extreme interest followed everything and knew
everything that was being done in Russia. He considered the Russian
peasant as occupying a stage of development intermediate between the
ape and the man, and at the same time in the days of Zemstvo
election no one was readier to shake hands with the peasants and
listen to their opinion. He believed neither in God nor the devil, but
was much concerned about the question of the improvement of the clergy
and the maintenance of their revenues, and took special trouble to
keep up the church in his village.
  On the woman question he was on the side of the extreme advocates of
complete liberty for women, and especially their right to labor. But
he lived with his wife on such terms that their affectionate,
childless home life was the admiration of everyone, and arranged his
wife's life so that she did nothing and could do nothing but share her
husband's preoccupations in spending their time as happily and as
agreeably as possible.
  If it had not been a characteristic of Levin to put the most
favorable interpretation on people, Sviiazhsky's character would
have presented no doubt or difficulty to him: he would have said to
himself, "a fool or a knave," and everything would have seemed
clear. But he could not say a fool, because Sviiazhsky was
unmistakably clever, and, moreover, a highly cultivated man, who was
exceptionally modest over his culture. There was not a subject he knew
nothing of. But he did not display his knowledge except when he was
compelled to do so. Still less could Levin say that he was a knave, as
Sviiazhsky was unmistakably an honest, goodhearted, sensible man,
who worked good-humoredly, keenly, and perseveringly at his work,
which was held in high honor by everyone about him, and certainly he
had never consciously done, and was indeed incapable of doing,
anything base.
  Levin tried to understand him, and could not understand him, and
looked at him and his life as at a living enigma.
  Levin and he were very friendly, and so Levin used to venture to
sound Sviiazhsky, to try to get at the very foundation of his view
of life; but it was always in vain. Every time Levin tried to
penetrate beyond the outer chambers of Sviiazhsky's mind, which were
hospitably open to all, he noticed that Sviiazhsky was slightly
disconcerted; faint signs of alarm were visible in his eyes, as though
he were afraid Levin would understand him, and he would give him a
kindly, good-humored rebuff.
  Just now, since his disenchantment with farming, Levin was
particularly glad to stay with Sviiazhsky. Apart from the fact that
the sight of this happy and affectionate couple, so pleased with
themselves and everyone else, and their well-ordered home, had
always a cheering effect on Levin, he felt a longing, now that he
was so dissatisfied with his own life, to get at that secret in
Sviiazhsky which gave him such clarity, definiteness, and good courage
in life. Moreover, Levin knew that at Sviiazhsky's he would meet the
landowners of the neighborhood, and it was particularly interesting
for him just now to hear and take part in those rural conversations
concerning crops, laborers' wages, and so on, which, Levin was
aware, are conventionally regarded as something very low, but which
seemed to him just now to constitute the one subject of importance.
"It was not, perhaps, of importance in the days of serfdom, and it may
not be of importance in England. In both cases the conditions of
agriculture are firmly established; but among us now, when
everything has been turned topsy-turvy, and is only just taking shape,
the question what form these conditions will take is the one
question of importance in Russia," thought Levin.
  The shooting turned out to be poorer than Levin expected. The
marsh was dry and there were no snipe at all. He walked about the
whole day and only brought back three birds, but to make up for that
he brought back, as he always did from shooting, an excellent
appetite, excellent spirits, and that keen, intellectual mood which
with him always accompanied violent physical exertion. And while out
shooting, when he seemed to be thinking of nothing at all, the old man
and his family would time and again come to mind, and the impression
of them seemed to claim not merely his attention, but the solution
of some question connected with them.
  In the evening, at tea, two landowners who had come about some
business connected with a wardship were of the party, and the
interesting conversation Levin had been looking forward to sprang up.
  Levin was sitting beside his hostess at the tea table, and was
obliged to keep up a conversation with her and her sister, who was
sitting opposite him. Madame Sviiazhsky was a round-faced,
fair-haired, rather short woman, all smiles and dimples. Levin tried
through her to get at a solution of the weighty enigma her husband
presented to his mind; but he had not complete freedom of ideas,
because he was in an agony of embarrassment. This agony of
embarrassment was due to the fact that the sister-in-law was sitting
opposite to him, in a dress, specially put on, as he fancied, for
his benefit, cut particularly open, in the shape of a trapeze, at
her white bosom. This quadrangular opening, in spite of the bosom's
being very white, or just because it was very white, deprived Levin of
the full use of his faculties. He imagined, probably mistakenly,
that this low-necked bodice had been made on his account, and felt
that he had no right to look at it, and tried not to look at it; but
he felt that he was to blame for the very fact of the low-necked
bodice having been made. It seemed to Levin that he had imposed upon
someone, that he ought to explain something, but that to explain it
was impossible, and for that reason he was continually blushing, was
ill at ease and awkward. His awkwardness infected the pretty
sister-in-law too. But their hostess appeared not to observe this, and
kept purposely drawing her into the conversation.
  "You say," she said, pursuing the subject that had been started,
"that my husband cannot be interested in what's Russian. It's quite
the contrary; he is in cheerful spirits abroad, but never in such as
he is here. Here he feels in his proper place. He has so much to do,
and he has the faculty of interesting himself in everything. Oh,
you've not been to see our school, have you?"
  "I've seen it.... The little house covered with ivy, isn't it?"
  "Yes; that's Nastia's work," she said, indicating her sister.
  "You teach in it yourself?" asked Levin, trying to look above the
open neck, but feeling that no matter where he looked in that
direction he should see it.
  "Yes; I used to teach in it myself, and do teach still, but we
have a first-rate schoolmistress now. And we've started gymnastic
exercises."
  "No, thank you, I won't have any more tea," said Levin, and
conscious of doing a rude thing, but incapable of continuing the
conversation, he got up, blushing. "I hear a very interesting
conversation," he added, and walked to the other end of the table,
where Sviiazhsky was sitting with the two gentlemen of the
neighborhood. Sviiazhsky was sitting sideways, with one elbow on the
table, and a cup in one hand, while with the other hand he gathered up
his beard, held it to his nose and let it drop again, as though he
were smelling it. His brilliant black eyes were looking directly at
the excited country gentleman with gray mustaches, and apparently he
derived amusement from his remarks. The gentleman was complaining of
the peasants. It was evident to Levin that Sviiazhsky knew the
answer to this gentleman's complaints, which would at once demolish
his whole contention, but that in his position he could not give
utterance to this answer, and listened, not without pleasure, to the
landowner's comic talk.
  The gentleman with the gray mustaches was obviously an inveterate
adherent of serfdom and a devoted agriculturist, who had lived all his
life in the country. Levin saw proofs of this in his dress, in his
old-fashioned threadbare coat, obviously not his everyday attire, in
his shrewd, deep-set eyes, in his coherent Russian, in the imperious
tone that had become habitual from long use, and in the resolute
gestures of his large, beautiful sunburned hands, with a single old
wedding ring on his fourth finger.
                             XXVII.

  "If I'd only the heart to throw up what's been set going... such a
lot of trouble wasted... I'd turn my back on the whole business,
sell out, go off like Nikolai Ivanovich... to hear La Belle Helene,"
said the landowner, a pleasant smile lighting up his shrewd old face.
  "But, you see, you don't throw it up," said Nikolai Ivanovich
Sviiazhsky, "so there must be something gained."
  "The only gain is that I live in my own house, neither bought nor
hired. Besides, one keeps hoping the people will learn sense.
Though, instead of that, believe it or not, there is such drunkenness,
such immorality!... They keep making partition of their bits of
land; there isn't a horse or a cow. The peasant's dying of hunger, but
just go and take him on as a laborer- he'll do his best to do you a
mischief, and then bring you up before the justice of the peace."
  "But then, you make complaints to the justice too," said Sviiazhsky.
  "I lodge complaints? Not for anything in the world There's so much
talk springs up that one is sorry ever to have complained. At the
works, for instance, they pocketed the advance money and made off.
What did the justice do? Why, acquitted them. Nothing keeps them in
order but their own communal court and their village elder. He'll flog
them in the good old style! But for that there'd be nothing for it but
to give it all up and run away."
  Obviously the landowner was chaffing Sviiazhsky, who, far from
resenting it, was apparently amused by it.
  "But, you see, we manage our land without such extreme measures,"
said he, smiling: "Levin, and I, and this gentleman."
  He indicated the other landowner.
  "Yes, the thing's done at Mikhail Petrovich's, but ask him how
it's done. Do you call that a rational system?" said the landowner,
obviously rather proud of the word "rational".
  "My system's very simple," said Mikhail Petrovich, "thank God. All
my management rests on getting the money ready for the autumn
taxes.... The peasants come to me, 'Father, master, help us!' Well,
the peasants are all one's neighbors; one feels for them. So one
advances them a third, but one says: 'Remember, lads, I have helped
you, and you must help me when I need it- whether it's the sowing of
the oats, or the hay cutting, or the harvest'; and well, one agrees,
so much for each taxpayer- though there are dishonest ones among
them too, it's true."
  Levin, who had long been familiar with these patriarchal methods,
exchanged glances with Sviiazhsky and interrupted Mikhail Petrovich,
turning again to the gentleman with the gray mustaches.
  "Well, what do you think?" he asked. "What system is one to adopt
nowadays?"
  "Why, manage like Mikhail Petrovich, or let the land for half the
crop or for rent to the peasants; one can do that- only that's just
how the general prosperity of the country is being ruined. Where the
land with serf labor and good management gave a yield of nine to
one, on the metayage system it yields three to one. Russia has been
ruined by the emancipation!"
  Sviiazhsky looked with smiling eyes at Levin, and even made a
faint gesture of irony to him; but Levin did not think the landowner's
words absurd; he understood them better than he did Sviiazhsky. A
great deal more of what the landowner said to show in what way
Russia was ruined by the emancipation struck him indeed as very
true, new to him, and quite incontestable. The landowner
unmistakably spoke his own individual thought- a thing that rarely
happens- and a thought to which he had been brought not by a desire of
finding some exercise for an idle brain, but a thought which had grown
up out of the conditions of his life, which he had brooded over in the
solitude of his village, and had considered in every aspect.
  "The point is, don't you see, that progress of every sort is only
made by the use of authority," he said, evidently wishing to show he
was not without culture. "Take the reforms of Peter, of Catherine,
of Alexander. Take European history. And progress in agriculture
more than anything else- the potato, for instance, that was introduced
among us by force. The wooden plow, too, wasn't always used. It was
introduced in the days of appanaged princes, perhaps, but it was
probably brought in by force. Now, in our own day, we landowners in
the serf times used various improvements in our husbandry: drying
machines and threshing machines, and carting manure, and all the
modern implements- all these we brought into use by our authority, and
the peasants opposed it at first, and ended by imitating us. Now, by
the abolition of serfdom, we have been deprived of our authority;
and so our husbandry, where it had been raised to a high level, is
bound to sink to the most savage, primitive condition. That's how I
see it."
  "But why so? If it's rational, you'll be able to keep up the same
system with hired labor," said Sviiazhsky.
  "We've no power over them. With whom am I going to work the
system, allow me to ask?"
  "There it is- the labor force- the chief element in agriculture,"
thought Levin.
  "With laborers."
  "The laborers won't work well, and won't work with good
implements. Our laborer can do nothing but get drunk, like a swine,
and then ruin everything you give him. He spoils the horses by
watering unseasonably, he cuts good harness, barters the tires of
the wheels for drink, drops bits of iron into the threshing machine,
so as to break it. He loathes the sight of anything that's not after
his fashion. And that's how the whole level of husbandry has fallen.
Lands gone out of cultivation, overgrown with weeds, or divided
among the peasants, and where millions of chetverts were raised you
get a hundred thousand; the wealth of the country has decreased. If
the same thing had been done, but with consideration for..."
  And he proceeded to unfold his own scheme of emancipation by means
of which these drawbacks might have been avoided.
  This did not interest Levin, but, when he had finished, Levin went
back to his first position, and, addressing Sviiazhsky, and trying
to draw him into expressing his serious opinion, said:
  "It's perfectly true that the standard of culture is falling, and
that with our present relations to the peasants there is no
possibility of farming on a rational system to yield a profit," said
he.
  "I don't believe it," Sviiazhsky replied quite seriously; "all I see
is that we don't know how to cultivate the land, and that our system
of agriculture in the serf days was by no means too high, but too low.
We have no machines, no good stock, no efficient supervision; we don't
even know how to keep accounts. Ask any landowner; he won't be able to
tell you which crop's profitable, and which isn't."
  "Italian bookkeeping," said the landowner ironically. "You may
keep your books as you like, but if they spoil everything for you,
there won't be any profit."
  "Why do they spoil things? A poor threshing machine, or your Russian
presser, they will break, but my steam press they don't break. A
wretched Russian nag they'll ruin, but keep good percherons or the
Russian wagon horses- they won't ruin them. And so it is all round. We
must raise our farming to a higher level."
  "Oh, if one only had the means to do it, Nikolai Ivanovich! It's all
very well for you; but for me, with a son to keep at the university,
lads to be educated at the high school- how am I going to buy these
percherons?"
  "Well, that's what the banks are for."
  "To get whatever I have left sold by auction? No, thank you."
  "I don't agree that it's necessary or possible to raise the level of
agriculture still higher," said Levin. "I devote myself to it, and I
have means, but I can do nothing. As to the banks, I don't know to
whom they're any good. For my part, anyway, whatever I've spent
money on in the way of husbandry has been a loss: stock- a loss,
machinery- a loss."
  "That's true enough," the gentleman with the gray mustaches chimed
in, even laughing with satisfaction.
  "And I'm not the only one," pursued Levin. "I mix with all the
neighboring landowners, who are cultivating their land on a rational
system; they all, with rare exceptions, are doing so at a loss.
Come, tell us how does your land do- does it pay?" said Levin, and
at once in Sviiazhsky's eyes he detected that fleeting expression of
alarm which he had noticed whenever he had tried to penetrate beyond
the outer chambers of Sviiazhsky's mind.
  Moreover, this question on Levin's part was not quite in good faith.
Madame Sviiazhsky had just told him at tea that they had that summer
invited a German expert accountant from Moscow, who for a
consideration of five hundred roubles had investigated the
management of their property, and found that it was costing them a
loss of three thousand odd roubles. She did not remember the precise
sum, but it appeared that the German had worked it out to the fraction
of a kopeck.
  The landowner smiled at the mention of the profits of Sviiazhsky's
farming, obviously aware how much gain his neighbor and marshal was
likely to be making.
  "Possibly it does not pay," answered Sviiazhsky. "That merely proves
that either I'm a bad manager, or that I've sunk my capital for the
increase of my rents."
  "Oh, rent!" Levin cried with horror. "Rent there may be in Europe,
where land has been improved by the labor put into it; but with us all
the land is deteriorating from the labor put into it- in other
words, they're working it out; so there's no question of rent."
  "How- no rent? It's a law."
  "Then we're outside the law; rent explains nothing for us, but
simply muddles us. No, tell me how there can be a theory of rent?..."
  "Will you have some curded milk? Masha, pass us some curded milk
or raspberries." He turned to his wife. "The raspberries are lasting
extraordinarily late this year."
  And in the happiest frame of mind Sviiazhsky got up and walked
off, apparently supposing the conversation to have ended at the very
point when to Levin it seemed that it was only just beginning.
  Having lost his antagonist, Levin continued the conversation with
the landowner, trying to prove to him that all the difficulty arises
from the fact that we don't find out the peculiarities and habits of
our laborer; but the landowner, like all men who think independently
and in isolation, was slow in taking in any other person's thought,
and particularly partial to his own. He stuck to it that the Russian
peasant is a swine and likes swinishness, and that to get him out of
his swinishness one must have authority, and there is none; one must
have the stick, and we have become so liberal that we have all of a
sudden replaced the stick, that served us for a thousand years, with
lawyers and model prisons, where the worthless, stinking peasant is
fed on good soup and has a fixed allowance of cubic feet of air.
  "What makes you think," said Levin, trying to get back to the
question, "that it's impossible to find some relation to the laborer
in which the labor would become productive?"
  "That never could be so with the Russian people; we've no
authority," answered the landowner.
  "How can new conditions be found?" said Sviiazhsky. Having eaten
some curded milk and lighted a cigarette, he came back to the
discussion. "All possible relations to the labor force have been
defined and studied," he said. "The relic of barbarism, the
primitive commune with a guarantee for all, will disappear of
itself; serfdom has been abolished- there remains nothing but free
labor, and its forms are fixed and ready made, and must be adopted.
Permanent hands, day laborers, farmers- you can't get out of those
forms."
  "But Europe is dissatisfied with these forms."
  "Dissatisfied, and seeking new ones. And will find them, in all
probability."
  "That's just what I meant," answered Levin. "Why shouldn't we seek
them for ourselves?"
  "Because it would be just like inventing afresh the means for
constructing railways. They are ready, invented."
  "But if they don't suit us, if they're stupid?" said Levin.
  And again he detected the expression of alarm in the eyes of
Sviiazhsky.
  "Oh, yes; we'll bury the world under our caps! We've found the
secret Europe was seeking for! I've heard all that; but, excuse me, do
you know all that's been done in Europe on the question of the
organization of labor?"
  "No, very little."
  "That question is now absorbing the best minds in Europe. The
Schulze-Delitsch movement.... And then, all this enormous literature
of the labor question, the most liberal Lassalle movement.... The
Mulhausen experiment? That's a fact by now, as you're probably aware."
  "I have some idea of it, but very vague."
  "No, you only say that; no doubt you know all about it as well as
I do. I'm no professor of sociology, of course, but it interested
me, and really, if it interests you, you ought to study it."
  "But what conclusion have they come to?"
  "Excuse me..."
  The two neighbors had risen, and Sviiazhsky, once more checking
Levin in his inconvenient habit of peeping into what was beyond the
outer chambers of his mind, went to see his guests out.
                             XXVIII.

  Levin was insufferably bored that evening with the ladies; he was
stirred as he had never been before by the idea that the
dissatisfaction he was feeling with his system of managing his land
was not an exceptional case, but the general condition of things in
Russia; that the evolving of some relation of the laborers to the soil
which they would work, as with the peasant he had met halfway to the
Sviiazhskys', was not a dream, but a problem which must be solved. And
it seemed to him that the problem could be solved, and that he ought
to try to solve it.
  After saying good night to the ladies, and promising to stay the
whole of the next day, so as to make an expedition on horseback with
them to see an interesting gap in the crown forest, Levin went, before
going to bed, into his host's study to get the books on the labor
question that Sviiazhsky had offered him. Sviiazhsky's study was a
huge room, by bookcases and with two tables in it- one a massive
writing table, standing in the middle of the room, and the other a
round table, covered with recent numbers of reviews and journals in
different languages, ranged like the rays of a star round a lamp. On
the writing table was a stand of drawers marked with gold labels,
and full of papers of various sorts.
  Sviiazhsky took out the books, and sat down in a rocking chair.
  "What are you looking at there?" he said to Levin, who was
standing at the round table looking through the reviews. "Oh, yes,
there's a very interesting article here," said Sviiazhsky, pointing to
the review Levin was holding in his hand. "It appears," he went on,
with eager interest, "that Friedrich was not, after all, the person
chiefly responsible for the partition of Poland. It is proved..."
  And, with his characteristic clearness, he summed up those new, very
important, and interesting revelations. Although Levin was engrossed
at the moment by his ideas about the problem of the land, he wondered,
as he heard Sviiazhsky: "What is there inside of him? And why, why
is he interested in the partition of Poland?" When Sviiazhsky had
finished, Levin could not help asking: "Well, and what then?" But
there was nothing to follow. It was simply interesting that such and
such had been "proved." But Sviiazhsky did not explain, and saw no
need of explaining, why it was interesting to him.
  "Yes, but I was very much interested by your irritable neighbor,"
said Levin, sighing. "He's a clever fellow, and said a lot that was
true."
  "Oh, get along with you! An inveterate supporter of serfdom at
heart, like all of them!" said Sviiazhsky.
  "Whose marshal you are."
  "Yes, only I marshal them in the other direction," said
Sviiazhsky, laughing.
  "I'll tell you what interests me very much," said Levin. "He's right
that our system, that is to say, of rational farming, doesn't
answer; that the only thing that answers is the moneylender system,
like that meek-looking gentleman's, or else the very simplest. Whose
fault is it?"
  "Our own, of course. Besides, it's not true that it doesn't
answer. It answers with Vassilchikov."
  "A factory..."
  "But I really don't know what it is you are surprised at. The people
are at such a low stage of material and moral development, that
obviously they're bound to oppose everything that's necessary to them.
In Europe, a rational system answers because the people are
educated; it follows that we must educate the people- that's all."
  "But how are we to educate the people?"
  "To educate the people three things are needed: schools, and
schools, and schools."
  "But you said yourself the people are at such a low stage of
material development: what help are schools for that?"
  "Do you know, you remind me of the story of the advice given to
the sick man.- You should try purgative medicine. Taken it: worse. Try
leeches. Tried them: worse. Well, then, there's nothing left but to
pray to God. Tried it: worse. That's just how it is with us. I say
political economy; you say- worse. I say socialism- worse.
Education- worse."
  "But how do schools help matters?"
  "They give the peasant fresh wants."
  "Well, that's a thing I've never understood," Levin replied with
heat. "In what way are schools going to help the people to improve
their material position? You say schools, education, will give them
fresh wants. So much the worse, since they won't be capable of
satisfying them. And in what way a knowledge of addition and
subtraction and the catechism is going to improve their material
condition, I never could make out. The day before yesterday I met a
peasant woman in the evening with a little baby, and asked her where
she was going. She said she was going to the wisewoman; her boy had
screaming fits, so she was taking him to be doctored. I asked, 'Why,
how does the wisewoman cure screaming fits?' 'She puts the child on
the hen roost and repeats some charm....'"
  "Well, you're saying it yourself! What's wanted to prevent her
taking her child to the hen roost to cure it of screaming fits is
just..." Sviiazhsky said, smiling good-humoredly.
  "Oh, no!" said Levin with annoyance; "that method of doctoring I
merely meant as a simile for doctoring the people with schools. The
people are poor and ignorant- that we see as surely as the peasant
woman sees the baby has fits because it screams. But in what way
this trouble of poverty and ignorance is to be cured by schools is
as incomprehensible as how the hen roost affects the screaming. What
has to be cured is what makes him poor."
  "Well, in that, at least, you're in agreement with Spencer, whom you
dislike so much. He says, too, that education may be the consequence
of greater prosperity and comfort, of more frequent washing, as he
says, but not of being able to read and write...."
  "Well, then, I'm very glad- or the contrary, very sorry- that I'm in
agreement with Spencer; only I've known it a long while. Schools can
do no good; what will do good is an economic organization in which the
people will become richer, will have more leisure- and then there will
be schools."
  "Still, all over Europe now schools are obligatory."
  "And how far do you agree with Spencer yourself about it?" asked
Levin.
  But there was a gleam of alarm in Sviiazhsky's eyes, and he said
smiling:
  "No; that screaming story is positively capital! Did you really hear
it yourself?"
  Levin saw that he was not to discover the connection between this
man's life and his thoughts. Obviously he did not care in the least
what his reasoning led him to; all he wanted was the process of
reasoning. And he did not like it when the process of reasoning
brought him into a blind alley. That was the only thing he disliked,
and avoided by changing the conversation to something agreeable and
amusing.
  All the impressions of the day, beginning with the impression made
by the old peasant, which served, as it were, as the thorough bass
of all the conceptions and ideas of the day, threw Levin into
violent excitement. This dear good Sviiazhsky, keeping a stock of
ideas simply for public purposes, and obviously having some other
principles hidden from Levin, while with the crowd, whose name is
legion, he guided public opinion by ideas he did not share; that
irascible country gentleman, perfectly correct in the conclusions that
he had been worried into by life, but wrong in his exasperation
against a whole class, and that the best class in Russia; his own
dissatisfaction with the work he had been doing, and the vague hope of
finding a remedy for all this- all was blended in a sense of inward
turmoil, and the anticipation of some solution near at hand.
  Left alone in the room assigned him, lying on a spring mattress,
that yielded unexpectedly at every movement of his arm or his leg,
Levin did not fall asleep for a long while. Not one conversation
with Sviiazhsky, though he had said a great deal that was clever,
had interested Levin; but the conclusions of the irascible landowner
required consideration. Levin could not help recalling every word he
had said, and in imagination amending his own replies.
  "Yes, I ought to have said to him: You say that our husbandry does
not answer because the peasant hates improvements, and that they
must be forced on him by authority. If no system of husbandry answered
at all without these improvements, you would be quite right. But the
only system that does answer is when the laborer is working in
accordance with his habits, just as on the old peasant's land
halfway here. Your and our general dissatisfaction with the system
shows that either we are to blame or the laborers. We have gone our
way- the European way- a long while, without asking ourselves about
the qualities of our labor force. Let us try to look upon the labor
force not as an abstract force but as the Russian mouzhik with his
instincts, and let us arrange our system of agriculture in
accordance with that. Imagine, I ought to have said to him, that you
have the same system as the old peasant has, that you have found means
of making your laborers take an interest in the success of the work,
and have found the happy mean in the way of improvements which they
will admit, and you will, without exhausting the soil, get twice or
three times the yield you got before. Divide it in halves, give half
as the share of labor, the surplus left you will be greater, and
labor's share will be greater too. And to do this one must lower the
standard of husbandry and interest the laborers in its success. How to
do this?- that's a matter of detail; but undoubtedly it can be done."
  This idea threw Levin into a great excitement. He did not sleep half
the night, thinking over in detail the putting of his idea into
practice. He had not intended to go away next day, but he now
determined to go home early in the morning. Besides, the sister-in-law
with her low-necked bodice aroused in him a feeling akin to shame
and remorse for some utterly base action. Most important of all- he
must get back without delay: he would have to make haste to put his
new project to the peasants before the sowing of the winter wheat,
so that the sowing might be undertaken on a new basis. He had made
up his mind to revolutionize his whole system.
                             XXIX.

  The carrying out of Levin's plan presented many difficulties; but he
struggled on, doing his utmost, and attained a result which, though
not what he desired, was enough to enable him, without self-deception,
to believe that the attempt was worth the trouble. One of the chief
difficulties was that the process of cultivating the land was in
full swing, that it was impossible to stop everything and begin it all
again from the beginning, and the machine had to be mended while in
motion.
  When on the evening of his arrival home he informed the bailiff of
his plans, the latter with visible pleasure agreed with what he
said, so long as he was pointing out that all that had been done up to
that time was stupid and useless. The bailiff said that he had said so
a long while ago, but no heed had been paid him. But as for the
proposal made by Levin- to take a part as shareholder with his
laborers in each agricultural undertaking- at this the bailiff
simply expressed a profound despondency, and offered no definite
opinion, but began immediately talking of the urgent necessity of
carrying the remaining sheaves of rye the next day, and of sending the
men out for the second plowing, so that Levin felt that this was not
the time for discussing it.
  On beginning to talk to the peasants about it, and making a
proposition to cede them the land on new terms, he came into collision
with the same great difficulty- that they were so much absorbed by the
current work of the day that they had not time to consider the
advantages and disadvantages of the proposed scheme.
  The simplehearted Ivan, the cowherd, seemed to grasp Levin's
proposal fully- that he should with his family take a share of the
profits of the cattle yard- and he was in complete sympathy with the
plan. But when Levin hinted at the future advantages, Ivan's face
expressed alarm and regret that he could not hear all he had to say,
and he made haste to find himself some task that would admit of no
delay: he either snatched up the fork to pitch the hay out of the
pens, or ran to get water or to clear out the manure.
  Another difficulty lay in the invincible disbelief of the peasants
that a landowner's object could be anything else than a desire to
squeeze all he could out of them. They were firmly convinced that
his real aim (whatever he might say to them) would always be in what
he did not say to them. And they themselves, in giving their
opinion, said a great deal but never said what was their real
object. Moreover (Levin felt that the irascible landowner had been
right) the peasants made their first and unalterable condition of
any agreement whatsoever that they should not be forced to any new
methods of tillage of any kind, nor to use new implements. They agreed
that the modern plow plowed better, that the scarifier did the work
more quickly, but they found thousands of reasons that made it out
of the question for them to use either of them; and though he had
accepted the conviction that he would have to lower the standard of
cultivation, he felt sorry to give up improved methods, the advantages
of which were so obvious. But in spite of all these difficulties he
got his way, and by autumn the system was working, or at least so it
seemed to him.
  At first Levin had thought of giving up the whole farming of the
land just as it was to the peasants, the laborers, and the bailiff, on
new conditions of partnership; but he was very soon convinced that
this was impossible, and determined to divide it up. The cattle
yard, the garden, hayfields, and arable land, divided into several
parts, had to be made into separate lots. The simplehearted cowherd,
Ivan, who, Levin fancied, understood the matter better than any of
them, collecting together a gang of workers to help him, principally
of his own family, became a partner in the cattle yard. A distant part
of the estate, a tract of wasteland that had lain fallow for eight
years, was with the help of the clever carpenter, Fiodor Rezunov,
taken by six families of peasants on new conditions of partnership and
the peasant Shuraev took the management of all the vegetable gardens
on the same terms. The remainder of the land was still worked on the
old system, but these three items were the first step to a new
organization of the whole, and they completely engrossed Levin.
  It is true that in the cattle yard things went no better than
before, and Ivan strenuously opposed warm housing for the cows and
butter made of fresh cream, affirming that cows require less food if
kept cold, and that butter is more profitable made from sour cream,
and he asked for wages just as under the old system, and took not
the slightest interest in the fact that the money he received was
not wages but an advance out of his future share in the profits.
  It is true that Fiodor Rezunov's company did not plow over the
ground twice before sowing, as had been agreed, justifying
themselves on the plea that the time was too short. It is true that
the peasants of the same company, though they had agreed to work the
land on new conditions, always spoke of the land, not as held in
partnership, but as rented for half the crop, and more than once the
peasants and Rezunov himself said to Levin: "If you would take a
rent for the land, it would save you trouble, and we should be more
free." Moreover, the same peasants kept putting off, on various
excuses, the building of a cattle yard and threshing barn on the
land as agreed upon, and delayed doing it till the winter.
  It is true that Shuraev would have liked to let out the kitchen
gardens he had undertaken in small lots to the peasants. He
evidently quite misunderstood, and apparently intentionally
misunderstood, the conditions upon which the land had been given to
him.
  Often, too, talking to the peasants and explaining to them all the
advantages of the plan, Levin felt that the peasants heard nothing but
the sound of his voice, and were firmly resolved, whatever he might
say, not to let themselves be taken in. He felt this especially when
he talked to the cleverest of the peasants, Rezunov, and detected that
gleam in Rezunov's eyes which showed so plainly both ironical
amusement at Levin, and the firm conviction that, if anyone were to be
taken in, it would not be he, Rezunov.
  But in spite of all this Levin thought the system worked, and that
by keeping accounts strictly, and insisting on his own way, he would
prove to them in the future the advantages of the arrangement, and
then the system would go of itself.
  These matters, together with the management of the land still left
on his hands, and the indoor work over his book, so engrossed Levin
the whole summer that he scarcely ever went out shooting. At the end
of August he heard that the Oblonskys had gone away to Moscow- from
their servant, who brought back the sidesaddle. He felt that in not
answering Darya Alexandrovna's letter he had by his rudeness, of which
he could not think without a flush of shame, burned his ships, and
that he would never go to see them again. He had been just as rude
with the Sviiazhskys, leaving them without saying good-by. But he
would never go to see them again either. He did not care about that
now. The business of reorganizing the farming of his land absorbed him
as completely as though there would never be anything else in his
life. He read the books lent him by Sviiazhsky, and ordering from
Moscow what he had not had, he read both the economic and
socialistic books on the subject, but, as he had anticipated, found
nothing bearing on the scheme he had undertaken. In the books on
political economy- in Mill, for instance- whom he studied first with
great ardor, hoping every minute to find an answer to the questions
that were engrossing him, he found laws deduced from the condition
of land culture in Europe; but he did not see why these laws, which
did not apply in Russia, must be general. He saw just the same thing
in the socialistic books: either they were the beautiful but
impracticable fantasies which had fascinated him when he was a
student, or they were attempts at improving, at rectifying the
economic position in which Europe was placed, with which the system of
land tenure in Russia had nothing in common. Political economy told
him that the laws by which the wealth of Europe had been developed,
and was developing, were universal and unvarying. Socialism told him
that development along these lines leads to ruin. And neither of
them gave an answer, or even a hint, in reply to the question as to
what he, Levin, and all the Russian peasants and landowners, were to
do with their millions of hands and millions of dessiatinas, to make
them as productive as possible for the common weal.
  Having once taken the subject up, he read conscientiously everything
bearing on it, and intended in the autumn to go abroad to study land
systems on the spot, in order that he might not on this question be
confronted with what so often met him on various subjects. Often, just
as he was beginning to understand the idea in the mind of anyone he
was talking to, and was beginning to explain his own, he would
suddenly be told: "But Kauffmann, but Jones, but Dubois, but Michelli?
You haven't read them: do read, they've thrashed that question out
thoroughly."
  He saw now distinctly that Kauffmann and Michelli had nothing to
tell him. He knew what he wanted. He saw that Russia had splendid
land, splendid laborers, and that in certain cases, as at the
peasant's on the way to Sviiazhsky's, the produce raised by the
laborers and the land is great- in the majority of cases when
capital is applied in the European way the produce is small, and
that this simply arises from the fact that the laborers want to work
and work well only in their own peculiar way, and that this antagonism
is not incidental but invariable, and has its roots in the national
spirit. He thought that the Russian people whose task it was to
colonize and cultivate vast tracts of unoccupied land, consciously
adhered, till all their land was occupied, to the methods suitable
to their purpose, and that their methods were by no means so bad as
was generally supposed. And he wanted to prove this theoretically in
his book and practically on his land.
                             XXX.

  At the end of September the timber had been carted for building
the cattle yard on the land that had been allotted to the
association of peasants, and the butter from the cows was sold and the
profits divided. In Practice the system worked capitally, or, at
least, so it seemed to Levin. In order to work out the whole subject
theoretically and to complete his book, which, in Levin's daydreams,
was not merely to effect a revolution in political economy, but to
annihilate that science entirely and to lay the foundation of a new
science of the relation of the people to the soil, all that was left
to do was to make a tour abroad, and to study on the spot all that had
been done in the same direction, and to collect conclusive evidence
that all that had been done there was not what was wanted. Levin was
only waiting for the delivery of his wheat to receive the money for it
and go abroad. But the rains began preventing the harvesting of the
corn and potatoes left in the fields, and putting a stop to all
work, even to the delivery of the wheat. The mud was impassable
along the roads; two mills were carried away by the spate, and the
weather got worse and worse.
  On the 30th of September the sun came out in the morning, and,
hoping for fine weather, Levin began making final preparations for his
journey. He gave orders for the wheat to be delivered, sent the
bailiff to the merchant to get the money owing him, and went out
himself to give some final directions on the estate before setting
off.
  Having finished all his business, soaked through with the streams of
water which kept running into his leather coat and down his neck and
his boot tops, but in the keenest and most confident temper, Levin
turned homeward in the evening. The weather had become worse than ever
toward evening; the hail lashed the drenched mare so cruelly that
she went along sideways, shaking her head and ears; but Levin was
all right under his hood, and he looked cheerfully about him at the
muddy streams running under the wheels, at the drops hanging on
every bare twig, at the whiteness of the patch of unmelted
hailstones on the planks of the bridge, at the thick layer of still
succulent, fleshy leaves that lay heaped up about the stripped elm
tree. In spite of the gloominess of nature around him, he felt
peculiarly eager. The talks he had been having with the peasants in
the farther village had shown that they were beginning to get used
to their new position. The innkeeper, an old man, to whose inn he
had gone to get dry evidently approved of Levin's plan, and of his own
accord proposed to enter the partnership for purchasing of cattle.
  "I have only to go on stubbornly toward my aim, and I shall attain
my end," thought Levin; "and it's something to work and take trouble
for. This is not a matter of myself individually, the question of
the public welfare comes into it. The whole system of agriculture, the
chief element in the condition of the people, must be completely
transformed. Instead of poverty- general prosperity and content;
instead of hostility- harmony and unity of interests. In short, a
bloodless revolution, but a revolution of the greatest magnitude,
beginning in the little circle of our district, then the province,
then Russia, and the whole world. Because a just idea cannot but be
fruitful. Yes, it's an aim worth working for. And the fact that it
is I, Kostia Levin, who went to a ball in a black tie, and was refused
by the Shcherbatsky girl, and who is intrinsically such a pitiful,
worthless creature to himself- that proves nothing; I feel sure
Franklin felt just as worthless, and he too had no faith in himself,
thinking of himself as a whole. That means nothing. And he too, most
likely, had an Agathya Mikhailovna to whom he confided his secrets."
  Musing on such thoughts Levin reached home in the darkness.
  The bailiff, who had been to the merchant, had come back and brought
part of the money for the wheat. An agreement had been made with the
old innkeeper, and on the road the bailiff had learned that everywhere
the corn was still standing in the fields, so that his one hundred and
sixty shocks that had not been carried were nothing in comparison with
the losses of others.
  After dinner Levin was sitting, as he usually did, in an easy
chair with a book, and as he read he went on thinking of the journey
before him in connection with his book. Today all the significance
of his book rose before him with special distinctness, and whole
periods ranged themselves in his mind in illustration of his theories.
"I must write that down," he thought. "That ought to form a brief
introduction, which I thought unnecessary before." He got up to go
to his writing table, and Laska, lying at his feet, got up too,
stretching and looking at him as though to inquire where to go. But he
had not time to write it down, for the overseers had come for
receiving orders, and Levin went out into the hall to meet them.
  After giving orders, that is to say, directions about the labors
of the next day, and seeing all the peasants who had business with
him, Levin went back to his study and sat down to work. Laska lay
under the table; Agathya Mikhailovna settled herself in her place with
her stocking.
  After writing for a little while, Levin suddenly thought with
exceptional vividness of Kitty, her refusal, and their last meeting.
He got up and began walking about the room.
  "What's the use of being downhearted?" said Agathya Mikhailovna.
"Come, why do you stay on at home? You ought to go to some warm
springs, especially now that you're ready for the journey."
  "Well, I am going away the day after tomorrow, Agathya
Mikhailovna; I must finish my work."
  "There, there, your work, you say! As if you hadn't done enough
for the peasants! Why, as 'tis, they're saying, 'Your master will be
getting some honor from the Czar for it.' Indeed, 'tis a strange
thing: why need you worry about the peasants?"
  "I'm not worrying about them; I'm doing it for my own good."
  Agathya Mikhailovna knew every detail of Levin's plans for his land.
Levin often put his views before her in all their complexity, and
not uncommonly he argued with her and did not agree with her comments.
But on this occasion she entirely misinterpreted what he had said.
  "Of one's soul's salvation we all know and must think before all
else," she said with a sigh. "Parfion Denissich now, for all he was no
scholar, died a death whose like may God grant to every one of us,"
she said, referring to a servant who had died recently. "Took the
sacrament and all."
  "That's not what I mean," said he. "I mean that I'm acting for my
own advantage. It's all the better for me if the peasants do their
work better."
  "Well, whatever you do, if he's a lazy good-for-naught,
everything'll be at sixes and sevens. If he has a conscience, he'll
work, and if not, there's no doing anything."
  "Oh, come, you say yourself Ivan has begun looking after the
cattle better."
  "All I say is," answered Agathya Mikhailovna, evidently not speaking
at random, but in strict sequence of ideas, "that you ought to get
married- that's what I say."
  Agathya Mikhailovna's allusion to the very subject he had only
just been thinking about hurt and stung him. Levin scowled, and
without answering her, he sat down again to his work, repeating to
himself all that he had been thinking of the real significance of that
work. Only at intervals he listened in the stillness to the click of
Agathya Mikhailovna's needles, and, recollecting what he did not
want to remember, he would frown again.
  At nine o'clock they heard the bell and the faint vibration of a
carriage over the mud.
  "Well, here's visitors come to us, and you won't be dull," said
Agathya Mikhailovna, getting up and going to the door. But Levin
overtook her. His work was not going well now, and he was glad of a
visitor, whoever it might be.
                             XXXI.

  Running halfway down the staircase, Levin caught a sound he knew,
a familiar cough in the hall. But he heard it indistinctly through the
sound of his own footsteps, and hoped he was mistaken. Then he
caught sight of a long, bony, familiar figure, and now it seemed there
was no possibility of mistake; and yet he still went on hoping that
this tall man taking off his fur cloak and coughing was not his
brother Nikolai.
  Levin loved his brother, but being with him was always a torture.
Just now, when Levin, under the influence of the thoughts that had
come to him, and Agathya Mikhailovna's hint, was in a troubled and
uncertain humor, this meeting with his brother which he had to face
seemed particularly difficult. Instead of a lively, healthy visitor,
some outsider who would, he hoped, cheer him up in his uncertain
humor, he had to see his brother, who knew him through and through,
who would call forth all the thoughts nearest his heart, would force
him to show himself fully. And that he was not disposed to do.
  Angry with himself for so base a feeling, Levin ran into the hall;
as soon as he had seen his brother close, this feeling of selfish
disappointment vanished instantly and was replaced by pity. Terrible
as his brother Nikolai had been before in his emaciation and
sickliness, now he looked still more emaciated, still more wasted.
He was a skeleton covered by skin.
  He stood in the hall, jerking his long thin neck, and pulling the
scarf off it, and smiled a strange and pitiful smile. When he saw that
smile, submissive and humble, Levin felt something clutching at his
throat.
  "You see, I've come to you," said Nikolai in a thick voice, never
for one second taking his eyes off his brother's face. "I've been
meaning to a long while, but I've been constantly unwell. Now I'm ever
so much better," he said, rubbing his beard with his big thin hands.
  "Yes, yes!" answered Levin. And he felt still more frightened
when, kissing him, he felt with his lips the dryness of his
brother's skin and saw close to him his big eyes, full of a strange
light.
  A few weeks before, Konstantin Levin had written to his brother that
through the sale of the small part of the property that had remained
undivided, there was a sum of about two thousand roubles to come to
him as his share.
  Nikolai said that he had come now to take his money and, what was
more important, to stay a while in the old nest, to get in touch
with the earth, so as to renew his strength like the heroes of old for
the work that lay before him. In spite of his exaggerated stoop, and
the emaciation that was so striking from his height, his movements
were as rapid and abrupt as ever. Levin led him into his study.
  His brother dressed with particular care- a thing he never used to
do- combed his scanty, lank hair, and, smiling, went upstairs.
  He was in the most affectionate and good-humored mood, just as Levin
often remembered him in childhood. He even referred to Sergei
Ivanovich without rancor. When he saw Agathya Mikhailovna, he joked
with her and asked after the old servants. The news of the death of
Parfion Denissich made a painful impression on him. A look of fear
crossed his face, but he regained his serenity immediately.
  "Of course he was quite old," he said, and changed the subject.
"Well, I'll spend a month or two with you, and then I'm off to Moscow.
Do you know, Miaghkov has promised me a place there, and I'm going
into the service. Now I'm going to arrange my life quite differently,"
he went on. "You know I got rid of that woman."
  "Marya Nikolaevna? Why, what for?"
  "Oh, she was a horrid woman! She caused me all sorts of annoyances."
But he did not say what the annoyances were. He could not say that
he had driven off Marya Nikolaevna because the tea was weak, and,
above all, because she would look after him as though he were an
invalid. "Besides, I want to turn over a new leaf completely now. I've
done silly things, of course, like everyone else, but money's the last
consideration; I don't regret it. So long as there's health- and my
health, thank God, is quite restored."
  Levin listened and racked his brains, but could think of nothing
to say. Nikolai probably felt the same; he began questioning his
brother about his affairs; and Levin was glad to talk about himself,
because then he could speak without hypocrisy. He told his brother
of his plans and his doings.
  His brother listened, but evidently he was not interested.
  These two men were so akin, so near each other, that the slightest
gesture, the tone of voice, told both more than could be said in
words.
  Both of them now had only one thought- the illness of Nikolai and
the nearness of his death- which stifled all else. But neither of them
dared speak of it, and so, whatever they said- without uttering the
one thought that filled their minds- was all falsehood. Never had
Levin been so glad when the evening was over and it was time to go
to bed. Never with any outside person, never on any official visit,
had he been so unnatural and false as he was that evening. And the
consciousness of this unnaturalness, and the remorse he felt at it,
made him even more unnatural. He wanted to weep over his dying, dearly
loved brother, and he had to listen and keep on talking of how he
meant to live.
  As the house was damp, and only the one bedroom had been kept
heated, Levin put his brother to sleep in his own bedroom, behind a
partition.
  His brother got into bed, and whether he slept or did not sleep,
tossed about like a sick man, coughed, and when he could not get his
throat clear, mumbled something. Sometimes when his breathing was
painful, he said, "Oh, my God!" Sometimes when he was choking he
muttered angrily, "Ah, the devil!" Levin could not sleep for a long
while, hearing him. His thoughts were of the most various kinds, but
the end of all his thoughts was the same- death.
  Death, the inevitable end of all, for the first time presented
itself to him with irresistible force. And death, which was here in
this loved brother, groaning half-asleep and from habit calling
without distinction on God and the devil, was not so remote as it
had hitherto seemed to him. It was in himself, too, that he felt this.
If not today, tomorrow; if not tomorrow, in thirty years- wasn't it
all the same? And what was this inevitable death- he did not know, had
never thought about it, and, what was more, had not the power, had not
the courage to think about it.
  "I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all
end; I had forgotten- death."
  He sat on his bed in the darkness, crouched up, hugging his knees,
and, holding his breath from the strain of thought, he pondered. But
the more intensely he thought, the clearer it became to him that it
was indubitably so, that, in reality, looking upon life, he had
forgotten one little fact- that death will come, and all ends; that
nothing was even worth beginning, and that there was no helping it
anyway. Yes, it was awful, but it was so.
  "But I am alive still. What's to be done now- what's to be done?" he
asked in despair. He lighted a candle, got up cautiously, went to
the looking glass, and began looking at his face and hair. Yes,
there were gray hairs about his temples. He opened his mouth. His back
teeth were beginning to decay. He bared his muscular arms. Yes,
there was strength in them. But Nikolenka, who lay there breathing
with what was left of his lungs, had had a strong, healthy body too.
And suddenly he recalled how they used to go to bed together as
children, and how they only waited till Fiodor Bogdanich was out of
the room to fling pillows at each other and laugh, laugh
irrepressibly, so that even their awe of Fiodor Bogdanich could not
check the effervescing, overbrimming sense of life and happiness. "And
now that warped, hollow chest... And I, not knowing what will become
of me, or wherefore...."
  "K-ha! K-ha! Damnation! Why do you keep fidgeting- why don't you
go to sleep?" his brother's voice called to him.
  "Oh, I don't know; I'm not sleepy."
  "I have had a good sleep, I'm not in a sweat now. Just see, feel
my shirt- there's no sweat, is there?"
  Levin felt it, withdrew behind the partition, and put out the
candle, but for a long while he could not sleep. The question how to
live had hardly begun to grow a little clearer to him, when a new,
insolvable question presented itself- death.
  "Why, he's dying- yes, he'll die in the spring; and how is one to
help him? What can I say to him? What do I know about it? I'd even
forgotten the very fact of it."
                             XXXII.

  Levin had long before made the observation that when one is
uncomfortable with people from their being excessively amenable and
meek, one is apt very soon after to find things intolerable from their
pretensions and irritability. He felt that this was how it would be
with his brother. And his brother Nikolai's gentleness did not, in
fact, last out for long. The very next morning he began to be
irritable, and seemed doing his best to find fault with his brother,
attacking him on his tenderest points.
  Levin felt himself to blame, and could not set things right. He felt
that if they had both not kept up appearances, but had spoken, as it
is called, from the heart- that is to say, had said only just what
they were thinking and feeling- they would simply have looked into
each other's faces, and Konstantin could only have said: "You're
dying, you're dying," and Nikolai could only have answered: "I know
I'm dying, but I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid!" And they could
have said nothing more, if they had said only what was in their
hearts. But life like that was impossible, and so Konstantin tried
to do what he had been trying to do all his life, and never could
learn to do, though, as far as he could observe, many people knew so
well how to do it, and without it there was no living at all. He tried
to say what he was not thinking, but he felt continually that it had a
ring of falsehood, that his brother detected him in it, and was
exasperated at it.
  The third day Nikolai induced his brother to explain his plan to him
again, and began not merely attacking it, but intentionally
confounding it with communism.
  "You've simply borrowed an idea that's not your own, but you've
distorted it, and are trying to apply it where it's not applicable."
  "But I tell you there's nothing in common. They deny the justice
of property, of capital, of inheritance, while I do not deny this
chief stimulus." (Levin felt disgusted himself at using such
expressions, but ever since he had been engrossed by his work, he
had unconsciously come more and more frequently to use non-Russian
words.) "All I want is to regulate labor."
  "Which means, you've borrowed an idea, stripped it of all that
gave it its force, and want to make believe that it's something
new," said Nikolai, angrily tugging at his necktie.
  "But my idea has nothing in common..."
  "The other, at any rate," said Nikolai Levin, with an ironical
smile, his eyes flashing malignantly, "has the charm of- what's one to
call it?- geometrical symmetry, of clearness, of definiteness. It
may be a Utopia. If one once allows the possibility of making all
the past a tabula rasa- no property, no family- then labor would
organize itself. But you have nothing..."
  "Why do you mix things up? I've never been a communist."
  "But I have, and I consider it's premature, but rational, and it has
a future, just like Christianity in its first ages."
  "All that I maintain is that the labor force ought to be
investigated from the point of view of natural science; that is to
say, it ought to be studied, its qualities ascertained..."
  "But that's an utter waste of time. That force finds a certain
form of activity of itself, according to the stage of its development.
There have been slaves first, everywhere; then metayers; and we have
the metayage system, rent, and day laborers. What are you trying to
find?"
  Levin suddenly lost his temper at these words, because at the bottom
of his heart he was afraid that it was true- true that he was trying
to hold the balance even between communism and the familiar forms, and
that this was hardly possible.
  "I am trying to find means of working productively for myself and
for the laborers. I want to organize..." he answered hotly.
  "You don't want to organize anything; it's simply the same as you've
been all your life- you want to be original, to pose as not simply
exploiting the peasants, but with some idea in view."
  "Oh, all right, that's what you think- and let me alone!" answered
Levin, feeling the muscles of his left cheek twitching uncontrollably.
  "You've never had, and never have, convictions; all you want is to
please your vanity."
  "Oh, very well; let me alone then!"
  "And I will let you alone! And it's high time I did, and go to the
devil with you! And I'm very sorry I ever came!"
  In spite of all Levin's efforts to soothe his brother afterward,
Nikolai would listen to nothing he said, declaring that it was
better to part, and Konstantin saw that it was simply a case of life
being unbearable to him.
  Nikolai was just getting ready to go, when Konstantin went in to him
again and begged him, rather unnaturally, to forgive him if he had
hurt his feelings in any way.
  "Ah, generosity!" said Nikolai, and he smiled. "If you want to be
right, I can give you that satisfaction. You're in the right; but
I'm going all the same."
  It was only just at parting that Nikolai kissed him, and said,
looking with sudden strangeness and seriousness at his brother:
  "Anyway, don't remember evil against me, Kostia!" and his voice
quavered.
  These were the only words that had been spoken sincerely between
them. Levin knew that those words meant, "You see, and you know,
that I'm in a bad way, and maybe we shall never see each other again."
Levin knew this, and the tears gushed from his eyes. He kissed his
brother once more, but he could not speak, and knew not what to say.
  Two days after his brother's departure, Levin too set off for his
foreign tour. Happening to meet Shcherbatsky, Kitty's cousin, in the
railway train, Levin greatly astonished him by his depression.
  "What's the matter with you?" Shcherbatsky asked him.
  "Oh, nothing; there's not much happiness in life."
  "Not much? You come with me to Paris instead of to Mulhouse. You
shall see how to be happy."
  "No, I've done with it all. It's time I was dead."
  "Well, that's a good one!" said Shcherbatsky, laughing, "why, I'm
only just getting ready to begin."
  "Yes, I thought the same not long ago, but now I know I shall soon
be dead."
  Levin said what he had genuinely been thinking of late. He saw
nothing but death, or an approach to death in everything. But his
cherished scheme only engrossed him the more. Life had to be got
through somehow, till death did come. Darkness had fallen upon
everything for him; but just because of this darkness he felt that the
one guiding clue in the darkness was his work, and he clutched it, and
clung to it with all his strength.
                         PART FOUR

                             I.

  The Karenins, husband and wife, continued living in the same
house, met every day, but were complete strangers to one another.
Alexei Alexandrovich made it a rule to see his wife every day, so that
the servants might have no grounds for suppositions, but avoided
dining at home. Vronsky was never at Alexei Alexandrovich's house, but
Anna saw him away from home, and her husband was aware of it.
  The position was one of torture for all three; and not one of them
would have been equal to enduring this position for a single day,
had it not been for the expectation that it would change, that it
was merely a temporary painful difficulty which would pass over.
Alexei Alexandrovich hoped that this passion would pass, as everything
does pass, that everyone would forget about it, and his name would
remain unsullied. Anna, on whom the position depended, and for whom it
was more poignant than for any other, endured it because she not
merely hoped, but firmly believed, that it would all very soon be
settled and come right. She had not the least idea what would settle
the situation, but she firmly believed that something would now very
soon turn up. Vronsky unaccountably followed her lead, hoping too that
something, independent of him, would be sure to clear up all
difficulties.
  In the middle of the winter Vronsky spent a very tiresome week. A
foreign Prince, who had come on a visit to Peterburg, was put under
his charge, and he had to show him the sights worth seeing. Vronsky
was of distinguished appearance; he possessed, moreover, the art of
behaving with respectful dignity, and was used to having to do with
such grand personages- that was how he came to be put in charge of the
Prince. But he felt his duties to be very irksome. The Prince was
anxious to miss nothing about which he would be asked at home: Had
he seen this and that in Russia? And on his own account he was anxious
to enjoy to the utmost all Russian forms of amusement. Vronsky was
obliged to be his guide in satisfying both these inclinations. The
mornings they spent driving to look at places of interest: the
evenings they passed enjoying the national amusements. The prince
enjoyed a health exceptional even among Princes. By gymnastics and
careful attention to his person he had brought himself to such a point
that in spite of his excesses in pleasure he looked as fresh as a big,
glossy, green Dutch cucumber. The Prince had traveled a great deal,
and considered one of the chief advantages of modern facilities of
communication the accessibility of the pleasures of all nations. He
had been in Spain, and there had indulged in serenades, and had made
friends with a Spanish girl who played the mandolin. In Switzerland he
had killed chamois. In England he had galloped in a red coat over
hedges and killed two hundred pheasants on a bet. In Turkey he had got
into a harem; in India he had traveled on an elephant; and now, in
Russia, he wished to taste all the peculiarly Russian forms of
pleasure.
  Vronsky, who was, as it were, chief master of the ceremonies to him,
was at great pains to distribute all the Russian amusements
suggested by various persons to the Prince. They had race horses,
and Russian pancakes and bear hunts, and troikas, and gypsy
choruses, and drinking orgies, with the Russian accompaniment of
broken crockery. And the Prince, with surprising ease, fell in with
the Russian spirit; he smashed trays full of crockery, sat with a
gypsy girl on his knee, and seemed to be asking: What more? Or does
the whole Russian spirit consist in just this?
  In reality, of all the Russian entertainments the Prince liked
best French actresses, a ballet dancer, and white-seal champagne.
Vronsky was used to Princes, but, either because he had himself
changed of late, or that he was in too close proximity to the
Prince, that week seemed fearfully wearisome to him. The whole of that
week he experienced unceasingly a sensation such as a man might have
who has been put in charge of a dangerous madman, who is afraid of the
madman, and, at the same time, from being with him, fears for his
own reason. Vronsky was continually conscious of the necessity of
never for a second relaxing the tone of stern official respectfulness,
so that he might not himself be insulted. The Prince's manner of
treating the very people who, to Vronsky's surprise, were ready to
descend to any depths to provide him with Russian amusements, was
contemptuous. His criticisms of Russian women, whom he wished to
study, more than once made Vronsky crimson with indignation. The chief
reason why the Prince was so particularly disagreeable to Vronsky
was that he could not help seeing himself in him. And what he saw in
this mirror did not gratify his self-esteem. He was a very stupid
and a very self-satisfied and a very healthy and a very well-washed
man, and nothing else. He was a gentleman, it was true, and Vronsky
could not deny it. He was equable and not cringing with his superiors,
was free and ingratiating in his behavior with his equals, and was
contemptuously indulgent with his inferiors. Vronsky was himself the
same, and regarded it as a great merit to be so. But to this Prince he
was an inferior, and his contemptuous and indulgent attitude to him
revolted him.
  "Brainless beef! Can I be like that?" he reflected.
  Be that as it might, when, on the seventh day, he parted from the
Prince, who was starting for Moscow, and received his thanks, he was
happy to be rid of his uncomfortable position and the unpleasant
reflection of himself. He said good-by to him at the station, on their
return from a bear hunt, at which they had had a display of Russian
derring-do kept up all night.
                             II.

  When he got home, Vronsky found there a note from Anna. She wrote:
"I am ill and unhappy. I cannot come out, yet cannot go on longer
without seeing you. Come in this evening. Alexei Alexandrovich goes to
the Council at seven and will be there till ten." After a minute's
reflection on the strangeness of her bidding him come straight to her,
in spite of her husband's insisting on her not receiving him, he
decided to go.
  Vronsky had that winter got his promotion, was now a colonel, had
left the regiment, and was living alone. After having some lunch, he
lay down on the sofa immediately, and in five minutes memories of
the hideous scenes he had witnessed during the last few days were
jumbled and joined to a mental image of Anna and of the peasant, one
of the encompassing people, who had played an important part in the
bear hunt, and Vronsky fell asleep. He waked up in the dark, trembling
with horror, and made haste to light a candle. "What was it? What?
What was the dreadful thing I dreamed? Yes, yes; the peasant bear
hunter, I think; a little dirty man with a disheveled beard was
stooping down doing something, and all of a sudden he began saying
some strange words in French. Yes, there was nothing else in the
dream," he said to himself. "But why was it so awful?" He vividly
recalled the peasant again and those incomprehensible French words the
peasant had uttered, and a chill of horror ran down his spine.
  "What nonsense!" thought Vronsky, and glanced at his watch.
  It was half-past eight already. He rang up his servant, dressed in
haste, and went out on the steps, completely forgetting the dream
and only worried at being late. As he drove up to the Karenins'
entrance he looked at his watch and saw it was ten minutes to nine.
A high, narrow carriage with a pair of grays was standing at the
entrance. He recognized Anna's carriage. "She is coming to me,"
thought Vronsky, "and better she should. I don't like going into
that house. But no matter; I can't hide myself," he thought, and
with that manner peculiar to him from childhood, as of a man who has
nothing to be ashamed of, Vronsky got out of his sleigh and went to
the door. The door opened, and the hall porter with a rug on his arm
called the carriage. Vronsky, though he did not usually notice
details, noticed at this moment the amazed expression with which the
porter glanced at him. In the very doorway Vronsky almost ran up
against Alexei Alexandrovich. The gas jet threw its full light on
the bloodless, sunken face under the black hat, and on the white
cravat, brilliant against the beaver of the coat. Karenin's fixed,
dull eyes were fastened upon Vronsky's face. Vronsky bowed, and Alexei
Alexandrovich, chewing his lips, lifted his hand to his hat and went
on. Vronsky saw him get into the carriage without looking back,
receive the rug and the opera glasses through the window, and
disappear. Vronsky went into the hall. His brows were scowling, and
his eyes gleamed with a proud and angry light in them.
  "What a situation!" he thought. "If he would fight, would stand up
for his honor, I could act, could express my feelings; but this
weakness or baseness... He puts me in the position of playing false,
which I never meant and never mean to do."
  Vronsky's ideas had changed since the day of his conversation with
Anna in the Vrede garden. Unconsciously yielding to the weakness of
Anna- who had surrendered herself up to him utterly, and simply looked
to him to decide her fate, ready to submit to anything- he had long
ceased to think that their liaison might end as he had thought then.
His ambitious plans had retreated into the background again, and
feeling that he had got out of that circle of activity in which
everything was definite, he had given himself up entirely to his
passion, and that passion was binding him more and more closely to
her.
  He was still in the hall when he caught the sound of her
retreating footsteps. He realized she had been expecting him, had
listened for him, and was now going back to the drawing room.
  "No," she cried, on seeing him, and at the first sound of her
voice the tears came into her eyes. "No; if things are to go on like
this, the end will come much, much too soon."
  "What is it, dear one?"
  "What? I've been waiting in agony for an hour, two hours... No, I
won't... I can't quarrel with you. Of course you couldn't come. No,
I won't."
  She laid her two hands on his shoulders, and looked a long while
at him with a profound, passionate, and, at the same time, searching
look. She was studying his face to make up for the time she had not
seen him. She was, every time she saw him, making the picture of him
in her imagination (incomparably superior, impossible in reality)
fit with him as he really was.
                             III.

  "You met him?" she asked, when they had sat down at the table in the
lamplight. "You're punished, you see, for being late."
  "Yes; but how was it? Wasn't he to be at the Council?"
  "He had been and come back, and was going out somewhere again. But
that doesn't matter. Don't talk about it. Where have you been? With
the Prince still?"
  She knew every detail of his existence. He was going to say that
he had been up all night and had dropped asleep, but looking at her
thrilled and rapturous face, he was ashamed. And he said he had had to
report on the Prince's departure.
  "But it's over now? He is gone?"
  "Thank God it's over! You wouldn't believe how insufferable it's
been for me."
  "Why so? Isn't it the life all of you- all young men- always
lead?" she said, knitting her brows; and, taking up the crochet work
that was lying on the table, she began drawing the hook out of it,
without looking at Vronsky.
  "I gave that life up long ago," said he, wondering at the change
in her face, and trying to divine its meaning. "And I confess," he
said, with a smile, showing his thick, white teeth, "this week I've
been, as it were, looking at myself in a glass, seeing that life,
and I didn't like it."
  She held the work in her hands, but did not crochet, and looked at
him with strange, shining, and hostile eyes.
  "This morning Liza came to see me- they're not afraid to call on me,
in spite of the Countess Lidia Ivanovna," she put in- "and she told me
about your Athenian evening. How loathsome!"
  "I was just going to say..."
  She interrupted him.
  "It was that Therese you used to know?"
  "I was just saying..."
  "How disgusting you are, you men! How is it you can't understand
that a woman can never forget that," she said, getting more and more
angry, and so letting him see the cause of her irritation, "especially
a woman who cannot know your life? What do I know? What have I ever
known?" she said. "Only what you tell me. And how do I know whether
you tell me the truth?..."
  "Anna, you hurt me. Don't you trust me? Haven't I told you that I
haven't a thought I wouldn't lay bare to you?"
  "Yes, yes," she said, evidently trying to suppress her jealous
thoughts. "But if only you knew how wretched I am! I believe you, I
believe you.... What were you saying?"
  But he could not at once recall what he had been going to say. These
fits of jealousy, which of late had been more and more frequent with
her, horrified him, and however much he tried to disguise the fact,
made him feel cold to her, although he knew the cause of her
jealousy was her love for him. How often he had told himself that
her love was happiness; and now she loved him as a woman can love when
love has outweighed for her all the good things of life- and he was
much further from happiness than when he had followed her from Moscow.
Then he had thought himself unhappy, but happiness was before him; now
he felt that the best happiness was already left behind. She was
utterly unlike what she had been when he first saw her. Both morally
and physically she had changed for the worse. She had broadened out
all over, and in her face at the time when she was speaking of the
actress there was an evil expression of hatred that distorted it. He
looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with
difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined
it. And in spite of this he felt that then, when his love was
stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love
out of his heart; but now when, as at this moment it seemed to him
he felt no love for her, he knew that his bond with her could not be
broken.
  "Well, well, what was it you were going to say about the Prince? I
have driven away the fiend, I have," she added. The fiend was the name
they had given her jealousy. "What did you begin to tell me about
the Prince? Why did you find it so tiresome?"
  "Oh, it was intolerable!" he said, trying to pick up the thread of
his interrupted thought. "He does not improve on closer
acquaintance. If you want him defined, here he is: a prime, well-fed
animal, such as takes medals at the cattle shows, and nothing more,"
he said, with a tone of vexation that interested her.
  "No; how so?" she replied. "He's seen a great deal, anyway; he's
cultured?"
  "It's an utterly different culture- their culture. He's
cultivated, one sees, simply to be able to despise culture, as they
despise everything but animal pleasures."
  "But don't you all care for these animal pleasures?" she said, and
again he noticed a dark look in her eyes that avoided him.
  "How is it you're defending him?" he said, smiling.
  "I'm not defending him, it's nothing to me; but I imagine, if you
had not cared for those pleasures yourself, you might have got out
of them. But it affords you satisfaction to gaze at Therese in the
attire of Eve..."
  "Again- again the devil," Vronsky said, taking the hand she had laid
on the table and kissing it.
  "Yes; but I can't help it. You don't know what I have suffered
waiting for you. I believe I'm not jealous. I'm not jealous: I believe
you when you're here, near me; but when you're away somewhere
leading your life alone, so incomprehensible to me..."
   She turned away from him, pulled the hook at last out of the
crochet work, and rapidly with the help of her forefinger, began
working loop after loop of the wool that was dazzlingly white in the
lamplight, while the slender wrist moved swiftly, nervously in its
embroidered cuff.
  "How was it, then? Where did you meet Alexei Alexandrovich?" Her
voice sounded in an unnatural and jarring tone.
  "We ran against each other in the doorway."
  "And he bowed to you like this?"
  She drew a long face, and half-closing her eyes, quickly transformed
her expression, folded her hands, and Vronsky suddenly saw in her
beautiful face the very expression with which Alexei Alexandrovich had
bowed to him. He smiled, while she laughed gaily, with that sweet,
deep laugh, which was one of her greatest charms.
  "I don't understand him in the least," said Vronsky. "If after
your avowal to him at your summer villa he had broken with you, if
he had challenged me... But this I can't understand. How can he put up
with such a position? He feels it, that's evident."
  "He?" she said sneeringly. "He's perfectly satisfied."
  "What are we all miserable for, when everything might be so well?"
  "Except for him. Don't I know him- the falsity in which he's utterly
steeped?... Could one, with any feeling, live as he is living with me?
He understands nothing, and feels nothing. Could a man of any
feeling live in the same house with his unfaithful wife? Could he talk
to her, call her 'my dear'?"
  And again she could not help mimicking him: "Anna, ma chere; Anna,
dear!"
  "He's not a man, not a human being- he's a mannikin! No one knows
him; but I know him. Oh, if I'd been in his place, I'd long ago have
killed, have torn to pieces a wife like me. I wouldn't have said,
'Anna, ma chere'! He's not a man, he's a ministerial machine. He
doesn't understand that I'm your wife, that he's outside, that he's
superfluous.... Don't let's talk of him!..."
  "You're unfair, very unfair, dearest," said Vronsky, trying to
soothe her. "But never mind, don't let's talk of him. Tell me what
you've been doing. What is the matter? Why are you unwell, and what
did the doctor say?"
  She looked at him with mocking amusement. Evidently she had hit on
other absurd and grotesque aspects in her husband and was awaiting the
moment to give expression to them.
  But he went on:
  "I imagine that it's not illness, but your condition. When will it
be?"
  The ironical light died away in her eyes, but a different smile, a
consciousness of something, he did not know what, and of quiet
melancholy, came over her face.
  "Soon, soon. You say that our position is miserable, that we must
put an end to it. If you knew how terrible it is to me- what I would
give to be able to love you freely and unafraid! I should not
torture myself and torture you with my jealousy.... And it will come
soon, but not as we expect."
  And at the thought of how it would come, she seemed so pitiable to
herself that tears came into her eyes, and she could not go on. She
laid on his sleeve her hand, shining with its whiteness and its
rings in the lamplight.
  "It won't come as we suppose. I didn't mean to say this to you,
but you've made me. Soon, soon, all will be over, and we shall all,
all be at peace, and suffer no more."
  "I don't understand," he said, understanding her.
  "You asked when? Soon. And I shan't live through it. Don't interrupt
me!" and she made haste to speak. "I know it; I know for certain. I
shall die; and I'm very glad I shall die, and release myself and you."
  Tears dropped from her eyes; he bent down over her hand and began
kissing it, trying to hide his emotion, which, he knew, had no sort of
grounds, though he could not control it.
  "Yes, it's better so," she said, tightly gripping his hand.
"That's the only way- the only way left us."
  He had recovered himself, and lifted his head.
  "How absurd! What absurd nonsense you are talking!"
  "No, it's the truth."
  "What- what's the truth?"
  "That I shall die. I have had a dream."
  "A dream?" repeated Vronsky, and instantly he recalled the peasant
of his dream.
  "Yes, a dream," she said. "It's a long while since I dreamed it. I
dreamed that I ran into my bedroom, that I had to get something there,
to find out something; you know how it is in dreams," she said, her
eyes wide with horror; "and in the bedroom, in the corner, stood
something."
  "Oh, what nonsense! How can you believe..."
  But she would not let him interrupt her. What she was saying was too
important to her.
  "And the something turned round, and I saw it was a peasant with a
disheveled beard- a little man, and dreadful. I wanted to run away,
but he bent down over a sack, and was fumbling there with his
hands..."
  She showed how he had moved his hands. There was terror in her face.
And Vronsky, remembering his dream, felt the same terror filling his
soul.
  "He was fumbling and kept talking quickly, quickly in French, and,
you know, he burred: Il faut le battre, le fer, le broyer, le
petrir.... And in my horror I tried to wake up, and woke up... but
woke up in the dream. And I began asking myself what it meant. And
Kornei said to me: 'In childbirth you'll die, ma'am, you'll die....'
And I woke up."
  "What nonsense, what nonsense!" said Vronsky; but he felt himself
that there was no conviction in his voice.
  "But don't let's talk of it. Ring the bell, I'll have tea. And
stay a little, now; it's not long I shall..."
  But all at once she stopped. The expression of her face
instantaneously changed. Horror and excitement were suddenly
replaced by a look of soft, solemn, blissful attention. He could not
comprehend the meaning of the change. She was listening to the
stirring of the new life within her.
                             IV.

  Alexei Alexandrovich, after meeting Vronsky on his own steps, drove,
as he had intended, to the Italian opera. He sat through two acts
there, and saw everyone he wanted to see. On returning home, he
carefully scrutinized the hatstand, and noticing that there was not
a military overcoat there, he went, as usual, to his own room. But,
contrary to his usual habit, he did not go to bed; he walked up and
down his study till three o'clock in the morning. The feeling of
furious anger with his wife, who would not observe the proprieties and
keep to the one stipulation he had laid on her- not to receive her
lover in her own house- gave him no peace. She had not complied with
his request, and he was bound to punish her and carry out his
threat- obtain a divorce and take away his son. He knew all the
difficulties connected with this course, but he had said he would do
it, and now he must carry out his threat. Countess Lidia Ivanovna
had hinted that this was the best way out of his position, and of late
the obtaining of divorces had been brought to such a pitch of
perfection that Alexei Alexandrovich saw a possibility of overcoming
the formal difficulties. Misfortunes never come singly, and the
affairs of the reorganization of the native tribes, and of the
irrigation of the lands of the Zaraisky province, had brought such
official worries upon Alexei Alexandrovich that he had been of late in
a continual state of extreme irritability.
  He did not sleep the whole night, and his fury growing in a sort
of vast, arithmetical progression, reached its highest limits in the
morning. He dressed in haste, and, as though carrying his cup full
of wrath, and fearing to spill any over, fearing to lose with his
wrath the energy necessary for the interview with his wife, he went
into her room directly he heard she was up.
  Anna, who had thought she knew her husband so well, was amazed at
his appearance when he went in to her. His brow was lowering and his
eyes stared darkly before him, avoiding her eyes; his mouth was
tightly and contemptuously shut. In his walk, in his gestures, in
the sound of his voice there was a determination and firmness such
as his wife had never seen in him. He went into her room, and, without
greeting her, walked straight up to her writing table, and, taking her
keys, opened a drawer.
  "What do you want?" she cried.
  "Your lover's letters," he said.
  "They're not here," she said, shutting the drawer; but from that
action he saw he had guessed right, and roughly pushing away her hand,
he quickly snatched a portfolio in which he knew she used to put her
most important papers. She tried to pull the portfolio away, but he
pushed her back.
  "Sit down! I have to speak to you," he said, putting the portfolio
under his arm, and squeezing it so tightly with his elbow that his
shoulder stood up.
  Amazed and intimidated, she gazed at him in silence.
  "I told you that I would not allow you to receive your lover in this
house."
  "I had to see him to..."
  She stopped, not finding a reason.
  "I do not enter into the details of why a woman wants to see her
lover."
  "I meant, I only..." she said, flushing hotly. This coarseness of
his angered her, and gave her courage. "Surely you must feel how
easy it is for you to insult me?" she said.
  "An honest man and an honest woman may be insulted, but to tell a
thief he's a thief is simply la constatation d'un fait."
  "This cruelty is something new- I did not know in you."
  "You call it cruelty for a husband to give his wife liberty,
giving her the honorable protection of his name, simply on the
condition of observing the proprieties: is that cruelty?"
  "It's worse that cruel- it's base, if you want to know!" Anna cried,
in a rush of hatred, and, getting up, she was about to leave the room.
  "No!" he shrieked in his shrill voice, which pitched a note even
higher than usual, and his big hands clutching her by the arm so
violently that red marks were left from the bracelet he was squeezing,
he forcibly made her sit down in her place. "Base! If you care to
use that word, what is base is to forsake husband and child for a
lover, while you eat your husband's bread!"
  She bowed her head. She did not say what she had said the evening
before to her lover, that he was her husband, and her husband was
superfluous; she did not even think of that. She felt all the
justice of his words, and only said softly:
  "You cannot describe my position as worse than I feel it to be
myself; but what are you saying all this for?"
  "What am I saying it for? What for?" he went on, as angrily. "So
that you may know that, since you have not carried out my wishes in
regard to observing outward decorum, I will take measures to put an
end to this state of things."
  "Soon, very soon, it will end, anyway," she said; and again, at
the thought of death near at hand and now desired, tears came into her
eyes.
  "It will end sooner than you and your lover have planned! If you
must have the satisfaction of animal passion..."
  "Alexei Alexandrovich! I won't say it's not generous, but it's not
like a gentleman to strike anyone who's down."
  "Yes, you only think of yourself! But the sufferings of a man who
was your husband have no interest for you. You don't care that his
whole life is ruined, that he is seff... seff..."
  Alexei Alexandrovich was speaking so quickly that he began to
stammer, and was utterly unable to articulate the word "suffering". In
the end he pronounced it "saffering". She wanted to laugh, and was
immediately ashamed that anything could amuse her at such a moment.
And for the first time, for an instant, she felt for him, put
herself in his place, and was sorry for him. But what could she say or
do? Her head sank, and she sat silent. He too was silent for some
time, and then began speaking in a frigid, less shrill voice,
emphasizing random words that had no special significance.
  I came to tell you..." he said.
  She glanced at him. "No; it was my fancy," she thought, recalling
the expression of his face when he stumbled over the word "suffering."
"No; can a man with those dull eyes, with that self-satisfied
complacency, feel anything?"
  "I cannot change anything," she whispered.
  "I have come to tell you that I am going tomorrow to Moscow, and
shall not return again to this house, and you will receive notice of
what I decide through the lawyer into whose hands I shall entrust
the task of getting a divorce. My son is going to my sister's," said
Alexei Alexandrovich, with an effort recalling what he had meant to
say about his son.
  "You take Seriozha to hurt me," she said, looking at him from
under her brows. "You do not love him.... Leave me Seriozha!"
  "Yes, I have lost even my affection for my son, because he is
associated with the repulsion I feel for you. But still I shall take
him. Good-by!"
  And he was going away, but now she detained him.
  "Alexei Alexandrovich, leave me Seriozha!" she whispered once
more. "I have nothing else to say. Leave Seriozha till my... I shall
soon be confined; leave him!"
  Alexei Alexandrovich flared up, and, snatching his hand from her, he
went out of the room without a word.
                             V.

  The waiting room of the celebrated Peterburg lawyer was full when
Alexei Alexandrovich entered it. Three ladies- an old lady, a young
lady, and a merchant's wife, and three gentlemen- one a German
banker with a ring on his finger, the second a merchant with a
beard, and the third a wrathful-looking government clerk in official
uniform, with a cross on his neck- had obviously been waiting a long
while already. Two clerks were writing at tables with scratching pens.
The appurtenances of the writing tables, about which Alexei
Alexandrovich was himself very fastidious, were exceptionally good. He
could not help observing this. One of the clerks, without getting
up, turned fretfully to Alexei Alexandrovich, half-closing his eyes.
  "What is it you wish?"
  "My business has to do with the lawyer."
  "He is engaged," the clerk responded severely, and he pointed with
his pen at the persons waiting, and went on writing.
  "Can't he spare time to see me?" said Alexei Alexandrovich.
  "He has no time free; he is always busy. Kindly wait your turn."
  "Then I must trouble you to give him my card," Alexei
Alexandrovich said with dignity, seeing the impossibility of
preserving his incognito.
  The clerk took the card and, obviously not approving of what he read
on it, went to the door.
  Alexei Alexandrovich was in principle in favor of the publicity of
legal proceedings, though for some higher official considerations he
disliked the application of the principle in Russia, and disapproved
of it, as far as he could disapprove of anything instituted by
authority of the Emperor. His whole life had been spent in
administrative work, and consequently, when he did not approve of
anything, his disapproval was softened by the recognition of the
inevitability of mistakes and the possibility of reform in every
department. In the new public law courts he disliked the
restrictions laid on the lawyers conducting cases. But till then he
had had nothing to do with the law courts, and so had disapproved of
their publicity simply in theory; now his disapprobation was
strengthened by the unpleasant impression made on him in the
lawyer's waiting room.
  "He will be out right away," said the clerk; and two minutes later
there did actually appear in the doorway the large figure of an old
student of jurisprudence who had been consulting with the lawyer,
and the lawyer himself.
  The lawyer was a little, squat, bald man, with a dark, reddish
beard, light-colored long eyebrows, and beetling brow. He was
attired as though for a wedding, from his cravat to his double watch
chain and patent-leather shoes. His face was clever and rustic, but
his dress was dandified and in bad taste.
  "Pray walk in," said the lawyer, addressing Alexei Alexandrovich;
and, gloomily ushering Karenin in before him, he closed the door.
"Won't you sit down?" He indicated an armchair at a writing table
covered with papers. He sat down himself, and, rubbing his little
hands with short fingers covered with white hairs, he bent his head on
one side. But as soon as he was settled in this position a moth flew
over the table. The lawyer, with a swiftness that could never have
been expected of him, opened his hands, caught the moth, and resumed
his former attitude.
  "Before beginning to speak of my business," said Alexei
Alexandrovich, following the lawyer's movements with wondering eyes,
"I ought to observe that the matter about which I have to speak to you
is to be a secret."
  The lawyer's drooping reddish mustaches were stirred by a scarcely
perceptible smile.
  "I should not be a lawyer if I could not keep the secrets confided
to me. But if you would like proof..."
  Alexei Alexandrovich glanced at his face, and saw that the shrewd,
gray eyes were laughing, and seemed to know all about it already.
  "You know my name?" Alexei Alexandrovich resumed.
  "I know you and the good"- again he caught a moth- "work you are
doing, like every Russian," said the lawyer, bowing.
  Alexei Alexandrovich sighed, plucking up his courage. But, having
once made up his mind, he went on in his shrill voice, without
timidity or hesitation, accentuating a word here and there.
  "I have the misfortune," Alexei Alexandrovich began, "to be a
deceived husband, and I desire to break off all relations with my wife
by legal means- that is, to be divorced; but do this so that my son
may not remain with his mother."
  The lawyer's gray eyes tried not to laugh, but they were dancing
with irrepressible glee, and Alexei Alexandrovich saw that it was
not simply the delight of a man who has just got a profitable job:
there was triumph and joy, there was a gleam like the malignant
gleam he had seen in his wife's eyes.
  "You desire my assistance in securing a divorce?"
  "Yes, precisely; but I ought to warn you that I may be wasting
your time and attention. I have come simply to consult you as a
preliminary step. I want a divorce, but the form which it may take
is of great consequence to me. It is very possible that if that form
does not correspond with my requirements I may give up a legal
action."
  "Oh, that's always the case," said the lawyer, "and that's always
for you to decide."
  He let his eyes rest on Alexei Alexandrovich's feet, feeling that he
might offend his client by the sight of his irrepressible amusement.
He looked at a moth that flew before his nose, and moved his hand, but
did not catch it from regard for Alexei Alexandrovich's situation.
  "Though in their general features our laws on this subject are known
to me," pursued Alexei Alexandrovich, "I should be glad to have an
idea of the forms in which such things are done, in practice."
  "You would be glad," the lawyer, without lifting his eyes,
responded, adopting, with a certain satisfaction, the tone of his
client's remarks, "for me to lay before you all the methods by which
you could secure what you desire?"
  And on receiving an assenting nod from Alexei Alexandrovich, he went
on, stealing a glance now and then at Alexei Alexandrovich's face,
which was growing red in patches.
  "Divorce by our laws," he said, with a slight shade of
disapprobation of our laws, "is possible, as you are aware, in the
following cases... To wait!" he called to a clerk who put his head
in at the door, but he got up all the same, said a few words to him,
and sat down again. "In the following cases: physical defect in the
married parties, desertion without communication for five years," he
said, crooking a short finger covered with hair, "adultery" (this word
he pronounced with obvious satisfaction), "subdivided as follows"
(he continued to crook his fat fingers, though the cases and their
subdivisions could obviously not be classified together): "physical
defect of the husband or of the wife, adultery of the husband or of
the wife." As by now all his fingers were used up, he straightened
them and went on: "This is the theoretical view; but I imagine you
have done me the honor to apply to me in order to learn its
application in practice. And therefore, guided by precedents, I must
inform you that in practice cases of divorce may all be reduced to the
following- there's no physical defect, I may assume, nor
desertion?..."
  Alexei Alexandrovich bowed his head in assent.
  "They may be reduced to the following: adultery of one of the
married parties, and the detection in the fact of the guilty party
by mutual agreement, and, failing such agreement, accidental
detection. It must be admitted that the latter case is rarely met with
in practice," said the lawyer, and stealing a glance at Alexei
Alexandrovich he paused, as a man selling pistols, after enlarging
on the advantages of each weapon, might await his customer's choice.
But Alexei Alexandrovich said nothing, and therefore the lawyer went
on: "The most usual and simple, the sensible course, I consider, is
adultery by mutual consent. I should not permit myself to express it
so, speaking with a man of no education," he said, "but I imagine that
to you this is comprehensible."
  Alexei Alexandrovich was, however, so perturbed that he did not
immediately comprehend all the reasonableness of adultery by mutual
consent, and his eyes expressed this uncertainty; but the lawyer
promptly came to his assistance.
  "People cannot go on living together- here you have a fact. And if
both are agreed about it, the details and formalities become a
matter of no importance. And at the same time this is the simplest and
most certain method."
  Alexei Alexandrovich understood fully now. But he had religious
scruples, which hindered the execution of such a plan.
  "That is out of the question in the present case," he said. "Only
one alternative is possible: involuntary detection, supported by
letters which I have."
  At the mention of letters the lawyer pursed up his lips, and gave
utterance to a thin little compassionate and contemptuous sound.
  "Kindly consider," he began, "cases of that kind are, as you are
aware, under ecclesiastical jurisdiction; the reverend fathers are
fond of going into the minutest details in cases of that kind," he
said, with a smile which betrayed his sympathy with the taste of the
reverend fathers. "Letters may, of course, be a partial
confirmation; but detection in the act there must be of the most
direct kind- that is, by eyewitnesses. In fact, if you do me the honor
to trust me with your confidence, you will do well to leave me the
choice of the measures to be employed. If one wants the result, one
must allow the means."
  "If it is so..." Alexei Alexandrovich began, suddenly turning white;
but at that moment the lawyer rose and again went to the door to speak
to the intruding clerk.
  "Tell her we don't haggle over fees!" he said, and returned to
Alexei Alexandrovich.
  On his way back he caught, unobserved, another moth. "Nice state
my rep curtains will be in by the summer!" he thought, frowning.
  "And so you were saying?..." he said.
  "I will communicate my decision to you by letter," said Alexei
Alexandrovich, getting up, and he clutched at the table. After
standing a moment in silence, he said: "From your words I may
consequently conclude that a divorce may be obtained? I would ask
you to let me know what your terms are."
  "It may be obtained if you give me complete liberty of action," said
the lawyer, without answering his question. "When can I count on
receiving word from you?" he asked moving toward the door, his eyes
and his patent-leather shoes shining.
  "In a week's time. You will be kind enough to communicate to me your
answer as to whether you will undertake to conduct the case, and on
what terms."
  "Very good, sir."
  The lawyer bowed respectfully, let his client out of the door,
and, left alone, gave himself up to his sense of amusement. He felt so
mirthful that, contrary to his rule, he made a reduction in his
terms to the haggling lady, and gave up catching moths, finally
deciding that next winter he must have the furniture covered with
velvet, like Sigonin's.
                             VI.

  Alexei Alexandrovich had gained a brilliant victory at the sitting
of the Commission of the 17th of August, but in the sequel this
victory cut the ground from under his feet. The new commission for the
inquiry into the condition of the native tribes on every aspect had
been formed and despatched to its destination with an unusual speed
and energy, inspired by Alexei Alexandrovich. Within three months a
report was presented. The condition of the native tribes was
investigated in its political, administrative, economic, ethnographic,
material, and religious aspects. To all these questions there were
answers admirably stated, and answers admitting no shade of doubt,
since they were not a product of human thought, always liable to
error, but were all the product of official activity. The answers were
all based on official data furnished by governors and bishops, and
founded on the reports of district magistrates and ecclesiastical
superintendents, founded in their turn on the reports of local
authorities and parish priests; and so all of these answers were
unhesitating and certain. All such questions as, for instance, the
cause of crop failures, why certain tribes adhered to their ancient
beliefs, and so on- questions which, but for the convenient
intervention of the official machine, are not, and cannot be solved
for ages- received full, unhesitating solution. And this solution
was in favor of Alexei Alexandrovich's contention. But Stremov, who
had felt stung to the quick at the last sitting, had, on the reception
of the commission's report, resorted to tactics which Alexei
Alexandrovich had not anticipated. Stremov, carrying with him
several other members, went over to Alexei Alexandrovich's side,
and, not contenting himself with warmly defending the measure proposed
by Karenin, proposed other measures, still more extreme, in the same
direction. These measures, still stronger than Alexei
Alexandrovich's fundamental idea, were passed by the commission, and
then the aim of Stremov's tactics became apparent. Carried to an
extreme, the measures seemed at once to be so absurd that the
highest authorities, and public opinion, and intellectual ladies,
and the newspapers, all at the same time fell foul of them, expressing
their indignation both with the measures and their nominal father,
Alexei Alexandrovich. Stremov drew back, affecting to have blindly
followed Karenin, and to be astounded and distressed at what had
been done. This meant the defeat of Alexei Alexandrovich. But in spite
of failing health, in spite of his domestic griefs, he did not give
in. There was a split in the Commission. Some members, with Stremov at
their head, justified their mistake on the ground that they had put
faith in the commission of revision, instituted by Alexei
Alexandrovich, and maintained that the report of the commission was
rubbish, and simply so much wastepaper. Alexei Alexandrovich, with a
following of those who saw the danger of so revolutionary an
attitude to official documents, persisted in upholding the
statements obtained by the revising commission. In consequence of
this, in the higher spheres, and even in society, all was chaos, and
although everyone was interested, no one could tell whether the native
tribes really were becoming impoverished and ruined, or whether they
were in a flourishing condition. The position of Alexei Alexandrovich,
owing to this, and partly owing to the contempt lavished on him for
his wife's infidelity, became very precarious. And in this position he
took an important resolution. To the astonishment of the Commission,
he announced that he should ask permission to go himself to
investigate the question on the spot. And having obtained
permission, Alexei Alexandrovich prepared to set off to these remote
provinces.
  Alexei Alexandrovich's departure created a great stir, the more so
as just before he started he officially returned the posting fares
allowed him for twelve horses to drive to his destination.
  "I think it very noble," Betsy said about this to the Princess
Miaghkaia. "Why take money for posting horses when everyone knows that
there are railways everywhere now?"
  But Princess Miaghkaia did not agree, and the Princess Tverskaia's
opinion annoyed her indeed.
  "It's all very well for you to talk," said she, "when you have I
don't know how many millions; but I am very glad when my husband
goes on a revising tour in the summer. It's very good for him and
pleasant traveling about, and it's a settled arrangement for me to
keep a carriage and hired coach on the money."
  On his way to the remote provinces Alexei Alexandrovich stopped
for three days at Moscow.
  The day after his arrival he went to call on the governor general.
At the crossroads by Gazetny Lane, where there are always crowds of
carriages and hired sleighs, Alexei Alexandrovich suddenly heard his
name called out in such a loud and cheerful voice that he could not
help looking round. At the corner of the pavement, in a short, stylish
overcoat and a low-crowned fashionable hat, jauntily askew, with a
smile that showed a gleam of white teeth and red lips, stood Stepan
Arkadyevich, radiant, young, and beaming. He called him vigorously and
urgently, and insisted on his stopping. He had one arm on the window
of a carriage that was stopping at the corner, and out of the window
were thrust the heads of a lady in a velvet hat, and two children.
Stepan Arkadyevich was smiling and beckoning to his brother-in-law.
The lady smiled a kindly smile too, and she too waved her hand to
Alexei Alexandrovich. It was Dolly with her children.
  Alexei Alexandrovich did not want to see anyone in Moscow, and least
of all his wife's brother. He raised his hat and would have driven on,
but Stepan Arkadyevich told his coachman to stop, and ran across the
snow to him.
  "Well, what a shame not to have let us know! Been here long? I was
at Dussot's yesterday and saw 'Karenin' on the visitors' list, but
it never entered my head that it was you," said Stepan Arkadyevich,
sticking his head in at the window of the carriage, "or I should
have looked you up. I am glad to see you!" he said, knocking one
foot against the other to shake the snow off. "What a shame you did
not let us know!" he repeated.
  "I had no time; I am very busy," Alexei Alexandrovich responded
dryly.
  "Come to my wife- she does so want to see you."
  Alexei Alexandrovich unfolded the rug in which his frozen feet
were wrapped, and getting out of his carriage made his way over the
snow to Darya Alexandrovna.
  "Why, Alexei Alexandrovich, what are you cutting us like this
for?" said Dolly smiling.
  "I was very busy. Delighted to see you!" he said in a tone clearly
indicating that he was annoyed by it. "How are you?"
  "Tell me, how is my darling Anna?"
  Alexei Alexandrovich mumbled something and would have gone on. But
Stepan Arkadyevich stopped him.
  "I tell you what we'll do tomorrow. Dolly, ask him to dinner.
We'll ask Koznishev and Pestsov, so as to entertain him with our
Moscow intellectuals."
  "Yes, please, do come," said Dolly; "we will expect you at five-
or six o'clock, if you like. How is my darling Anna? How long..."
  "She is quite well," Alexei Alexandrovich mumbled, frowning.
"Delighted!" and he moved away toward his carriage.
  "You will come?" Dolly called after him.
  Alexei Alexandrovich said something which Dolly could not catch in
the noise of the moving carriages.
  "I shall come round tomorrow!" Stepan Arkadyevich shouted to him.
  Alexei Alexandrovich got into his carriage, and buried himself in it
so as neither to see nor to be seen.
  "Queer fish!" said Stepan Arkadyevich to his wife, and, glancing
at his watch, he made a motion of his hand before his face, indicating
a caress to his wife and children, and walked jauntily along the
pavement.
  "Stiva! Stiva!" Dolly called, reddening.
  He turned round.
  "I must get coats, you know, for Grisha and Tania. Give me the
money."
  "Never mind; you tell them I'll pay the bill!" and he vanished,
nodding genially to an acquaintance who drove by.
                             VII.

  The next day was Sunday. Stepan Arkadyevich went to the Grand
Theater to a rehearsal of the ballet, and gave Masha Chibisova, a
pretty dancing girl who had been engaged through his protection, the
coral necklace he had promised her the evening before, and, behind the
scenes, in the dim daylight of the theater, managed to kiss her pretty
little face, radiant over the present. Besides the gift of the
necklace he wanted to arrange a meeting with her after the ballet.
After explaining that he could not come at the beginning of the
ballet, he promised he would come for the last act and take her to
supper. From the theater Stepan Arkadyevich drove to Okhotny Riad,
selected himself the fish and asparagus for dinner, and by twelve
o'clock was at Dussot's, where he had to see three people, luckily all
staying at the same hotel: Levin, who had recently come back from
abroad and was staying there; the new head of his board who had just
been promoted to that position, and had come on a tour of revision
to Moscow; and his brother-in-law, Karenin, whom he must see, so as to
be sure of bringing him to dinner.
  Stepan Arkadyevich liked dining, but still better he liked to give a
dinner, small, but very choice, both as regards the food and drink and
as regards the selection of guests. He particularly liked the
program of that day's dinner. There would be fresh perch, asparagus,
and la piece de resistance- first-rate, but quite plain, roast beef,
and wines to suit: so much for the eating and drinking. Kitty and
Levin would be of the party, and, so that this might not be
obtrusively evident, there would be a girl cousin too, and young
Shcherbatsky, and- la piece de resistance among the guests- Sergei
Koznishev and Alexei Alexandrovich. Sergei Ivanovich was a Moscow man,
and a philosopher; Alexei Alexandrovich a Peterburg man, and a
practical politician. He was asking, too, the well-known eccentric
enthusiast, Pestsov, a liberal, a great talker, a musician, a
historian, and the most delightfully youthful person of fifty, who
would be a sauce or garnish for Koznishev and Karenin. He would
provoke them and set them off against one another.
  The second installment for the forest had been received from the
merchant and was not yet exhausted; Dolly had been very amiable and
good-humored of late, and the idea of the dinner pleased Stepan
Arkadyevich from every point of view. He was in the most
lighthearted mood. There were two circumstances a little unpleasant,
but these two circumstances were drowned in the sea of good-humored
gaiety which flooded the soul of Stepan Arkadyevich. These two
circumstances were: first, that on meeting Alexei Alexandrovich the
day before in the street Stiva had noticed that the latter was cold
and reserved with him, and putting together the expression of Alexei
Alexandrovich's face, and the fact that he had not come to see them,
or let them know of his arrival, with the rumors he had heard about
Anna and Vronsky, Stepan Arkadyevich guessed that something was
wrong between the husband and wife.
  That was one disagreeable thing. The other slightly disagreeable
fact was that the new head of his board, like all new heads, already
had the reputation of a terrible person, who got up at six o'clock
in the morning, worked like a horse, and insisted on his
subordinates working in the same way. Moreover, this new head had
the further reputation of being a bear in his manners, and was,
according to all reports, a man of a class in all respects the
opposite of that to which his predecessor had belonged, and to which
Stepan Arkadyevich had hitherto belonged himself. On the previous
day Stepan Arkadyevich had appeared at the office in a uniform, and
the new chief had been very affable and had talked to him as to an
acquaintance. Consequently Stepan Arkadyevich deemed it his duty to
call upon him in his nonofficial dress. The thought that the new chief
might not give him a warm reception was the other unpleasant thing.
But Stepan Arkadyevich instinctively felt that everything would come
round all right. "They're all human, all men, like us poor sinners;
why be nasty and quarrelsome?" he thought as he went into the hotel.
  "Good day, Vassilii," he said, walking into the corridor with his
hat cocked on one side, and addressing a footman he knew; "why, you've
let your whiskers grow! Levin- number seven, eh? Take me up, please.
And find out whether Count Anychkin" (this was the new head) "is
receiving."
  "Yes, sir," Vassilii responded, smiling. "You've not been to see
us for a long while."
  "I was here yesterday, but at the other entrance. Is this number
seven?"
  Levin was standing with a peasant from Tver in the middle of the
room, measuring a fresh bearskin, when Stepan Arkadyevich came in.
  "What! You killed him?" cried Stepan Arkadyevich. "Well done! A
she-bear? How are you, Arkhip!"
  He shook hands with the peasant and sat down on a chair, without
taking off his coat and hat.
  "Come, take off your coat and stay a little," said Levin, taking his
hat.
  "No, I haven't time; I've only looked in for just a second,"
answered Stepan Arkadyevich. He threw open his fur coat, but afterward
did take it off, and sat on for a whole hour, talking to Levin about
hunting and the most intimate subjects. "Come, tell me, please, what
you did abroad. Where have you been?" said Stepan Arkadyevich, when
the peasant had gone.
  "Oh, I stayed in Germany, in Prussia, in France, and in England- not
in the capitals, but in the manufacturing towns- and saw a great
deal that was new to me. And I'm glad I went."
  "Yes, I knew your idea of the solution of the labor question."
  "Not a bit: in Russia there can be no labor question. In Russia
the question is that of the relation of the working people to the
land; though the question exists there too- but there it's a matter of
repairing what's been ruined, while with us..."
  Stepan Arkadyevich listened attentively to Levin.
  "Yes, yes!" he said. "It's very possible you're right. But I'm
glad you're in good spirits, and are hunting bears, and working, and
interested. Shcherbatsky told me another story- he met you: that you
were in such a depressed state, talking of nothing but death..."
  "Well, what of it? I've not given up thinking of death," said Levin.
"It's true that it's high time I was dead; and that all this is
nonsense. It's the truth I'm telling you. I do value my idea and my
work awfully; but really, do consider this: all this world of ours
is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet.
And yet we think that something great is possible to us- ideas,
work! Grains of sand- that's all they are."
  "But all that's as old as the hills, my boy!"
  "It is old; but, do you know, when you grasp this fully, then
somehow everything becomes of no consequence. When you understand that
you will die tomorrow, if not today, and nothing will be left, then
everything is so unimportant! And I consider my idea very important,
but it turns out really to be just as unimportant, even if it were
carried out, as outwitting that she-bear. So one goes on living,
amusing oneself with hunting, with work- anything, so as not to
think of death!"
  Stepan Arkadyevich smiled a subtle and affectionate smile as he
listened to Levin.
  "Well, of course! Here you've come round to my point. Do you
remember you attacked me for seeking enjoyment in life?

           'Don't be, O moralist, severe...'"

  "No; all the same, what's fine in life is..." Levin hesitated.
"Oh! I don't know. All I know is that we shall soon be dead."
  "Why so soon?"
  "And I know there's less charm in life, when one thinks of death-
but there's more peace."
  "On the contrary, the finish is always the best. But I must be
going," said Stepan Arkadyevich, getting up for the tenth time.
  "Oh, no, stay a bit!" said Levin, detaining him. "Now, when shall we
see each other again? I'm going tomorrow."
  "I'm a fine fellow! Why, that's just what I came for! You simply
must come to dinner with us today. Your brother's coming, and Karenin,
my brother-in-law."
  "You don't mean to say he's here?" said Levin, and he wanted to
inquire about Kitty. He had heard at the beginning of the winter
that she was at Peterburg with her sister, the wife of the diplomat,
and he did not know whether she had come back or not; but he changed
his mind and did not ask. "Whether she's coming or not, I don't care,"
he said to himself.
  "So you'll come?"
  "Of course."
  "At five o'clock, then, and wear a frock coat."
  And Stepan Arkadyevich got up and went down below to the new head of
his department. Instinct had not misled Stepan Arkadyevich. The
terrible new head turned out to be an extremely amenable person, and
Stepan Arkadyevich lunched with him and stayed on, so that it was past
three o'clock before he got to Alexei Alexandrovich.
                             VIII.

  Alexei Alexandrovich, on coming back from church service, had
spent the whole morning indoors. He had two pieces of business
before him that morning; first, to receive and send on a deputation
from the native tribes which was on its way to Peterburg, and which
was now at Moscow; secondly, to write the promised letter to the
lawyer. The deputation, though it had been summoned at Alexei
Alexandrovich's instigation, was not without its discomforting and
even dangerous aspect, and he was glad he had found it in Moscow.
The members of this deputation had not the slightest conception of
their duty and the part they were to play. They naively believed
that it was their business to lay before the Commission their needs
and the actual condition of things, and to ask assistance of the
government, and utterly failed to grasp that some of their
statements and requests supported the contention of the enemy's
side, and so spoiled the whole business. Alexei Alexandrovich was
busily engaged with them for a long while, drew up a program for
them from which they were not to depart, and on dismissing them
wrote a letter to Peterburg for the guidance of the deputation. He had
his chief support in this affair in the Countess Lidia Ivanovna. She
was a specialist in the matter of deputations, and no one knew
better than she how to puff, and put them in the way they should go.
Having completed this task, Alexei Alexandrovich wrote the letter to
the lawyer. Without the slightest hesitation he gave him permission to
act as he might judge best. In the letter he enclosed three of
Vronsky's notes to Anna, which were in the portfolio he had taken
away.
  Since Alexei Alexandrovich had left home with the intention of not
returning to his family again, and since he had been at the lawyer's
and had spoken, though only to one man, of his intention, since,
moreover, he had translated the matter from the world of real life
to the world of ink and paper, he had grown more and more used to
his own intention, and by now distinctly perceived the feasibility
of its execution.
  He was sealing the envelope to the lawyer, when he heard the loud
tones of Stepan Arkadyevich's voice. Stepan Arkadyevich was
disputing with Alexei Alexandrovich's servant, and insisting on
being announced.
  "No matter," thought Alexei Alexandrovich, "so much the better. I
will inform him at once of my position in regard to his sister, and
explain why it is I can't dine with him."
  "Come in!" he said aloud, collecting his papers, and putting them
under the blotting pad.
  "There, you see, you're talking nonsense, and he is at home!"
responded Stepan Arkadyevich's voice, addressing the servant, who
had refused to let him in, and, taking off his coat as he went,
Oblonsky walked into the room. "Well, I'm awfully glad I've found you!
So I hope..." Stepan Arkadyevich began cheerfully.
  "I cannot come," Alexei Alexandrovich said coldly, standing and
not asking his visitor to sit down.
  Alexei Alexandrovich had thought to pass at once into those frigid
relations in which he ought to stand with the brother of a wife
against whom he was beginning a suit for divorce. But he had not taken
into account the ocean of kindliness brimming over in the heart of
Stepan Arkadyevich.
  Stepan Arkadyevich opened wide his clear, shining eyes.
  "Why can't you? What do you mean?" he asked in perplexity,
speaking in French. "Oh, but it's a promise. And we're all counting on
you."
  "I want to tell you that I can't dine at your house, because the
terms of relationship which have existed between us must cease."
  "How? How do you mean? For what reason?" said Stepan Arkadyevich
with a smile.
  "Because I am beginning an action for divorce against your sister,
my wife. I ought to have..."
  But, before Alexei Alexandrovich had time to finish his sentence,
Stepan Arkadyevich was behaving not at all as he had expected.
Stepan Arkadyevich groaned and sank into an armchair.
  "No, Alexei Alexandrovich! What are you saying?" cried Oblonsky, and
his suffering was apparent in his face.
  "It is so."
  "Excuse me, I can't, I can't believe it!"
  Alexei Alexandrovich sat down, feeling that his words had not had
the effect he anticipated, and that it would be unavoidable for him to
explain his position, and that, whatever explanations he might make,
his relations with his brother-in-law would remain unchanged.
  "Yes, I am brought to the painful necessity of seeking a divorce,"
he said.
  "I will say one thing, Alexei Alexandrovich. I know you for an
excellent, upright man; I know Anna- excuse me, I can't change my
opinion of her- for a good, an excellent woman; and so you must excuse
me if I cannot believe it. There is some misunderstanding," said he.
  "Oh, if it were merely a misunderstanding!..."
  "Pardon, I understand," interposed Stepan Arkadyevich. "But of
course... One thing: you must not act in haste. You must not, you must
not act in haste!"
  "I am not acting in haste," Alexei Alexandrovich said coldly, "but
one cannot ask advice of anyone in such a matter. I have quite made up
my mind."
  "This is awful!" said Stepan Arkadyevich. "I would do one thing,
Alexei Alexandrovich. I beseech you- do it!" he said. "No action has
yet been taken, if I understand rightly. Before you take advice, see
my wife, talk to her. She loves Anna like a sister, she loves you, and
she's a wonderful woman. For God's sake, talk to her! Do me that
favor, I beseech you!"
  Alexei Alexandrovich pondered, and Stepan Arkadyevich looked at
him sympathetically, without interrupting his silence.
  "You will go to see her?"
  "I don't know. That was just why I have not been to see you. I
imagine our relations must change."
  "Why so? I don't see that. Allow me to believe that, apart from
our connection, you have for me, at least in part, the same friendly
feeling I have always had for you... and sincere esteem," said
Stepan Arkadyevich, pressing his hand. "Even if your worst
suppositions were correct, I don't- and never would- take on myself to
judge either side, and I see no reason why our relations should be
affected. But now, do this, come and see my wife."
  "Well, we look at the matter differently," said Alexei Alexandrovich
coldly. "However, we won't discuss it."
  "No; why shouldn't you come today to dine, anyway? My wife's
expecting you. Please, do come. And, above all, talk it over with her.
She's a wonderful woman. For God's sake, on my knees, I implore you!"
  "If you so much wish it, I will come," said Alexei Alexandrovich,
sighing.
  And, anxious to change the conversation, he inquired about what
interested them both- the new head of Stepan Arkadyevich's board, a
man not yet old, who had suddenly been promoted to so high a position.

  Alexei Alexandrovich had previously felt no liking for Count
Anychkin, and had always differed from him in his opinions. But now,
from a feeling readily comprehensible to officials- that hatred felt
by one who has suffered a defeat in the service for one who has
received a promotion- he could not endure him.
  "Well, have you seen him?" said Alexei Alexandrovich with a
malignant smile.
  "Of course; he was at our sitting yesterday. He seems to know his
work capitally, and to be very energetic."
  "Yes, but what is his energy directed to?" said Alexei
Alexandrovich. "Is he aiming at doing anything, or simply doing
again what's been done? It's the great misfortune of our government-
this paper administration, of which he's a worthy representative."
  "Really, I don't know what fault one could find with him. His policy
I don't know, but one thing is certain- he's a very fine fellow,"
answered Stepan Arkadyevich. "I've just been seeing him, and he's
really a fine fellow. We lunched together, and I taught him how to
make- you know that drink- wine and oranges. It's so cooling. And it's
a wonder he didn't know it. He liked it awfully. No, really, he's a
fine fellow."
  Stepan Arkadyevich glanced at his watch.
  "Why, good heavens, it's four already, and I've still to go to
Dolgovushin's! So please come round to dinner. You can't imagine how
you will grieve my wife and me if you don't."
  The way in which Alexei Alexandrovich saw his brother-in-law out was
very different from the manner in which he had met him.
  "I've promised, and I'll come," he answered wearily.
  "Believe me, I appreciate it, and I hope you won't regret it,"
answered Stepan Arkadyevich, smiling.
  And, putting on his coat as he went, he patted the footman on the
head with his coat sleeve, chuckled, and went out.
  "At five o'clock, and wear your frock coat, please," he shouted once
more, returning at the door.
                             IX.

  It was past five, and several guests had already arrived, before the
host himself got home. He went in together with Sergei Ivanovich
Koznishev and with Pestsov, both of whom had reached the street door
at the same moment. These were the two leading representatives of
the Moscow intellectuals, as Oblonsky had called them. Both were men
respected for their character and their intelligence. They respected
each other, but were in complete and hopeless disagreement upon almost
every subject, not because they belonged to opposite parties, but
precisely because they were of the same party (their enemies refused
to see any distinction between their views); but, in that party,
each had his own special shade of opinion. And since no difference
is less easily overcome than the difference of opinion about
semiabstract questions, they never agreed on any opinion, and, indeed,
had long been accustomed to jeer without anger at each other's
incorrigible aberrations.
  They were just going in at the door, talking of the weather, when
Stepan Arkadyevich overtook them. In the drawing room there were
already sitting Prince Alexander Dmitrievich Shcherbatsky, young
Shcherbatsky, Turovtsin, Kitty, and Karenin.
  Stepan Arkadyevich saw immediately that things were not going well
in the drawing room without him. Darya Alexandrovna, in her best
gray silk gown, obviously worried about the children who were to
have their dinner by themselves in the nursery, and by her husband's
absence, was not equal to the task of making the party mix without
him. All were sitting like so many priests' daughters on a visit (so
the old Prince expressed it), obviously wondering why they were there,
and pumping up remarks simply to avoid being silent. Turovtsin-
goodhearted man- felt unmistakably like a fish out of water, and the
smile with which his thick lips greeted Stepan Arkadyevich said, as
plainly as words: "Well, old boy, you have popped me down in a learned
set! A drinking party, and the Chateau des Fleurs, would be more in my
line!" The old Prince sat in silence, his bright little eyes
watching Karenin with a sidelong look; and Stepan Arkadyevich saw that
he had already formed a sharp remark to sum up that politician of whom
guests had been invited to partake, as though he were a sturgeon.
Kitty was looking at the door, calling up all her energies to keep her
from blushing at the entrance of Konstantin Levin. Young Shcherbatsky,
who had not been introduced to Karenin, was trying to look as though
he were not in the least embarrassed by it. Karenin himself had
followed the Peterburg. etiquette for a dinner with ladies present and
was wearing evening dress and a white tie. Stepan Arkadyevich saw by
his face that he had come simply to keep his promise, and was
performing a disagreeable duty in being present at this gathering.
He was indeed the person chiefly responsible for the chill benumbing
all the guests before Stepan Arkadyevich came in.
  On entering the drawing room Stepan Arkadyevich apologized,
explaining that he had been detained by that Prince who was always the
scapegoat for all his absences and unpunctualities, and in one
moment he had made all the guests acquainted with each other, and,
bringing together Alexei Alexandrovich and Sergei Koznishev, had
started them on a discussion of the Russification of Poland, into
which they immediately plunged with Pestsov. Slapping Turovtsin on the
shoulder, he whispered something comic in his ear, and set him down by
his wife and the old Prince. Then he told Kitty she was looking very
pretty that evening, and presented Shcherbatsky to Karenin. In a
moment he had so kneaded together the social dough that the drawing
room became very lively, and there was a merry buzz of voices.
Konstantin Levin was the only person who had not arrived. But this was
so much the better, as, going into the dining room, Stepan Arkadyevich
found to his horror that the port and sherry had been procured from
Depre, and not from Leve, and, directing that the coachman should be
sent off as speedily as possible to Leve's he started back to the
drawing room.
  In the dining room he was met by Konstantin Levin.
  "I'm not late?"
  "You can never help being late!" said Stepan Arkadyevich, taking his
arm.
  "Have you a lot of people? Who's here?" asked Levin, unable to
help blushing, as he knocked the snow off his cap with his glove.
  "All our own set. Kitty's here. Come along, I'll introduce you to
Karenin."
  Stepan Arkadyevich, for all his liberal views, was well aware that
to meet Karenin was sure to be felt a flattering distinction, and so
treated his best friends to this honor. But at that instant Konstantin
Levin was not in a condition to feel all the gratification of making
such an acquaintance. He had not seen Kitty since that memorable
evening when he met Vronsky- not counting, that is, the moment when he
had had a glimpse of her on the highroad. He had known at the bottom
of his heart that he would see her here today. But, to keep his
thoughts free, he had tried to persuade himself that he did not know
it. Now when he heard that she was here, he was suddenly conscious
of such delight, and at the same time of such dread, that his breath
failed him and he could not utter what he wanted to say.
  "What is she like, what is she like? As she used to be, or as she
was in the carriage? What if Darya Alexandrovna told the truth? Why
shouldn't it be the truth?" he thought.
  "Oh, please, introduce me to Karenin," he brought out with an
effort, and with a desperately determined step he walked into the
drawing room and beheld her.
  She was not the same as she used to be, nor was she as she had
been in the carriage; she was quite different.
  She was scared, shy, shamefaced, and because of all this, still more
charming. She saw him the very instant he walked into the room. She
had been expecting him. She was delighted, and so confused at her
own delight that there was a moment, the moment when he went up to her
sister and glanced again at her, when she, and he, and Dolly, who
saw it all, thought she would break down and begin to cry. She
crimsoned, turned white, crimsoned again, and grew faint, waiting with
quivering lips for him to come to her. He went up to her, bowed, and
held out his hand without speaking. Except for the slight quiver of
her lips and the moisture in her eyes, making them brighter, her smile
was almost calm as she said:
  "How long it is since we've seen each other!" and, with desperate
determination, with her cold hand squeezed his.
  "You've not seen me, but I've seen you," said Levin, with a
radiant smile of happiness. "I saw you when you were driving from
the railway station to Ergushovo."
  "When?" she asked, wondering.
  "You were driving to Ergushovo," said Levin, feeling as if he
would sob with the rapture that was flooding his heart.- "And how
dared I associate a thought of anything not innocent with this
touching creature? And, yes, I do believe what Darya Alexandrovna told
me is true," he thought.
  Stepan Arkadyevich took him by the arm and led him away to Karenin.
  "Let me introduce you." He mentioned their names.
  "Very glad to meet you again," said Alexei Alexandrovich coldly,
shaking hands with Levin.
  "You are acquainted?" Stepan Arkadyevich asked in surprise.
  "We spent three hours together in the train," said Levin smiling,
"but got out, just as in a masquerade, quite mystified- at least I
was."
  "Oh, so that's it! Come along, please," said Stepan Arkadyevich,
pointing in the direction of the dining room.
  The men went into the dining room and went up to the table for
hors d'oeuvres, laid with six sorts of vodka and as many kinds of
cheese, some with little silver spades and some without, caviar,
herrings, preserves of various kinds, and plates with slices of French
bread.
  The men stood round the strong-smelling spirits and salt delicacies,
and the discussion of the Russification of Poland between Koznishev,
Karenin and Pestsov, died down in anticipation of dinner.
  Sergei Ivanovich was unequaled in his skill in winding up the most
heated and serious argument by some unexpected pinch of Attic salt
that changed the disposition of his opponent. He did this now.
  Alexei Alexandrovich had been maintaining that the Russification
of Poland could only be accomplished as a result of greater
principles, which ought to be introduced by the Russian government.
  Pestsov insisted that one country can absorb another only when it is
the more densely populated.
  Koznishev admitted both points, but with limitations. As they were
going out of the drawing room to conclude the argument, Koznishev said
smiling:
  "So, then, for the Russification of our foreign populations there is
but one method- to bring up as many children as one can. My brother
and I are terribly at fault, I see. You married men- especially you,
Stepan Arkadyevich- are the real patriots: what number have you
reached?" he said, smiling genially at their host and holding out a
tiny wineglass to him.
  Everyone laughed, and Stepan Arkadyevich with particular good humor.
  "Oh, yes, that's the best method!" he said, munching cheese and
filling the wineglass with a special sort of vodka. The conversation
dropped at the jest.
  "This cheese is not bad. Shall I give you some?" said the master
of the house. "Why, have you been going in for gymnastics again?" he
asked Levin, pinching his muscle with his left hand. Levin smiled,
bent his arm, and under Stepan Arkadyevich's fingers the muscles
swelled up like a sound cheese, hard as a knob of iron, through the
fine cloth of the coat.
  "What biceps! A perfect Samson!"
  "I imagine great strength is needed for hunting bears," observed
Alexei Alexandrovich, who had the mistiest notions about the chase. He
cut off and spread with cheese a wafer of bread fine as a spiderweb.
  Levin smiled.
  "Not at all. Quite the contrary- a child can kill a bear," he
said, with a slight bow moving aside for the ladies, who were
approaching the hors d'oeuvres table.
  "You have killed a bear, I've been told!" said Kitty, trying
assiduously to catch with her fork a perverse mushroom that would slip
away, and shaking the lace over her white arm. "Are there bears on
your place?" she added, turning her charming little head to him and
smiling.
  There was apparently nothing extraordinary in what she said, but
what unutterable meaning there was for him in every sound, in every
turn of her lips, her eyes, her hand as she said it! There was
entreaty for forgiveness, and trust in him, and tenderness- soft,
timid tenderness- and promise, and hope, and love for him, which he
could not but believe in, and which suffocated him with happiness.
  "No, we've been hunting in the Tver province. It was coming back
from there that I met your beau-frere in the train, or your
beau-frere's brother-in-law," he said with a smile. "It was an amusing
meeting."
  And he began telling with droll good humor how, after not sleeping
all night, he had, wearing a fur-lined, full-skirted coat, got into
Alexei Alexandrovich's compartment.
  "The conductor, forgetting the proverb, would have chucked me out on
account of my attire; but thereupon I began expressing my feelings
in elevated language, and... you, too," he said, addressing Karenin
and forgetting his name, "at first would have ejected me on the ground
of my coat, but afterward you took my part, for which I am extremely
grateful."
  "The rights of passengers generally to choose their seats are too
ill-defined," said Alexei Alexandrovich, rubbing the tips of his
fingers on his handkerchief.
  "I saw you were in uncertainty about me," said Levin, smiling
good-naturedly, "but I made haste to plunge into intellectual
conversation to smooth over the defects of my attire."
  Sergei Ivanovich, while he kept a conversation with their hostess,
had one ear for his brother, and he glanced askance at him. "What is
the matter with him today? Why such a conquering hero?" he thought. He
did not know that Levin was feeling as though he had grown wings.
Levin knew she was listening to his words and that she was glad to
listen to him. And this was the only thing that interested him. Not in
that room only, but in the whole world, there existed for him only
himself, with enormously increased importance and dignity in his own
eyes, and she. He felt himself on a pinnacle that made him giddy,
and far away down below were all those kind, excellent Karenins,
Oblonskys, and all the world.
  Quite without attracting notice, without glancing at them, as though
there were no other places left, Stepan Arkadyevich put Levin and
Kitty side by side.
  "Oh, you may as well sit there," he said to Levin.
  The dinner was as choice as the china, of which Stepan Arkadyevich
was a connoisseur. The soupe Marie-Louise was a splendid success;
the tiny patties eaten with it melted in the mouth and were
irreproachable. The two footmen and Matvei, in white cravats, did
their duty with the dishes and wines unobtrusively, quietly, and
dexterously. On the material side the dinner was a success; it was
no less so on the immaterial. The conversation, at times general and
at times between individuals, never paused, and toward the end the
company was so lively that the men rose from the table without
stopping speaking, and even Alexei Alexandrovich became lively.
                             X.

  Pestsov liked threshing an argument out to the end, and was not
satisfied with Sergei Ivanovich's words, especially as he felt the
injustice of his view.
  "I did not mean," he said over the soup, addressing Alexei
Alexandrovich, "mere density of population alone, but in conjunction
with fundamental ideas, and not by means of principles."
  "It seems to me," Alexei Alexandrovich said languidly, and with no
haste, "that that's the same thing. In my opinion, influence over
another people is only possible to the people which has the higher
development, which..."
  "But that's just the question," Pestsov broke in in his bass. He was
always in a hurry to speak, and seemed always to put his whole soul
into whatever he was saying; "of what are we to make higher
development consist? The English, the French, the Germans- which is at
the highest stage of development? Which of them will nationalize the
other? We see the Rhine provinces have been turned French, yet the
Germans are not at a lower stage!" he shouted. "There is another law
at work there!"
  "I fancy that the greater influence is always on the side of true
civilization," said Alexei Alexandrovich, slightly lifting his
eyebrows.
  "But what are we to lay down as the outward signs of true
civilization?" said Pestsov.
  "I imagine such signs are generally very well known," said Alexei
Alexandrovich.
  "But are they fully known?" Sergei Ivanovich put in with a subtle
smile. "It is the accepted view now that real culture must be purely
classical; but we see most intense disputes on each side of the
question, and there is no denying that the opposite camp has strong
points in its favor."
  "You are for the classics, Sergei Ivanovich. Will you take red
wine?" said Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "I am not expressing my own opinion of either form of culture,"
Sergei Ivanovich said, holding out his glass with a smile of
condescension, as to a child. "I only say that both sides have
strong arguments to support them," he went on, addressing Alexei
Alexandrovich. "My sympathies are classical from education, but in
this discussion I am personally unable to arrive at a conclusion. I
see no distinct grounds for classical studies being given a
pre-eminence over scientific studies."
  "The natural sciences have just as great an educational value,"
put in Pestsov. "Take astronomy, take botany, or zoology, with its
system of general principles."
  "I cannot quite agree with that," responded Alexei Alexandrovich.
"It seems to me that one must admit that the very process of
studying the forms of language has a peculiarly favorable influence on
intellectual development. Moreover, it cannot be denied that the
influence of the classical authors is in the highest degree moral,
while, unfortunately, with the study of the natural sciences are
associated the false and noxious doctrines which are the curse of
our day."
  Sergei Ivanovich would have said something, but Pestsov
interrupted him in his rich bass. He began warmly contesting the
justice of this view. Sergei Ivanovich waited serenely to speak,
obviously with a convincing reply ready.
  "But," said Sergei Ivanovich, smiling subtly, and addressing
Karenin, "one must allow that to weigh all the advantages and
disadvantages of classical and scientific studies is a difficult task,
and the question which form of education was to be preferred would not
have been so quickly and conclusively decided if there had not been in
favor of classical education, as you expressed it just now, its moral-
disons le mot- antinihilist influence."
  "Undoubtedly."
  "If it had not been for the distinctive property of antinihilistic
influence on the side of classical studies, we should have
considered the subject more, have weighed the arguments on both
sides," said Sergei Ivanovich with a subtle smile, "we should have
given elbowroom to both tendencies. But now we know that these
little pills of classical learning possess the medicinal property of
antinihilism, and we boldly prescribe them to our patients.... But
what if they had no such medicinal property?" he added his pinch of
Attic salt.
  At Sergei Ivanovich's little pills everyone laughed; Turovtsin in
especial roared loudly and jovially, glad at last to have found
something to laugh at- all he ever looked for in listening to
conversation.
  Stepan Arkadyevich had not made a mistake in inviting Pestsov.
With Pestsov intellectual conversation never flagged for an instant.
Directly Sergei Ivanovich had concluded the conversation with his
jest, Pestsov promptly started a new one.
  "I can't agree even," said he, "that the government had that aim.
The government obviously is guided by abstract considerations, and
remains indifferent to the influence its measures may exercise. The
education of women, for instance, would naturally be regarded as
likely to be harmful, but the government opens schools and
universities for women."
  And the conversation at once passed to the new subject of the
education of women.
  Alexei Alexandrovich expressed the idea that the education of
women is apt to be confounded with the emancipation of women, and that
it is only so that it can be considered dangerous.
  "I consider, on the contrary, that the two questions are inseparably
connected together," said Pestsov; "it is a vicious circle. Woman is
deprived of rights from lack of education, and the lack of education
results from the absence of rights. We must not forget that the
subjection of women is so complete, and dates from such distant
ages, that we are often unwilling to recognize the gulf that separates
them from us," said he.
  "You mentioned rights," said Sergei Ivanovich, waiting till
Pestsov had finished, "meaning the right of sitting on juries, of
voting, of presiding at councils, the right of entering the civil
service, of sitting in parliament...."
  "Undoubtedly."
  "But if women, as a rare exception, can occupy such positions, it
seems to me you are wrong in using the expression 'rights'. It would
be more correct to say duties. Every man will agree that in doing
the duty of a juryman, a witness, a telegraph clerk, we feel we are
performing duties. And, therefore, it would be correct to say that
women are seeking duties, and quite legitimately. And one can but
sympathize with this desire to assist in the general labor of man."
  "Quite so," Alexei Alexandrovich assented. "The question, I imagine,
is simply whether they are fitted for such duties."
  "They will most likely be perfectly fitted," said Stepan
Arkadyevich, "when education has become general among them. We see
this..."
  "How about the proverb?" said the Prince, who had a long while
been intent on the conversation, his mocking little eyes twinkling. "I
can say it before my daughters: her hair is long, but her wit is
short...."
  "Just what they thought of the Negroes before their emancipation!"
said Pestsov angrily.
  "What seems strange to me is that women should seek fresh duties,"
said Sergei Ivanovich, "while we see, unhappily, that men usually
try to avoid them."
  "Duties are bound up with rights- power, money, honor; those are
what women are seeking," said Pestsov.
  "Just as though I should seek the right to be a wet nurse, and
feel injured because women are paid for the work, while no one will
take me," said the old Prince.
  Turovtsin exploded in a loud roar of laughter, and Sergei
Ivanovich regretted that he had not made this comparison. Even
Alexei Alexandrovich smiled.
  "Yes, but a man can't nurse a baby," said Pestsov, "while a
woman..."
  "No, there was an Englishman who did suckle his baby on board ship,"
said the old Prince, feeling this freedom in conversation
permissible before his own daughters.
  "There are as many such Englishmen as there would be women
officials," said Sergei Ivanovich.
  "Yes, but what is a girl to do who has no family?" put in Stepan
Arkadyevich, thinking of Masha Chibisova, whom he had had in his
mind all along, in sympathizing with Pestsov and supporting him.
  "If the story of such a girl were thoroughly sifted, you would
find she had abandoned a family- her own or a sister's, where she
might have found a woman's duties," Darya Alexandrovna broke in
unexpectedly, in a tone of exasperation, probably suspecting what sort
of girl Stepan Arkadyevich had in mind.
  "But we take our stand on principle, on the ideal," replied
Pestsov in his sonorous bass. "Woman desires to have the right to be
independent, educated. She is oppressed, humiliated by the
consciousness of her disabilities."
  "And I'm oppressed and humiliated that they won't engage me at the
Foundling Asylum," the old Prince said again, to the huge delight of
Turovtsin, who in his mirth dropped his asparagus with the thick end
in the sauce.
                             XI.

  Everyone took part in the conversation except Kitty and Levin. At
first, when they were talking of the influence that one people has
on another, there rose to Levin's mind what he had to say on the
subject. But these ideas, once of such importance in his eyes,
seemed to come into his brain as in a dream, and had now not the
slightest interest for him. It even struck him as strange that they
should be so eager to talk of what was of no use to anyone. Kitty,
too, one would have supposed, should have been interested in what they
were saying of the rights and education of women. How often she had
mused on the subject, thinking of her friend abroad, Varenka, of her
painful state of dependence; how often she had wondered about
herself as to what would become of her if she did not marry, and how
often she had argued with her sister about it! But now it did not
interest her at all. She and Levin had a conversation of their own,
yet not a conversation, but a sort of mysterious communication,
which brought them every moment nearer, and stirred in both a sense of
glad terror before the unknown into which they were entering.
  At first Levin, in answer to Kitty's question how he could have seen
her last year in the carriage, told her that he had been coming home
from the mowing along the highroad and had met her.
  "It was very, very early in the morning. You were probably only just
awake. Your maman was asleep in her corner. It was an exquisite
morning. I was walking along wondering who it could be in the
four-in-hand. It was a splendid set of four horses with bells, and
in a second you flashed by, and I saw you at the window- you were
sitting, like this; holding the strings of your cap in both hands, and
in awfully deep thought about something," he said, smiling. "How I
should like to know what you were thinking about then! Something
important?"
  "Wasn't I dreadfully untidy?" she wondered, but seeing the smile
of ecstasy these reminiscences called up, she felt that the impression
she had made had been very good. She blushed and laughed with delight:
  "Really I don't remember."
  "How nicely Turovtsin laughs!" said Levin, admiring his humid eyes
and heaving chest.
  "Have you known him long?" asked Kitty.
  "Oh, everyone knows him!"
  "And I see you think he's a horrid man?"
  "Not horrid, but there's nothing in him."
  "Oh, you're wrong! And you must give up thinking so directly!"
said Kitty. "I used to have a very poor opinion of him too, but he's
an awfully fine and wonderfully goodhearted man. He has a heart of
gold."
  "How could you find out what sort of heart he has?"
  "We are great friends. I know him very well. Last winter, soon
after... you came to see us," she said, with a guilty and at the
same time a confiding smile, "all Dolly's children had scarlatina, and
he happened to come to see her. And only fancy," she said in a
whisper, "he felt so sorry for her that he stayed and began to help
her look after the children. Yes, and for three weeks he stopped
with them, and looked after the children like a nurse."
  "I am telling Konstantin Dmitrievich about Turovtsin and the
scarlatina," she said, bending over to her sister.
  "Yes, it was wonderful, noble!" said Dolly, glancing toward
Turovtsin, who had become aware they were talking of him, and
smiling gently to him. Levin glanced once more at Turovtsin, and
wondered how it was he had not realized all this man's goodness
before.
  "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, and I'll never think ill of people again!" he
said gaily, genuinely expressing what he felt at the moment.
                             XII.

  Connected with the conversation that had sprung up on the rights
of women there were certain questions as to the inequality of rights
in marriage, improper to discuss before the ladies. Pestsov had
several times during dinner touched upon these questions, but Sergei
Ivanovich and Stepan Arkadyevich carefully drew him off them.
  When they rose from the table and the ladies had gone out, Pestsov
did not follow them, but, addressing Alexei Alexandrovich, began to
expound the chief ground of inequality. The inequality in marriage, in
his opinion, lay in the fact that the infidelity of the wife and
infidelity of the husband are punished unequally, both by the law
and by public opinion.
  Stepan Arkadyevich went hurriedly up to Alexei Alexandrovich and
offered him a cigar.
  "No, I don't smoke," Alexei Alexandrovich answered calmly, and, as
though purposely wishing to show that he was not afraid of the
subject, he turned to Pestsov with a chilly smile.
  "I imagine that such a view has a foundation in the very nature of
things," he said, and would have gone on to the drawing room. But at
this point Turovtsin broke suddenly and unexpectedly into the
conversation, addressing Alexei Alexandrovich.
  "You heard, perhaps, about Priachnikov?" said Turovtsin, warmed up
by the champagne he had drunk, and long waiting for an opportunity
to break the silence that had weighed on him. "Vassia Priachnikov," he
said, with a good-natured smile on his moist, red lips, addressing
himself principally to the most important guest, Alexei Alexandrovich,
"they told me today he fought a duel with Kvitsky at Tver, and has
killed him."
  Just as it always seems that one bruises oneself on a sore place, so
Stepan Arkadyevich felt now that the conversation would by ill luck
fall at any moment on Alexei Alexandrovich's sore spot. He would again
have got his brother-in-law away, but Alexei Alexandrovich himself
inquired, with curiosity:
  "What did Priachnikov fight about?"
  "His wife. Acted like a man, he did! Called him out and shot him!"
  "Ah!" said Alexei Alexandrovich indifferently, and, lifting his
eyebrows, he went into the drawing room.
  "How glad I am you have come," Dolly said with a frightened smile,
meeting him in the outer drawing room. "I must talk to you. Let's
sit here."
  Alexei Alexandrovich, with the same expression of indifference,
due to his lifted eyebrows, sat down beside Darya Alexandrovna, and
smiled affectedly.
  "It's fortunate," said he, "especially as I meant to ask you to
excuse me, and to be taking leave. I have to start tomorrow."
  Darya Alexandrovna was firmly convinced of Anna's innocence, and she
felt herself growing pale and her lips quivering with anger at this
frigid, unfeeling man, who was so calmly intending to ruin her
innocent friend.
  "Alexei Alexandrovich," she said, with desperate resolution
looking him in the face, "I asked you about Anna; you made me no
answer. How is she?"
  "She is, I believe, quite well, Darya Alexandrovna," replied
Alexei Alexandrovich, without looking at her.
  "Alexei Alexandrovich, forgive me, I have no right... But I love
Anna as a sister, and esteem her; I beg, I beseech you to tell me what
is wrong between you? What fault do you find with her?"
  Alexei Alexandrovich frowned, and, almost closing his eyes,
dropped his head.
  "I presume that your husband has told you the grounds on which I
consider it necessary to change my attitude to Anna Arkadyevna?" he
said, without looking her in the face, but eying with displeasure
Shcherbatsky, who was walking across the drawing room.
  "I don't believe it, I don't believe it- I can't believe it!"
Dolly said, clasping her bony hands before her with a vigorous
gesture. She rose quickly and laid her hand on Alexei
Alexandrovich's sleeve. "We shall be disturbed here. Come this way,
please."
  Dolly's agitation had an effect on Alexei Alexandrovich. He got up
and submissively followed her to the schoolroom. They sat down at a
table covered with an oilcloth cut in slits by penknives.
  "I don't- I don't believe it!" Dolly said, trying to catch his
glance, still avoiding her.
  "One cannot disbelieve facts, Darya Alexandrovna," said he, with
an emphasis on the word facts.
  "But what has she done?" said Darya Alexandrovna. "What,
precisely, has she done?"
  "She has forsaken her duty, and deceived her husband. That's what
she has done," said he.
  "No, no, it can't be! No, for God's sake, you are mistaken," said
Dolly, putting her hands to her temples and closing her eyes.
  Alexei Alexandrovich smiled coldly, with his lips alone, meaning
to signify to her and himself the firmness of his conviction; but this
warm defense, though it could not shake him, reopened his wound. He
began to speak with greater heat.
  "It is extremely difficult to be mistaken when a wife herself
informs her husband of the fact- informs him that eight years of her
life, and a son, are all a mistake, and that she wants to begin life
anew," he said angrily, with a snort.
  "Anna and sin- I cannot connect them, I cannot believe it!"
  "Darya Alexandrovna," he said, now looking straight into Dolly's
kindly, troubled face, and feeling that his tongue was being
loosened in spite of himself, "I would give a great deal for doubt
to be still possible. When I doubted, I was miserable, but it was
better than now. When I doubted, I had hope; but now there is no hope,
and still I doubt everything. I am in such doubt of everything that
I even hate my son, and sometimes do not believe he is my son. I am
very unhappy."
  He had no need to say that. Darya Alexandrovna had seen that as soon
as he glanced into her face; and she felt sorry for him, and her faith
in the innocence of her friend began to waver.
  "Oh, this is awful, awful! But can it be true that you are
resolved on a divorce?"
  "I am resolved on extreme measures. There is nothing else for me
to do."
  "Nothing else to do, nothing else to do..." she replied, with
tears in her eyes. "Oh no, don't say there's nothing else to do!"
she said.
  "What is horrible in a misfortune of this kind is that one cannot,
as in any other- in loss, in death- bear one's trouble in peace, but
that one must act," said he, as though guessing her thought. "One must
get out of the humiliating position in which one is placed; one
can't live a trois."
  "I understand, I quite understand that," said Dolly, and her head
sank. She was silent for a little, thinking of herself, of her own
grief in her family, and all at once, with an impulsive movement,
she raised her head and clasped her hands with an imploring gesture.
"But wait a little! You are a Christian. Think of her! What will
become of her, if you cast her off?"
  "I have thought, Darya Alexandrovna- I have thought a great deal,"
said Alexei Alexandrovich. His face turned red in patches, and his dim
eyes looked straight before him. Darya Alexandrovna at that moment
pitied him with all her heart. "That indeed was what I did when she
herself made known to me my humiliation; I left everything as of
old. I gave her a chance to reform, I tried to save her. And with what
result? She would not regard the least request- that she should
observe decorum," he said, getting heated. "One may save anyone who
does not want to be ruined; but if the whole nature is so corrupt,
so depraved, that ruin itself seems to her salvation, what's to be
done?"
  "Anything, only not divorce!" answered Darya Alexandrovna.
  "But what is anything?"
  "No, it is awful! She will be no one's wife; she will be lost!"
  "What can I do?" said Alexei Alexandrovich, raising his shoulders
and his eyebrows. The recollection of his wife's last act had so
incensed him that he had become frigid, as at the beginning of the
conversation. "I am very grateful for your sympathy, but I must be
going," he said, getting up.
  "No, wait a minute. You must not ruin her. Wait a little; I will
tell you about myself. I was married, and my husband deceived me; in
anger and jealousy I would have thrown up everything, I would
myself... But I came to myself again; and who did it? Anna saved me.
And here I am living on. The children are growing up, my husband has
come back to his family, and feels his fault, is growing purer,
better, and I live on... I have forgiven it, and you ought to
forgive!"
  Alexei Alexandrovich heard her, but her words had no effect on him
now. All the hatred of that day when he had resolved on a divorce
had sprung up again in his soul. He shook himself, and said in a
shrill loud voice:
  "Forgive I cannot, and do not wish to, and I regard it as wrong. I
have done everything for this woman, and she has trodden it all in the
mud to which she is kin. I am not a spiteful man, I have never hated
anyone, but I hate her with my whole soul, and I cannot even forgive
her, because I hate her too much for all the wrong she has done me!"
he said, with tears of hatred in his voice.
  "Love those that hate you..." Darya Alexandrovna whispered,
timorously.
  Alexei Alexandrovich smiled contemptuously. That he knew long ago,
but it could not be applied to his case.
  "Love those that hate you, but to love those one hates is
impossible. Forgive me for having troubled you. Everyone has enough to
bear in his own grief!" And, regaining his self-possession, Alexei
Alexandrovich quietly took leave and went away.
                             XIII.

  When they rose from the table, Levin would have liked to follow
Kitty into the drawing room; but he was afraid she might dislike this,
as too obviously paying her attention. He remained in the little
ring of men, taking part in the general conversation, and, without
looking at Kitty, he was aware of her movements, her looks, and the
place where she was in the drawing room.
  He did at once, and without the smallest effort, keep the promise he
had made her- always to think well of all men, and to like everyone
always. The conversation fell on the village commune, in which Pestsov
saw a sort of special principle, called by him the choral principle.
Levin did not agree with Pestsov, nor with his brother, who had a
special attitude of his own, both admitting yet not admitting the
significance of the Russian commune. But he talked to them, simply
trying to reconcile and soften their differences. He was not in the
least interested in what he said himself, and even less so in what
they said; all he wanted was that they and everyone should be happy
and contented. He knew now the one thing of importance; and that one
thing was at first there, in the drawing room, and then began moving
across, and came to a standstill at the door. Without turning round he
felt her eyes fixed on him, and her smile, and he could not help
turning round. She was standing in the doorway with Shcherbatsky,
looking at Levin.
  "I thought you were going toward the piano," said he, going up to
her. "That's something I miss in the country- music."
  "No; we only came to fetch you, and I thank you," she said,
rewarding him with a smile that was like a gift, "for coming. What
do they want to argue for? No one ever convinces anyone, you know."
  "Yes; that's true," said Levin; "it generally happens that one
argues warmly simply because one can't make out what one's opponent
wants to prove."
  Levin had often noticed in discussions between the most
intelligent people that after enormous efforts, and an enormous
expenditure of logical subtleties and words, the disputants finally
arrived at the realization that what they had so long been
struggling to prove to one another had long ago, from the beginning of
the argument, been known to both, but that they liked different
things, and would not define what they liked for fear of its being
attacked. He had often had the experience of suddenly grasping in a
discussion what it was his opponent liked and at once liking it too,
and immediately he found himself agreeing, and then all arguments fell
away as useless. Sometimes, too, he had experienced the opposite,
expressing at last what he liked himself, which he was devising
arguments to defend, and, chancing to express it well and genuinely,
he had found his opponent at once agreeing and ceasing to dispute
his position. He tried to say this.
  She knit her brow, trying to understand. But directly he began to
illustrate his meaning, she understood at once.
  "I know: one must find out what he is arguing for, what is
precious to him, then one can..."
  She had completely guessed and expressed his badly expressed idea.
Levin smiled joyfully; he was struck by this transition from the
confused, verbose discussion with Pestsov and his brother to this
laconic, clear, almost wordless communication of the most complex
ideas.
  Shcherbatsky moved away from them, and Kitty, going up to a card
table, sat down, and, taking up the chalk, began drawing diverging
circles over the new green cloth.
  They began again on the subject that had been started at dinner- the
liberty and occupations of women. Levin was of the opinion of Darya
Alexandrovna that a girl who did not marry should find a woman's
duties in a family. He supported this view by the fact that no
family can get on without women to help; that in every family, poor or
rich, there are and must be nurses, either relations or hired.
  "No," said Kitty, blushing, but looking at him all the more
bravely with her truthful eyes; "a girl may be so circumstanced that
she cannot live in the family without humiliation, while she
herself..."
  At the hint he understood her.
  "Oh, yes," he said. "Yes, yes, yes- you're right; you're right!"
  And he saw all that Pestsov had been maintaining at dinner about the
liberty of woman, simply from getting a glimpse of the terror of an
old maid's existence and its humiliation in Kitty's heart; and
loving her, he felt that terror and humiliation, and at once gave up
his arguments.
  A silence followed. She was still drawing with the chalk on the
table. Her eyes were shining with a soft light. Under the influence of
her mood he felt in all his being a continually growing tension of
happiness.
  "Ah! I've scribbled all over the table!" she said, and, laying
down the chalk, she made a movement as though to get up.
  "What! Shall I be left alone- without her?" he thought with
horror, and he took the chalk. "Wait a minute," he said, sitting
down to the table. "I've long wanted to ask you one thing."
  He looked straight into her caressing, though frightened eyes.
  "Please, ask it."
  "Here," he said; and he wrote the initial letters, w, y, t, m: i, c,
n, b, d, t, m, n, o, t. These letters meant, "When you told me: it
could never be, did that mean never, or then?" There seemed no
likelihood that she could make out this complicated sentence; but he
looked at her as though his life depended on her understanding the
words.
  She glanced at him seriously, then leaned her puckered brow on her
hands and began to read. Once or twice she stole a look at him, as
though asking him, "Is it what I think it is?"
  "I understand," she said, flushing.
  "What is this word?" he said, pointing to the n that stood for
never.
  "It means never," she said; "but that's not true!"
  He quickly rubbed out what he had written, gave her the chalk, and
stood up. She wrote, t, i, c, n, a, d.
  Dolly was completely comforted in the depression caused by her
conversation with Alexei Alexandrovich when she caught sight of the
two figures: Kitty with the chalk in her hand, with a shy and happy
smile looking upward at Levin, and his handsome figure bending over
the table with glowing eyes fastened one minute on the table and the
next on her. He was suddenly radiant: he had understood. It meant,
"Then I could not answer differently."
  He glanced at her questioningly, timidly.
  "Only then?"
  "Yes," her smile answered.
  "And n... And now?" he asked.
  "Well, read this. I'll tell you what I should like- should like so
much!" She wrote the initial letters, i, y, c, f, a, f, w, h. This
meant, "If you could forget and forgive what happened."
  He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and
breaking it, wrote the initial letters of the following phrase, "I
have nothing to forget and to forgive; I have never ceased to love
you."
  She glanced at him with a smile that did not waver.
  "I understand," she said in a whisper.
  He sat down and wrote a long phrase. She understood it all, and
without asking him, "Is it this?" took the chalk and at once answered.
  For a long while he could not understand what she had written, and
often looked into her eyes. He was stupefied with happiness. He
could not supply the words she had meant; but in her charming eyes,
beaming with happiness, he saw all he needed to know. And he wrote
three letters. But he had hardly finished writing when she read them
over her arm, and herself finished and wrote the answer, "Yes."
  "You're playing secretaire?" said the old Prince. "But we must
really be getting along if you want to be in time at the theater."
  Levin got up and escorted Kitty to the door.
  In their conversation everything had been said; it had been said
that she loved him, and that she would tell her father and mother that
he would come tomorrow morning.
                             XIV.

  When Kitty had gone and Levin was left alone, he felt such
uneasiness without her and such an impatient longing to get as quickly
as possible to tomorrow morning, when he would see her again and be
plighted to her forever, that he felt afraid, as though of death, of
those fourteen hours that he had to get through without her. It was
essential for him to be with someone to talk to, so as not to be
left alone; to deceive time. Stepan Arkadyevich would have been the
companion most congenial to him, but he was going out, he said, to a
soiree- in reality to the ballet. Levin only had time to tell him he
was happy, and that he loved him, and would never, never forget what
he had done for him. The eyes and the smile of Stepan Arkadyevich
showed Levin that he comprehended that feeling fittingly.
  "Oh, so it's not time to die yet?" said Stepan Arkadyevich, pressing
Levin's hand with emotion.
  "N-n-no!" said Levin.
  Darya Alexandrovna too, as she said good-by to him, gave him a
sort of congratulation, saying, "How glad I am you have met Kitty
again! One must value old friends." Levin did not like these words
of Darya Alexandrovna's. She could not understand how lofty and beyond
her it all was, and she ought not to have dared to allude to it. Levin
said good-by to them, but, not to be left alone, he attached himself
to his brother.
  "Where are you going?"
  "I'm going to a meeting."
  "Well, I'll come with you. May I?"
  "What for? Yes, come along," said Sergei Ivanovich, smiling. "What
is the matter with you today?"
  "With me? Happiness is the matter with me!" said Levin, letting down
the window of the carriage they were driving in. "You don't mind? It's
so stifling. Happiness is all that's the matter with me! Why is it you
have never married?"
  Sergei Ivanovich smiled.
  "I am very glad- she seems a lovely gi..." Sergei Ivanovich was
beginning.
  "Don't say it! Don't say it!" shouted Levin, clutching at the collar
of his fur coat with both hands, and muffling him up in it. "She's a
lovely girl" were such simple, humble words, so out of harmony with
his feeling.
  Sergei Ivanovich laughed outright a merry laugh, which was rare with
him.
  "Well, anyway, I may say that I'm very glad of it."
  "That you may do tomorrow, tomorrow- and say no more! Nothing,
nothing- silence," said Levin, and muffling him once more in his fur
coat, he added: "I do like you so! Well, is it possible for me to be
present at the meeting?"
  "Of course it is."
  "What is your discussion about today?" asked Levin, never ceasing
smiling.
  They arrived at the meeting. Levin heard the secretary
hesitatingly read the minutes which he obviously did not himself
understand; but Levin saw from this secretary's face what a good,
fine, kindhearted person he was. This was evident from his confusion
and embarrassment in reading the minutes. Then the discussion began.
They were disputing about the reckoning off of certain sums and the
laying of certain pipes, and Sergei Ivanovich was very cutting to
two members, and said something at great length with an air of
triumph; and another member, scribbling something on a bit of paper,
began timidly at first, but afterward answered him very viciously
and delightfully. And then Sviiazhsky (he was there also) said
something too, very handsomely and nobly. Levin listened to them,
and saw clearly that this reckoning off of sums and these pipes were
not anything real, and that they were not at all angry, but were all
the finest, kindest people, and everything was as happy and charming
as possible among them. They did no harm to anyone, and were all
enjoying it. What struck Levin was that he could see through them
all today, and from little, almost imperceptible signs knew the soul
of each, and saw distinctly that they were all good at heart. And they
were all extremely fond of Levin in particular that day. This was
evident from the way they spoke to him, from the friendly,
affectionate way even those whom he did not know looked at him.
  "Well, are you contented with it?" Sergei Ivanovich asked him.
  "Very much. I never supposed it was so interesting, nice, capital!"
  Sviiazhsky went up to Levin and invited him to come round to tea
with him. Levin was utterly at a loss to comprehend or recall what
it was he had disliked in Sviiazhsky, what he had failed to find in
him. He was a clever and wonderfully goodhearted man.
  "Most delighted," he said, and asked after his wife and
sister-in-law. And from a queer association of ideas, because in his
imagination the idea of Sviiazhsky's sister-in-law was connected
with marriage, it occurred to him that there was no one to whom he
could more suitably speak of his happiness, than to Sviiazhsky's
wife and sister-in-law, and he was very glad to go to see them.
  Sviiazhsky questioned him about his improvements on his estate,
presupposing, as he always did, that there was no possibility of doing
anything not done already in Europe, and now this did not in the least
annoy Levin. On the contrary, he felt that Sviiazhsky was right,
that the whole business was of little value, and he saw the
wonderful suavity and consideration with which Sviiazhsky avoided
fully expressing his correct view. The ladies of the Sviiazhsky
household were particularly delightful. It seemed to Levin that they
knew all about it already, and sympathized with him, saying nothing
merely out of delicacy. He stayed with them one hour, two, three,
talking of all sorts of subjects, but implied in it the only thing
that filled his heart, and did not observe that he was boring them
dreadfully, and that it was long past their bedtime. Sviiazhsky went
with him into the hall, yawning and wondering at the strange humor his
friend was in. It was past one o'clock. Levin went back to his
hotel, and was dismayed at the thought that all alone now with his
impatience he had ten hours still left to get through. The servant,
whose turn it was to be up all night, lighted his candles, and would
have gone away, but Levin stopped him. This servant, Iegor, whom Levin
had not noticed before, struck him as a very intelligent, excellent,
and, above all, a goodhearted man.
  "Well, Iegor, it's hard work not sleeping, isn't it?"
  "What's to be done! It's part of our work, you see. In a gentleman's
house it's easier; but then here one makes more."
  It appeared that Iegor had a family- three boys and a daughter, a
seamstress, whom he wanted to marry to a cashier in a saddler's shop.
  Levin, on hearing this, informed Iegor that, in his opinion, in
marriage the great thing was love, and that with love one would always
be happy, for happiness rests only on oneself.
  Iegor listened attentively, and obviously quite took in Levin's
idea, but by way of assent to it he enunciated, greatly to Levin's
surprise, the observation that when he had lived with good masters
he had always been satisfied with his masters, and now was perfectly
satisfied with his employer, though he was a Frenchman.
  "Wonderfully goodhearted fellow!" thought Levin.
  "Well, but you yourself, Iegor, when you got married, did you love
your wife?"
  "Ay! And why not?" responded Iegor.
  And Levin saw that Iegor too was in an excited state and intending
to express all his most heartfelt emotions.
  "My life, too, has been a wonderful one. From a child up..." he
was beginning with flashing eyes, apparently catching Levin's
enthusiasm, just as people catch yawning.
  But at that moment a ring was heard. Iegor departed, and Levin was
left alone. He had eaten scarcely anything at dinner, had refused
tea and supper at Sviiazhsky's, but he was incapable of thinking of
supper. He had not slept the previous night, but was incapable of
thinking of sleep either. His room was cold, but he was oppressed by
heat. He opened both the movable panes in his windows and sat down
on the table opposite the open panes. Over the snow-covered roofs
could be seen a decorated cross, with chains, and above it the
rising triangle of Auriga, with the yellowish light of Capella. He
gazed at the cross, then at the star, drank in the fresh freezing
air that flowed evenly into the room, and followed as though in a
dream the images and memories that rose in his imagination. At four
o'clock he heard steps in the passage and peeped out of the door. It
was the gambler Miaskin, whom he knew, coming from the club. He walked
gloomily, frowning and coughing. "Poor, unlucky fellow!" thought
Levin, and tears came into his eyes from love and pity for this man.
He would have talked with him, and tried to comfort him, but
remembering that he had nothing but his shirt on, he changed his
mind and sat down again at the open pane to bathe in the cold air
and gaze at the exquisite lines of the cross, silent, but full of
meaning for him, and the mounting lurid yellow star. At six o'clock
there was a noise of people polishing the floors, and church bells
ringing to some divine service, and Levin felt that he was beginning
to get frozen. He closed the pane, washed, dressed, and went out
into the street.
                             XV.

  The streets were still empty. Levin went to the house of the
Shcherbatskys. The visitors' doors were closed and everything was
asleep. He walked back, went into his room again, and asked for
coffee. The day servant, not Iegor this time, brought it to him. Levin
would have entered into conversation with him, but a bell rang for the
servant, and he went out. Levin tried to drink coffee and take a
bite of a roll, but his mouth was quite at a loss what to do with
the roll. Levin, rejecting the roll, put on his coat and went out
again for a walk. It was nine o'clock when he reached the
Shcherbatskys' steps the second time. In the house they were only just
up, and the cook came out to go marketing. He had to get through at
least two hours more.
  All that night and morning Levin lived perfectly unconsciously,
and felt perfectly lifted out of the conditions of material life. He
had eaten nothing for a whole day, he had not slept for two nights,
had spent several hours undressed in the frozen air, and felt not only
fresher and stronger than ever, but felt utterly independent of his
body; he moved without muscular effort, and felt as if he could do
anything. He was convinced he could fly upward or lift the corner of
the house, if need be. He spent the remainder of the time in the
street, incessantly looking at his watch and gazing about him.
  And what he saw then, he never saw again after. Especially the
children going to school, the blue-gray doves fluttering down from the
roofs to the pavement, and the little loaves covered with flour, set
out by an unseen hand, touched him. Those loaves, those doves, and
those two boys were not of this earth. It all happened at the same
time: a boy ran toward a dove and glanced smiling at Levin; the
dove, with a whir of her wings, darted away, flashing in the sun, amid
grains of snow that quivered in the air, while from a little window
there came a smell of fresh-baked bread, and the loaves were set
out. All of this together was so extraordinarily resplendent that
Levin laughed and cried with delight. Going a long way round by
Gazetny Lane and Kislovka, he went back again to the hotel, and,
putting his watch before him, sat down to wait for twelve o'clock.
In the next room they were talking about some sort of machines, and
swindling, and coughing their morning coughs. They did not realize
that the hand was near twelve. The hand reached it. Levin went out
on the steps. The sleigh drivers clearly knew all about it. They
crowded round Levin with happy faces, quarreling among themselves, and
offering their services. Trying not to offend the other sleigh
drivers, and promising to drive with them too, Levin took one and told
him to drive to the Shcherbatskys'. The sleigh driver was splendid
in a white shirt collar, sticking out over his overcoat and into his
strong, full-blooded red neck. The sleigh was high and comfortable,
and altogether such a one as Levin never drove in after, and the horse
was a good one, and tried to gallop yet didn't seem to move. The
driver knew the Shcherbatskys' house, and drew up at the entrance,
squaring his arms and saying a "Whoa!" especially indicative of
respect for his fare. The Shcherbatskys' hall porter certainly knew
all about it. This was evident from the smile in his eyes and the
way he said:
  "Well, it's a long while since you've been to see us, Konstantin
Dmitrievich!"
  Not only did he know all about it, but he was unmistakably delighted
and making efforts to conceal his joy. Looking into his kindly old
eyes, Levin realized even something new in his happiness.
  "Are they up?"
  "Pray walk in! Leave it here," said he, smiling, as Levin would have
come back to take his hat. That meant something.
  "To whom shall I announce your honor?" asked the footman.
  The footman, though a young man, and one of the new school of
footmen- a dandy- was a very kindhearted, good fellow, and he too knew
all about it.
  "The Princess... the Prince... the young Princess..." said Levin.
  The first person he saw was Mademoiselle Linon. She walked across
the room, and her ringlets and her face were beaming. He had barely
spoken to her, when suddenly he heard the rustle of a skirt at the
door, and Mademoiselle Linon vanished from Levin's eyes, and a
joyful terror came over him at the nearness of his happiness.
Mademoiselle Linon was in great haste, and, leaving him, went out at
the other door. Directly she had gone out, swift, swift light steps
sounded on the parquet, and his bliss, his life, his own self- what
was best in himself, what he had so long sought and longed for- was
quickly, so quickly approaching him. She did not walk, but seemed,
by some unseen force, to float toward him.
  He saw nothing but her clear, truthful eyes, frightened by the
same bliss of love that flooded his heart. Those eyes were shining
nearer and nearer, blinding him with their light of love. She
stopped close to him, touching him. Her hands rose and dropped on
his shoulders.
  She had done all she could- she had run up to him and given
herself up entirely, shy and happy. He put his arms round her, and
pressed his lips to her mouth, which sought his kiss.
  She too had not slept all night, and had been expecting him all
the morning.
  Her mother and father had consented without demur, and were happy in
her happiness. She had been waiting for him. She wanted to be the
first to tell him her happiness and his. She had got ready to see
him alone, and had been delighted at the idea, and had been shy and
ashamed, and did not know herself what she was to do. She had heard
his steps and voice, and had waited at the door for Mademoiselle Linon
to go. Mademoiselle Linon had gone away. Without thinking, without
asking herself how and what, she had gone up to him, and did as she
was doing.
  "Let us go to mamma!" she said, taking him by the hand. For a long
while he could say nothing, not so much because he was afraid of
desecrating the loftiness of his emotion by a word, as that every time
he tried to say something, instead of words he felt that tears of
happiness were welling up. He took her hand and kissed it.
  "Can it be true?" he said at last in a choked voice. "I can't
believe you love me, dear!"
  She smiled at that "dear," and at the timidity with which he glanced
at her.
  "Yes!" she said significantly, deliberately. "I am so happy!"
  Without letting go his hand, she went into the drawing room. The
Princess, seeing them, breathed quickly, and immediately began to cry,
and then immediately began to laugh, and, with a vigorous step Levin
had not expected, ran up to him, and hugging his head, kissed him,
wetting his cheeks with her tears.
  "So it is all settled! I am glad. Love her. I am glad... Kitty!"
  "You've not been long settling things," said the old Prince,
trying to seem unmoved; but Levin noticed that his eyes were wet
when he turned to him. "I've long- always- wished for this!" said
the Prince, taking Levin by the arm and drawing him toward himself.
"Even when this little featherhead fancied..."
  "Papa!" shrieked Kitty, and shut his mouth with her hands.
  "Well, I won't!" he said. "I'm very, very... plea... Oh, what a fool
I am...."
  He embraced Kitty, kissed her face, her hand, her face again, and
made the sign of the cross over her.
  And there came over Levin a new feeling of love for this man, the
old Prince, till then so little known to him, when he saw how slowly
and tenderly Kitty kissed his muscular hand.
                             XVI.

  The Princess was sitting in her armchair, silent and smiling; the
Prince sat down beside her. Kitty stood by her father's chair, still
holding his hand. All were silent.
  The Princess was the first to put everything into words, and to
translate all thoughts and feelings into practical questions. And
all felt equally strange and painful for the first minute.
  "When is it to be? We must have the benediction and announcement.
And when's the wedding to be? What do you think, Alexandre?
  "Here he is," said the old Prince, pointing to Levin- "he's the
principal person in the matter."
  "When?" said Levin blushing. "Tomorrow. If you ask me, I should say,
the benediction today, and the wedding tomorrow."
  "Come, mon cher, that's nonsense!"
  "Well, in a week."
  "He's quite mad."
  "No, why so?"
  "Well, upon my word!" said the mother, smiling, delighted at this
haste. "How about the trousseau?"
  "Will there really be a trousseau and all that?" Levin thought
with horror. "But can the trousseau and the benediction and all
that- can it spoil my happiness? Nothing can spoil it!" He glanced
at Kitty and noticed that she was not in the least, not in the very
least, disturbed by the idea of the trousseau. "Then it must be all
right," he thought.
  "Oh, I know nothing about it; I only said what I should like," he
said apologetically.
  "We'll talk it over, then. The benediction and announcement can take
place now. That's very well."
  The Princess went up to her husband, kissed him, and would have gone
away, but he held her back, embraced her, and tenderly, as a young
lover, kissed her several times, smiling. The old people were
obviously muddled for a moment, and did not quite know whether it
was they who were in love again or their daughter. When the Prince and
the Princess had gone, Levin went up to his betrothed and took her
hand. He was self-possessed now and could speak, and he had a great
deal he wanted to tell her. But he did not say at all what he had to
say.
  "How I knew it would be so! I never hoped for it; and yet in my
heart I was always sure," he said. "I believe that it was ordained."
  "And I?" she said. "Even when..." She stopped and went on again,
looking at him resolutely with her truthful eyes, "Even when I
thrust my happiness from me. I always loved you only, but I was
carried away. I ought to tell you... Can you forgive it?"
  "Perhaps it was for the best. You will have to forgive me so much. I
ought to tell you..."
  This was one of the things he had meant to speak about. He had
resolved from the first to tell her two things- that he was not chaste
as she was, and that he was not a believer. It was agonizing, but he
considered he ought to tell her both these facts.
  "No, not now, later!" he said.
  "Very well, later, but you must certainly tell me. I'm not afraid of
anything. I want to know everything. Now it is settled."
  He added:
  "Settled that you'll take me whatever I may be- you won't give me
up? Yes?"
  "Yes, yes."
  Their conversation was interrupted by Mademoiselle Linon, who with
an affected but tender smile came to congratulate her favorite
pupil. Before she had gone, the servants came in with their
congratulations. Then relations arrived, and there began that state of
blissful absurdity from which Levin did not emerge till the day
after his wedding. Levin was in a continual state of awkwardness and
discomfort, but the intensity of his happiness went on increasing
all the while. He felt continually that a great deal was being
expected of him- what, he did not know; and he did everything he was
told, and it all gave him happiness. He had thought his engagement
would have nothing about it like others, that the ordinary
conditions of engaged couples would spoil his special happiness; but
it ended in his doing exactly as other people did, and his happiness
being only increased thereby and becoming more and more special,
more and more unlike anything that had ever happened.
  "Now we shall have sweetmeats to eat," said Mademoiselle Linon-
and Levin drove off to buy sweetmeats.
  "Well, I'm very glad," said Sviiazhsky. "I advise you to get the
bouquets from Fomin's."
  "Oh, are they wanted?" And he drove to Fomin's.
  His brother recommended lending money to him, as he would have so
many expenses, presents to give...
  "Oh, are presents wanted?" And he galloped to Foulde's.
  And at the confectioner's, and at Fomin's, and at Foulde's he saw
that he was expected; that they were pleased to see him, and prided
themselves on his happiness, just as everyone did whom he had to do
with during those days. What was extraordinary was that everyone not
only liked him, but even people previously unsympathetic, cold, and
callous, were enthusiastic over him, gave way to him in everything,
treated his feelings with tenderness and delicacy, and shared his
conviction that he was the happiest man in the world because his
betrothed was beyond perfection. Kitty too felt the same thing. When
Countess Nordstone ventured to hint that she had hoped for something
better, Kitty was so angry and proved so conclusively that nothing
in the world could be better than Levin, that Countess Nordstone had
to admit it, and in Kitty's presence never met Levin without a smile
of ecstatic admiration.
  The confession he had promised was the one painful incident of
this time. He consulted the old Prince, and with his sanction gave
Kitty his diary, in which there was written the confession that
tortured him. He had written this diary at the time with a view to his
future wife. Two things caused him anguish: his lack of purity and his
lack of faith. His confession of unbelief passed unnoticed. She was
religious, had never doubted the truths of religion, but his
external unbelief did not affect her in the least. Through love she
knew all his soul, and in his soul she saw what she wanted, and that
such a state of soul should be called unbelieving was to her a
matter of no account. The other confession set her weeping bitterly.
  Levin, not without an inner struggle, handed her his diary. He
knew that between him and her there could not be, and should not be,
any secrets, and so he had decided that so it must be. But he had
not realized what an effect it would have on her, he had not put
himself in her place. It was only when the same evening he came to
their house before the theater, went into her room, and saw her
tearstained, pitiful, sweet face, miserable with the suffering he
had caused and nothing could undo, that he felt the abyss that
separated his shameful past from her dovelike purity, and was appalled
at what he had done.
  "Take them, take these dreadful books!" she said, pushing away the
notebooks lying before her on the table. "Why did you give them me?
No, it was better anyway," she added, touched by his despairing
face. "But it's awful, awful!"
  His head sank, and he was silent. He could say nothing.
  "You can't forgive me," he whispered.
  "Yes, I forgive you; but it's horrible!"
  But his happiness was so immense that this confession did not
shatter it, it only added another shade to it. She forgave him; but
from that time, more than ever, he considered himself unworthy of her,
morally bowed down lower than ever before her, and prized more
highly than ever his undeserved happiness.
                             XVII.

  Unconsciously going over in his memory the conversations that had
taken place during and after dinner, Alexei Alexandrovich returned
to his solitary room. Darya Alexandrovna's words about forgiveness had
aroused in him nothing but annoyance. The applicability or
nonapplicability of the Christian precept to his own case was too
difficult a question to be discussed lightly, and this question had
long ago been answered by Alexei Alexandrovich in the negative. Of all
that had been said, what stuck most in his memory was the phrase of
stupid, good-natured Turovtsin: "Acted like a man, he did! Called
him out and shot him!" Everyone had apparently shared this feeling,
though from politeness they had not expressed it.
  "But the matter is settled; it's useless thinking about it,"
Alexei Alexandrovich told himself. And thinking of nothing but the
journey before him, and the revision work he had to do, he went into
his room and asked the porter who escorted him where his man was;
the porter said that the man had just gone out. Alexei Alexandrovich
ordered tea to be sent him, sat down to the table, and, taking the
schedule, began considering the route of his journey.
  "Two telegrams," said his valet, coming into the room. "I beg your
pardon, Your Excellency; I'd just stepped out this very minute."
  Alexei Alexandrovich took the telegrams and opened them. The first
telegram was the announcement of Stremov's appointment to the very
post Karenin had coveted. Alexei Alexandrovich flung the telegram
down, and, flushing, got up and began to pace up and down the room.
"Quos vult perdere dementat," he said, meaning by quos the persons
responsible for this appointment. He was not so much annoyed at not
receiving the post, as at having been so conspicuously passed over;
but it was incomprehensible, amazing to him that they did not see that
the wordy phrasemonger Stremov was the last man fit for it. How
could they fail to see they were ruining themselves, lowering their
prestige by this appointment?
  "Something else in the same line," he said to himself bitterly,
opening the second telegram. The telegram was from his wife. Her name,
written in blue pencil, "Anna," was the first thing that caught his
eye. "I am dying; I beg, I implore you to come. I shall die easier
with your forgiveness," he read. He smiled contemptuously, and flung
down the telegram. That this was a trick and a fraud, of that- he
thought for the first minute- there could be no doubt.
  "There is no deceit she would stick at. She was near her
confinement. Perhaps it is the confinement. But what can be their aim?
To legitimize the child, to compromise me, and prevent a divorce,"
he thought. "But something was said in it: I am dying..." He read
the telegram again, and suddenly the plain meaning of what was said in
it struck him. "And if it is true?" he said to himself. "If it is true
that in the moment of agony and nearness to death she is genuinely
penitent, and I, taking it for a trick, refuse to go? That would not
only be cruel, and everyone would blame me, but it would be stupid
on my part."
  "Piotr, call a coach; I am going to Peterburg," he said to his
servant.
  Alexei Alexandrovich decided that he would go to Peterburg and see
his wife. If her illness was a trick, he would say nothing and go away
again. If she were really in danger, and wished to see him before
her death, he would forgive her if he found her alive, and pay her the
last duties if he came too late.
  All the way he thought no more of what he ought to do.
  With a sense of weariness and uncleanness from the night spent in
the train, in the early fog of Peterburg, Alexei Alexandrovich drove
through the deserted Nevsky Prospect, and stared straight before
him, without thinking of what was awaiting him. He could not think
about it, because in picturing what would happen, he could not drive
away the reflection that her death would at once remove all the
difficulty of his position. Bakers, closed shops, night cabmen, street
sweepers sweeping the pavements flashed past his eyes, and he
watched it all, trying to smother the thought of what was awaiting
him, and what he dared not hope for, and yet was hoping for. He
drove up to the steps. A hackney sleigh, and a coach with its coachman
asleep, stood at the entrance. As he went into the entry, Alexei
Alexandrovich seemed to get out his resolution from the remotest
corner of his brain, and mastered it thoroughly. Its meaning ran:
"If it's a trick, then calm contempt and departure. If truth, do
what is seemly."
  The porter opened the door before Alexei Alexandrovich rang. The
porter, Kapitonich, looked queer in an old coat, without a tie, and in
slippers.
  "How is your mistress?"
  "She was confined yesterday, successfully."
  Alexei Alexandrovich stopped short and turned white. He felt
distinctly now how intensely he had longed for her death.
  "And how is she?"
  Kornei in his morning apron ran downstairs.
  "Very ill," he answered. "There was a consultation yesterday, and
the doctor's here now."
  "Take my things," said Alexei Alexandrovich, and, feeling some
relief at the news that there was still hope of her death, he went
into the hall.
  On the hatstand there was a military overcoat. Alexei
Alexandrovich noticed it and asked:
  "Who is here?"
  "The doctor, the midwife, and Count Vronsky."
  Alexei Alexandrovich went into the inner rooms.
  In the drawing room there was no one; at the sound of his steps
the midwife came out of Anna's boudoir, in a cap with lilac ribbons.
  She went up to Alexei Alexandrovich, and with the familiarity
given by the approach of death took him by the arm and drew him toward
the bedroom.
  "Thank God you've come! She keeps on talking about you, and
nothing but you," she said.
  "Make haste with the ice!" the doctor's peremptory voice came from
the bedroom.
  Alexei Alexandrovich went into the boudoir. At her table, sitting
sideways in a low chair, was Vronsky, his face hidden in his hands,
weeping. He jumped up at the doctor's voice, took his hands from his
face, and saw Alexei Alexandrovich. Seeing the husband, he was so
overwhelmed that he sat down again, drawing his head into his
shoulders, as if he wanted to disappear; but he made an effort over
himself, got up and said:
  "She is dying. The doctors say there is no hope. I am entirely in
your power, only let me be here... though I am at your disposal. I..."
  Alexei Alexandrovich, seeing Vronsky's tears, felt a rush of that
nervous emotion always produced in him by the sight of other
people's sufferings, and, turning away his face, he moved hurriedly to
the door, without hearing the rest of the words. From the bedroom came
the sound of Anna's voice saying something. Her voice was lively,
animated, with exceedingly distinct intonations. Alexei
Alexandrovich went into the bedroom, and walked up to the bed. She was
lying with her face turned toward him. Her cheeks were flushed
crimson, her eyes glittered, her little white hands thrust out from
the cuffs of her dressing gown were playing with the quilt, twisting
it about. It seemed as though she were not only well and blooming, but
in the happiest frame of mind. She was talking rapidly, musically, and
with exceptionally correct articulation and expressive intonation.
  "Because Alexei- I am speaking of Alexei Alexandrovich (what a
strange and awful thing that both are Alexeis, isn't it?)- Alexei
would not refuse me. I should forget, he would forgive... But why
doesn't he come? He's so good, he doesn't know himself how good he is.
Ah, my God, what pangs! Give me some water, quick! Oh, that will be
bad for her- my little girl! Oh, very well then, give her to a
nurse. Yes, I agree, it's better in fact. He'll be coming; it will
hurt him to see her. Give her to the nurse."
  "Anna Arkadyevna, he has come. Here he is!" said the midwife, trying
to attract her attention to Alexei Alexandrovich.
  "Oh, what nonsense!" Anna went on, not seeing her husband. "No, give
her to me; give me my little one! He has not come yet. You say he
won't forgive me, because you don't know him. No one knows him. I'm
the only one, and it was hard for me even. I ought to know his eyes-
Seriozha has just such eyes- and I can't bear to see them because of
it. Has Seriozha had his dinner? I know everyone will forget to do it.
He would not forget. Seriozha must be moved into the corner room,
and Mariette must be asked to sleep with him."
  All of a sudden she shrank back, and was silent; and in terror, as
though expecting a blow, as though to defend herself, she raised her
hands to her face. She had seen her husband.
  "No, no!" she began. "I am not afraid of him; I am afraid of
death. Alexei, come here. I am in a hurry, because I've no time, I
haven't long left to live; the fever will begin directly and I shall
understand nothing more. Now I understand, I understand it all- I
see it all!"
  Alexei Alexandrovich's wrinkled face wore an expression of
suffering; he took her by the hand and tried to say something, but
he could not utter it; his lower lip quivered, but he still went on
struggling with his emotion, and only now and then glanced at her. And
each time he glanced at her, he saw her eyes gazing at him with such
passionate and exultant tenderness as he had never yet seen in them.
  "Wait a minute, you don't know... Stay a little, stay!..." She
stopped, as though collecting her ideas. "Yes," she began, "yes,
yes, yes! This is what I wanted to say. Don't be surprised at me.
I'm still the same... But there is another woman in me- I'm afraid
of her: she loved that man, and I tried to hate you, and could not
forget about her that used to be. That woman isn't myself. Now I'm
my real self. I'm dying now, I know I shall die- ask him. Even now I
feel- see here, the weights on my feet, on my hands, on my fingers. My
fingers- see how huge they are! But this will soon be all over... Only
one thing I want: forgive me, forgive me quite. I'm terrible, but my
nurse would tell me- the holy martyr- what was her name? She was
worse. And I'll go to Rome; there's a wilderness, and there I shall be
no trouble to anyone, only I'll take Seriozha and the little one....
No, you can't forgive me! I know, it can't be forgiven! No, no, go
away, you're too good!" She held his hand in one burning hand, while
she pushed him away with the other.
  The nervous agitation of Alexei Alexandrovich kept increasing, and
had by now reached such a point that he ceased to struggle with it. He
suddenly felt that what he had regarded as nervous agitation was on
the contrary a blissful spiritual condition that gave him all at
once a new happiness he had never known. He did not think that the
Christian law, which he had been all his life trying to follow,
enjoined on him to forgive and love his enemies; but a joyous
feeling of love and forgiveness for his enemies filled his heart. He
knelt down, and laying his head in the curve of her arm, which
burned him as with fire through the sleeve, he sobbed like a little
child. She put her arm around his head, which was beginning to grow
bald, moved toward him, and with defiant pride lifted up her eyes.
  "That is he. I knew him! Now, good-by, everyone, good-by!... They've
come again; why don't they go away?... Oh, take these fur coats off
me!"
  The doctor unloosed her hands, carefully laying her on the pillow,
and covered her up to the shoulders. She lay back submissively, and
looked before her with beaming eyes.
  "Remember one thing, that I needed nothing but forgiveness, and I
want nothing more.... Why doesn't he come?" she said, turning to the
door, toward Vronsky. "Do come, do come! Give him your hand."
  Vronsky came to the side of the bed, and seeing Anna, again hid
his face in his hands.
  "Uncover your face- look at him! He's a saint," she said. "Oh!
uncover your face, do uncover it!" she said angrily. "Alexei
Alexandrovich, do uncover his face! I want to see him."
  Alexei Alexandrovich took Vronsky's hands and drew them away from
his face, which was awful with the expression of agony and shame
upon it.
  "Give him your hand. Forgive him."
  Alexei Alexandrovich gave him his hand, not attempting to restrain
the tears that streamed from his eyes.
  "Thank God, thank God!" she said, "now everything is ready. Only
to stretch my legs a little. There, that's capital. How badly these
flowers are done- not a bit like a violet," she said, pointing to
the hangings. "My God, my God! when will it end? Give me some
morphine. Doctor, give me some morphine! Oh, my God, my God!"
  And she tossed about on the bed.
  The doctors said that it was puerperal fever, and that ninety-nine
chances in a hundred it would end in death. The whole day long there
was fever, delirium, and unconsciousness. At midnight the patient
lay without consciousness, and almost without pulse.
  The end was expected every minute.
  Vronsky had gone home, but in the morning he came to inquire, and
Alexei Alexandrovich, meeting him in the hall, said: "Better stay, she
might ask for you," and himself led him to his wife's boudoir.
Toward morning there was a return again of excitement, rapid thought
and talk, and again it ended in unconsciousness. On the third day it
was the same thing, and the doctors said there was hope. That day
Alexei Alexandrovich went into the boudoir where Vronsky was
sitting, and, closing the door, sat down opposite him.
  "Alexei Alexandrovich," said Vronsky, feeling that a statement of
the situation was coming, "I can't speak, I can't understand. Spare
me! However hard it is for you, believe me, it is more terrible for
me."
  He would have risen; but Alexei Alexandrovich took him by the hand
and said:
  "I beg you to hear me out; it is necessary. I must explain my
feelings, the feelings that have guided me, and will guide me, so that
you may not be in error regarding me. You know I had resolved on a
divorce, and had even begun to take proceedings. I won't conceal
from you that in beginning this I was in uncertainty, I was in misery;
I will confess that I was pursued by a desire to revenge myself on you
and on her. When I got the telegram, I came here with the same
feelings; I will say more- I longed for her death. But..." He
paused, pondering whether to disclose or not to disclose his feelings.
"But I saw her and forgave her. And the happiness of forgiveness has
revealed to me my duty. I forgive completely. I would offer the
other cheek, I would give my cloak if my coat be taken. I pray to
God only not to take from me the bliss of forgiveness!"
  Tears stood in his eyes, and the luminous, serene look in them
impressed Vronsky.
  "This is my position: you can trample me in the mud, make me the
laughingstock of the world- I will not abandon her, and I will never
utter a word of reproach to you," Alexei Alexandrovich went on. "My
duty is clearly marked for me; I ought to be with her, and I will
be. If she wishes to see you, I will let you know, but now I suppose
it would be better for you to go away."
  He got up, and sobs cut short his words. Vronsky too was getting up,
and in a stooping, not yet erect posture, looked up at him from
under his brows. He did not understand Alexei Alexandrovich's feeling,
but he felt that it was something higher, and even unattainable for
him with his view of life.
                             XVIII.

  After the conversation with Alexei Alexandrovich, Vronsky went out
on the steps of the Karenins' house and stood still, with difficulty
remembering where he was, and where he ought to walk or drive. He felt
disgraced, humiliated, guilty, and deprived of all possibility of
washing away his humiliation. He felt thrust out of the beaten track
along which he had so proudly and lightly walked till then. All the
habits and rules of his life that had seemed so firm, had turned out
suddenly false and inapplicable. The betrayed husband, who had figured
till that time as a pitiful creature, an incidental and somewhat
ludicrous obstacle to his happiness, had suddenly been summoned by her
herself, elevated to an awe-inspiring pinnacle, and on the pinnacle
that husband had shown himself- not malignant, not false, not
ludicrous- but kind and straightforward and grand. Vronsky could not
but feel this, and the roles were suddenly reversed. Vronsky felt
the other's elevation and his own abasement, the other's truth and his
own falsehood. He felt that the husband was magnanimous even in his
sorrow, while he had been base and petty in his deceit. But this sense
of his own humiliation before the man he had unjustly despised made up
only a small part of his misery. He felt unutterably wretched now, for
his passion for Anna, which had seemed to him of late to be growing
cooler, now that he knew he had lost her forever, was stronger than
ever it had been. He had seen all of her in her illness, had come to
know her very soul, and it seemed to him that he had never loved her
till then. And now, when he had learned to know her, to love her as
she should be loved, he had been humiliated before her, and had lost
her forever, leaving with her nothing of himself but a shameful
memory. Most terrible of all had been his ludicrous, shameful position
when Alexei Alexandrovich had pulled his hands away from his
humiliated face. He stood on the steps of the Karenins' house like one
distraught, and did not know what to do.
  "A hack, sir?" asked the porter.
  "Yes- a hack."
  On getting home, after three sleepless nights, Vronsky, without
undressing, lay prone on the sofa, clasping his hands and laying his
head on them. His head was heavy. Images, memories, and ideas of the
strangest description followed one another with extraordinary rapidity
and vividness. First it was the medicine he had poured out for the
patient and spilled out of the spoon; then the midwife's white
hands; then the queer posture of Alexei Alexandrovich on the floor
beside the bed.
  "To sleep! To forget!" he said to himself with the serene confidence
of a healthy man that if he is tired and sleepy, he will go to sleep
at once. And the same instant his head did begin to feel drowsy and he
began to drop off into forgetfulness. The waves of the sea of
unconsciousness had begun to meet over his head, when all at once it
seemed as though a violent shock of electricity had passed over him.
He started so that he leaped up on the springs of the sofa, and
leaning on his arms got on his knees in a fright. His eyes were wide
open as though he had never been asleep. The heaviness in his head and
the flabbiness in his limbs that he had felt a minute before had
suddenly gone.
  "You may trample me in the mud," he heard Alexei Alexandrovich's
words and saw him standing before him, and saw Anna's face with its
burning flush and glittering eyes, gazing with love and tenderness not
at him but at Alexei Alexandrovich; he saw his own, as he fancied,
foolish and ludicrous figure when Alexei Alexandrovich had taken his
hands away from his face. He stretched out his legs again and flung
himself on the sofa in the same position and shut his eyes.
  "To sleep! To sleep!" he repeated to himself. But with his eyes shut
he saw more distinctly than ever Anna's face as it had been on the
memorable evening before the races.
  "This cannot, and will not be, and she wants to wipe it out of her
memory. But I cannot live without it. How can we be reconciled? How
can we be reconciled?" he said aloud, and unconsciously began to
repeat these words. This repetition of words checked the rising of
fresh images and memories, which he felt were thronging in his
brain. But repeating words did not check his imagination for long.
Again, in extraordinarily rapid succession, his best moments rose
before his mind, and then his recent humiliation. "Take away his
hands," Anna's voice was saying. He takes away his hands and feels the
shame-struck and idiotic expression of his face.
  He was still lying down, trying to sleep, though he felt there was
not the smallest hope of it, and kept repeating stray words from
some chain of thought, trying by this to check the rising flood of
fresh images. He listened, and heard words repeated in a strange,
mad whisper: "You did not appreciate it, did not make enough of it.
You did not appreciate it, did not make enough of it."
  "What's this? Am I going out of my mind?" he said to himself
"Perhaps. What makes men go out of their minds- what makes men shoot
themselves?" he answered himself, and, opening his eyes, he saw with
wonder an embroidered cushion beside him, worked by Varia, his
brother's wife. He touched the tassel of the cushion, and tried to
think of Varia, of when he had seen her last. But to think of anything
extraneous was an agonizing effort. "No, I must sleep!" He moved the
cushion up, and pressed his head into it, but he had to make an effort
to keep his eyes shut. He jumped up and sat down. "That's all over for
me," he said to himself. "I must think what to do. What is left?"
His mind rapidly ran through his life apart from his love of Anna.
  "Ambition? Serpukhovskoy? Society? The Court?" He could not come
to a pause anywhere. All of it had had meaning before, but now there
was no reality in it. He got up from the sofa, took off his coat,
undid his belt, and, uncovering his hairy chest to breathe more
freely, walked up and down the room. "This is how people go mad," he
repeated, "and how they shoot themselves... to escape humiliation," he
added slowly.
  He went to the door and closed it, and then with fixed eyes and
clenched teeth he went up to the table, took a revolver, looked it
about, turned it to a loaded barrel, and sank into thought. For two
minutes, his head bent forward with an expression of an intense effort
of thought, he stood with the revolver in his hand, motionless,
thinking. "Of course," he said to himself, as though a logical,
continuous, and clear chain of reasoning had brought him to an
indubitable conclusion. In reality this "of course," so convincing
to him, was simply the result of repeating exactly the same circle
of memories and images through which he had already passed ten times
during the last hour. There were the same memories of happiness lost
forever, the same conception of the senselessness of everything to
come in life, the same consciousness of humiliation. There was the
same sequence of these images and emotions too.
  "Of course," he repeated, when for the third time his thought passed
again round the same spellbound circle of memories and images, and,
putting the revolver to the left side of his chest, and twitching
vigorously with his whole hand, as though squeezing it in his fist, he
pulled the trigger. He did not hear the sound of the shot, but a
violent blow on his chest knocked him down. He tried to clutch at
the edge of the table, dropped the revolver, staggered, and sat down
on the ground, looking about him in astonishment. He did not recognize
his room, as he looked up from the ground at the bent legs of the
table, at the wastepaper basket, and the tigerskin rug. The hurried,
creaking steps of his servant coming through the drawing room
brought him to his senses. He made an effort at thought, and was aware
that he was on the floor; and seeing blood on the tigerskin rug and on
his arm, he knew he had shot himself.
  "Idiotic! Missed!" he said, fumbling after the revolver. The
revolver was close beside him- he was groping farther off. Still
groping for it, he stretched out to the other side, and not being
strong enough to keep his balance, fell over, streaming with blood.
  The elegant, whiskered manservant, who used to be continually
complaining to his acquaintances of the delicacy of his nerves, was so
panic-stricken on seeing his master lying on the floor that he left
him losing blood while he ran for assistance. An hour later Varia, his
brother's wife, had arrived, and with the assistance of three doctors,
whom she had sent for in all directions, and who all appeared at the
same moment, she got the wounded man to bed, and remained to nurse
him.
                             XIX.

  The mistake made by Alexei Alexandrovich, when preparing to see
his wife, in having overlooked the possibility that her repentance
might be sincere, and that he might forgive her, and she might not
die- this mistake was two months after his return from Moscow
brought home to him in all its significance. But the mistake made by
him had arisen not simply from his having overlooked that contingency,
but also from the fact that, until the day of his interview with his
dying wife, he had not known his own heart. At his sick wife's bedside
he had for the first time in his life given way to that feeling of
sympathetic suffering always roused in him by the sufferings of
others, and hitherto looked on by him with shame as a harmful
weakness. And pity for her, and remorse for having desired her
death, and, most of all, the joy of forgiveness, made him at once
conscious, not simply of the relief of his own sufferings, but of a
spiritual peace he had never experienced before. He suddenly felt that
the very thing that was the source of his sufferings had become the
source of his spiritual joy; that what had seemed insolvable while
he was judging, blaming, and hating, had become clear and simple
when he forgave and loved.
  He forgave his wife and pitied her for her sufferings and her
remorse. He forgave Vronsky, and pitied him, especially after
reports reached him of his despairing action. He felt more for his son
than before. And he blamed himself now for having taken too little
interest in him. But for the little newborn baby he felt a quite
peculiar sentiment, not of pity only, but of tenderness. At first,
from a feeling of compassion alone, he had been interested in the
delicate little creature, who was not his child, and who was neglected
during her mother's illness, and would certainly have died if he had
not troubled about her; and he did not himself observe how fond he
became of her. He would go into the nursery several times a day, and
sit there for a long while, so that the nurse and wet nurses, who were
at first afraid of him, got quite used to his presence. Sometimes, for
half an hour at a stretch, he would sit silently gazing at the
saffron-red, downy, wrinkled face of the sleeping baby, watching the
movements of the frowning brows, and the plump little hands with
clenched fingers, that rubbed the little eyes and bridge of the nose
with the back of their palms. At such moments particularly Alexei
Alexandrovich had a sense of perfect peace and inward harmony, and saw
nothing extraordinary in his position, nothing that ought to be
changed.
  But, as time went on, he saw more and more distinctly that however
natural the position now seemed to him, he would not long be allowed
to remain in it. He felt that besides the blessed spiritual force
controlling his soul, there was another, a brutal force, as
powerful, or more powerful, which controlled his life, and that this
force would not allow him that humble peace he longed for. He felt
that everyone was looking at him with inquiring wonder, that he was
not understood, and that something was expected of him. Above all,
he felt the instability and unnaturalness of his relations with his
wife.
  When the softening effect of the near approach of death had passed
away, Alexei Alexandrovich began to notice that Anna was afraid of
him, ill at ease with him, and could not look him straight in the
face. She seemed to be wanting, yet not daring, to tell him something;
and, as though foreseeing that their present relations could not
continue, she seemed to be expecting something from him.
  Toward the end of February Anna's baby daughter, who had also been
named Anna, happened to fall ill. Alexei Alexandrovich was in the
nursery in the morning, and leaving orders for the doctor to be sent
for, he went to his office. On finishing his work, he returned home at
four. Going into the hall he saw a handsome footman, in a gallooned
livery and a bear-fur cape, holding a white fur cloak.
  "Who is here?" asked Alexei Alexandrovich.
  "Princess Elizaveta Fiodorovna Tverskaia," the footman answered, and
it seemed to Alexei Alexandrovich that the fellow grinned.
  During all this difficult time Alexei Alexandrovich had noticed that
his worldly acquaintances, especially women, took a peculiar
interest in him and his wife. He observed all these acquaintances with
difficulty concealing their mirth at something- the same mirth that he
had perceived in the lawyer's eyes, and, just now, in the eyes of this
footman. Everyone seemed, somehow, hugely delighted, as though just
come from a wedding. When they met him, they inquired with
ill-disguised enjoyment after his wife's health.
  The presence of Princess Tverskaia was unpleasant to Alexei
Alexandrovich from the memories associated with her, and also
because he disliked her, and he went straight to the nursery. In the
day nursery Seriozha, leaning on the table with his legs on a chair,
was drawing and chatting away merrily. The English governess, who
had during Anna's illness replaced the French one, was sitting near
the boy, knitting mignardise. She hurriedly got up, curtsied, and
pulled Seriozha.
  Alexei Alexandrovich stroked his son's hair, answered the
governess's inquiries about his wife, and asked what the doctor had
said of the baby.
  "The doctor said it was nothing serious, and he ordered a bath,
sir."
  "But she is still in pain," said Alexei Alexandrovich, listening
to the baby's screaming in the next room.
  "I think it's the wet nurse, sir," the Englishwoman said firmly.
  "What makes you think so?" he asked, stopping short.
  "It's just as it was at Countess Paul's, sir. They gave the baby
medicine, and it turned out that the baby was simply hungry: the wet
nurse had no milk, sir."
  Alexei Alexandrovich pondered, and after standing still a few
seconds he went in at the other door. The baby was lying with its head
thrown back, stiffening itself in the nurse's arms, and would not take
the plump breast offered it; and it never ceased screaming in spite of
the double hushing of the wet nurse and the other nurse, who was
bending over her.
  "Still no better?" said Alexei Alexandrovich.
  "She's very restless," answered the nurse in a whisper.
  "Miss Edwards says that perhaps the wet nurse has no milk," he said.
  "I think so too, Alexei Alexandrovich."
  "Then why didn't you say so?"
  "Who's one to say it to? Anna Arkadyevna is still ill..." said the
nurse discontentedly.
  The nurse was an old servant of the family. And in her simple
words there seemed to Alexei Alexandrovich an allusion to his
position.
  The baby screamed louder than ever, struggling and choking. The
nurse, with a gesture of despair, went to it, took it from the wet
nurse's arms, and began walking up and down, rocking it.
  "You must ask the doctor to examine the wet nurse," said Alexei
Alexandrovich.
  The smartly dressed and healthy-looking nurse, frightened at the
idea of losing her place, muttered something to herself, and, covering
her bosom, smiled contemptuously at the idea of doubts being cast on
her abundance of milk. In that smile, too, Alexei Alexandrovich saw
a sneer at his position.
  "Luckless child," said the nurse, hushing the baby, and still
walking up and down with it.
  Alexei Alexandrovich sat down, and with a despondent and suffering
face watched the nurse walking to and fro.
  When the child at last was still, and had been put in a deep bed,
and the nurse, after smoothing the little pillow, had left her, Alexei
Alexandrovich got up, and, walking awkwardly on tiptoe, approached the
baby. For a minute he was still, and with the same despondent face
gazed at the baby; but all at once a smile that moved his hair and the
skin of his forehead, came out on his face, and he went as softly
out of the room.
  In the dining room he rang the bell, and told the servant who came
in to send again for the doctor. He felt vexed with his wife for not
being anxious about this charming baby, and in this vexed humor he had
no wish to go to her; he had no wish, either, to see Princess Betsy.
But his wife might wonder why he did not go to her as usual; and so,
overcoming his disinclination, he went toward her bedroom. As he
walked over the soft rug toward the door, he could not help
overhearing a conversation he did not want to hear.
  "If he hadn't been going away, I could have understood your
refusal and his too. But your husband ought to be above that," Betsy
was saying.
  "It's not for my husband- it's for myself I don't wish it. Don't say
that!" answered Anna's excited voice.
  "Yes, but you must care to say good-by to a man who has shot himself
on your account...."
  "That's just why I don't want to."
  With a dismayed and guilty expression, Alexei Alexandrovich
stopped and would have gone back unobserved. But reflecting that
this would be undignified, he turned back again, and, clearing his
throat, he approached the bedroom. The voices were silent, and he went
in.
  Anna, in a gray dressing gown, with a crop of short clustering black
curls on her round head, was sitting on a settee. The animation died
out of her face, as it always did, at the sight of her husband; she
dropped her head and looked round uneasily at Betsy. Betsy, dressed in
the height of the latest fashion, in a hat that towered over her
head like a shade on a lamp, in a dove-colored dress with crude
oblique stripes, slanting one way on the bodice and the other way on
the skirt, was sitting beside Anna, her tall flat figure held erect.
Bowing her head, she greeted Alexei Alexandrovich with an ironical
smile.
  "Ah!" she said, as though surprised. "I'm very glad you're at
home. You never put in an appearance anywhere, and I haven't seen
you ever since Anna has been ill. I have heard all about it- your
anxiety. Yes, you're a wonderful husband!" she said, with a
significant and affable air, as though she were bestowing an order
of magnanimity on him for his conduct toward his wife.
  Alexei Alexandrovich bowed frigidly, and, kissing his wife's hand,
asked how she was.
  "Better, I think," she said, avoiding his eyes.
  "But you've rather a feverish complexion," he said, laying stress on
the word "feverish."
  "We've been talking too much," said Betsy. "I feel it's
selfishness on my part, and I am going away."
  She got up, but Anna, suddenly flushing, quickly caught at her hand.
  "No, wait a minute, please. I must tell you... no, I mean you,"
she turned to Alexei Alexandrovich, and her neck and brow were
suffused with crimson. "I won't and can't keep anything secret from
you," she said.
  Alexei Alexandrovich cracked his fingers and bowed his head.
  "Betsy's been telling me that Count Vronsky wants to come here to
say good-by before his departure for Tashkend." She did not look at
her husband, and was evidently in haste to have everything out,
however hard it might be for her. "I told her I could not receive
him."
  "You said, my dear, that it would depend on Alexei Alexandrovich,"
Betsy corrected her.
  "Oh, no, I can't receive him; and what object would there be
in..." She stopped suddenly, and glanced inquiringly at her husband
(he did not look at her). "In short, I don't wish it...."
  Alexei Alexandrovich advanced and would have taken her hand.
  Her first impulse was to jerk back her hand from the damp hand
with big swollen veins that sought hers, but with an obvious effort to
control herself she pressed his hand.
  "I am very grateful to you for your confidence, but..." he said,
feeling with confusion and annoyance that what he could decide
easily and clearly by himself, he could not discuss before Princess
Tverskaia, who to him stood for the incarnation of that brute force
which would inevitably control him in the life he led in the eyes of
the world, and hinder him from giving way to his feeling of love and
forgiveness. He stopped short, looking at Princess Tverskaia.
  "Well, good-by, my darling," said Betsy, getting up. She kissed
Anna, and went out. Alexei Alexandrovich escorted her out.
  "Alexei Alexandrovich! I know you are a truly magnanimous man," said
Betsy, stopping in the little drawing room, and with special warmth
shaking hands with him once more. "I am an outsider, but I love her
so, and respect you, that I venture to advise. Receive him. Alexei
Vronsky is the soul of honor, and he is going away to Tashkend."
  "Thank you, Princess, for your sympathy and advice. But the question
of whether my wife can or cannot see anyone she must decide herself."
  He said this from habit, lifting his brows with dignity, and
reflected immediately that whatever his words might be, there could be
no dignity in his position. And he saw this by the suppressed,
malicious, and ironical smile with which Betsy glanced at him after
this phrase.
                             XX.

  Alexei Alexandrovich took leave of Betsy in the drawing room, and
went to his wife. She was lying down, but hearing his steps she sat up
hastily in her former attitude, and looked in a scared way at him.
He saw she had been crying.
  "I am very grateful for your confidence in me." He repeated gently
in Russian the phrase he had said in Betsy's presence in French, and
sat down beside her. When he spoke to her in Russian, using the
Russian "thou" of intimacy and affection, it was insufferably
irritating to Anna. "And I am very grateful for your decision. I, too,
imagine that since he is going away, there is no sort of necessity for
Count Vronsky to come here. However, if..."
  "But I've said so already, so why repeat it?" Anna suddenly
interrupted him, with an irritation she could not succeed in
repressing. "No sort of necessity," she thought, "for a man to come
and say good-by to the woman he loves, for whom he was ready to ruin
himself, and has ruined himself, and who cannot live without him. No
sort of necessity!" She compressed her lips, and dropped her burning
eyes to his hands with their swollen veins. They were slowly rubbing
each other. "Let us never speak of it," she added more calmly.
  "I have left this question to you to decide, and I am very glad to
see..." Alexei Alexandrovich was beginning.
  "That my wish coincides with your own," she finished quickly,
exasperated at his talking so slowly while she knew beforehand all
he would say.
  "Yes," he assented; "and Princess Tverskaia's interference in the
most difficult private affairs is utterly uncalled for. She
especially..."
  "I don't believe a word of what's said about her," said Anna
quickly. "I know she really cares for me."
  Alexei Alexandrovich sighed and said nothing. She played nervously
with the tassel of her dressing gown, glancing at him with that
torturing sensation of physical repulsion for which she blamed
herself, though she could not control it. Her only desire now was to
be rid of his repelling presence.
  "I have just sent for the doctor," said Alexei Alexandrovich.
  "I am very well; what do I want the doctor for?"
  "No- the little one cries, and they say the wet nurse hasn't
enough milk."
  "Why didn't you let me nurse her, when I begged to? Anyway"
(Alexei Alexandrovich knew what was meant by that "anyway"), "she's
a baby, and they're killing her." She rang the bell and ordered the
baby to be brought her. "I begged to nurse her, I wasn't allowed to,
and now I'm blamed for it."
  "I don't blame..."
  "Yes, you do blame me! My God! Why didn't I die!" And she broke into
sobs. "Forgive me, I'm nervous, I'm unjust," she said, controlling
herself, "but do go away..."
  "No, it can't go on like this," Alexei Alexandrovich said to himself
resolutely as he left his wife's room.
  Never had the impossibility of his position in the world's eyes, and
his wife's hatred of him, and, above all, the might of that mysterious
brutal force that guided his life against his spiritual inclinations
and exacted conformity with its decrees and a change in his present
attitude to his wife- never had it been presented to him with such
distinctness as on that day. He saw clearly that all the world and
Anna expected something of him, but what exactly he could not make
out. He felt that this was rousing in his soul a feeling of anger
destructive of his peace of mind, and of all the good of his
achievement. He believed that for Anna herself it would be better to
break off all relations with Vronsky; but if they all thought this out
of the question, he was even ready to allow these relations to be
renewed, so long as the children were not disgraced, and he was not
deprived of them nor forced to change his position. Bad as this
might be, it was at any rate better than a rupture, which would put
her in a hopeless and shameful position, and deprive him of everything
he cared for. But he felt helpless; he knew beforehand that everyone
was against him, and that he would not be allowed to do what seemed to
him now so natural and right, but would be forced to do what was
wrong, though to them it seemed the proper thing.
                             XXI.

  Before Betsy had time to walk out of the drawing room, she was met
in the doorway by Stepan Arkadyevich, who had just come from
Ielisseev's, where a consignment of fresh oysters had been received.
  "Ah! Princess! What a delightful meeting!" he began. "I've been to
see you."
  "A meeting for one minute, for I'm going," said Betsy, smiling and
putting on her glove.
  "Don't put on your glove yet, Princess; let me kiss your hand.
There's nothing I'm so thankful to the revival of the old fashions for
as kissing the hand." He kissed Betsy's hand. "When shall we see
each other?"
  "You don't deserve it," answered Betsy, smiling.
  "Oh, yes, I deserve a great deal, for I've become a most serious
person. I not only manage my own domestic affairs, but other
people's too," he said, with a significant expression.
  "Oh, I'm so glad!" answered Betsy, at once understanding that he was
speaking of Anna. And, going back into the drawing room, they stood in
a corner. "He's killing her," said Betsy in a whisper full of meaning.
"It's impossible, impossible..."
  "I'm so glad you think so," said Stepan Arkadyevich, shaking his
head with a serious and sympathetically distressed expression, "that's
what I've come to Peterburg for."
  "The whole town's talking of it," she said. "It's an impossible
situation. She pines and pines away. He doesn't understand that
she's one of those women who can't trifle with their feelings. One
of two things: either let him take her away, act with energy, or
give her a divorce. This is stifling her."
  "Yes, yes... just so..." Oblonsky said, sighing.
  "That's what I've come for. At least not solely for that... I've
been made a Kammerherr; of course, one has to give thanks. But the
chief thing was having to settle this."
  "Well, God help you!" said Betsy.
  After accompanying Betsy to the outside hall, once more kissing
her hand above the glove, at the point where the pulse beats, and
murmuring to her such unseemly nonsense that she did not know
whether to laugh or to be angry, Stepan Arkadyevich went to his
sister. He found her in tears.
  Although he happened to be bubbling over with good spirits, Stepan
Arkadyevich immediately and quite naturally fell into the sympathetic,
poetically emotional tone which harmonized with her mood. He asked her
how she was, and how she had spent the morning.
  "Very, very miserably. Today, and this morning, and all past days,
and all the days to come," she said.
  "I think you're giving way to pessimism. You must rouse yourself,
you must look life in the face. I know it's hard, but..."
  "I have heard it said that women love men even for their vices,"
Anna began suddenly, "but I hate him for his virtues. I can't live
with him. Do you understand? The sight of him has a physical effect in
me- I am beside myself from it. I can't, I can't live with him. What
am I to do? I have been unhappy, and used to think one couldn't be
unhappier, but the awful state of things I am going through now I
could never have conceived. Would you believe it, that, knowing he's a
good man, a splendid man, that I'm not worth his little finger, I
still hate him. I hate him for his generosity. And there's nothing
left for me but..."
  She would have said "death," but Stepan Arkadyevich would not let
her finish.
  "You are ill and overwrought," he said; "believe me, you're
exaggerating dreadfully. There's nothing so terrible in it."
  And Stepan Arkadyevich smiled. No one else in Stepan Arkadyevich's
place, having to do with such despair, would have ventured to smile
(the smile would have seemed brutal); but in his smile there was so
much of sweetness and almost feminine tenderness that his smile did
not wound, but softened and soothed. His gentle, soothing words and
smiles were as soothing and softening as almond oil. And Anna soon
felt this.
  "No, Stiva," she said, "I'm lost, lost! Worse than lost! I can't say
yet that all is over; on the contrary, I feel that it's not over.
I'm an overstrained cord that must snap. But it's not ended yet... And
it will have a fearful end."
  "No matter, we must let the cord be loosened, little by little.
There's no position from which there is no way of escape."
  "I have thought, and thought. Only one..."
  Again he knew from her terrified eyes that this one way of escape in
her thought was death, and he would not let her say it.
  "Not at all," he said. "Listen to me. You can't see your own
position as I can. Let me tell you candidly my opinion." Again he
smiled discreetly his almond-oil smile. "I'll begin from the
beginning. You married a man twenty years older than yourself. You
married him without love and not knowing what love was. It was a
mistake, let's admit."
  "A fearful mistake!" said Anna.
  "But, I repeat, it's an accomplished fact. Then you had, let us say,
the misfortune to love a man not your husband. That was a
misfortune; but that, too, is an accomplished fact. And your husband
knew it and forgave it." He stopped at each sentence, waiting for
her to object, but she made no answer. "That's that. Now the
question is: Can you go on living with your husband? Do you wish it?
Does he wish it?"
  "I know nothing, nothing."
  "But you said yourself that you can't endure him."
  "No, I didn't say so. I deny it. I don't know anything, I don't
understand anything."
  "Yes, but let..."
  "You can't understand. I feel I'm lying head downward in a sort of
pit, but I ought not to save myself. And I can't..."
  "Never mind, we'll slip something under you and pull you out. I
understand you: I understand that you can't take it on yourself to
express your wishes, your feelings."
  "There's nothing, nothing I wish... except for it to be all over."
  "But he sees this and knows it. And do you suppose it weighs on
him any less than on you? You're wretched, he's wretched, and what
good can come of it? While divorce would solve the whole
difficulty." With some effort Stepan Arkadyevich brought out his
central idea, and looked significantly at her.
  She said nothing, and shook her cropped head in dissent. But from
the look in her face, that suddenly brightened into its former beauty,
he saw that if she did not desire this, it was simply because it
seemed to her an unattainable happiness.
  "I'm awfully sorry for you both! And how happy I should be if I
could arrange things!" said Stepan Arkadyevich, smiling more boldly.
"Don't speak, don't say a word! God grant only that I may speak as I
feel. I'm going to him."
  Anna looked at him with dreamy, shining eyes, and said nothing.
                             XXII.

  Stepan Arkadyevich, with the same somewhat solemn expression with
which he used to take his presidential chair at his board, walked into
Alexei Alexandrovich's room. Alexei Alexandrovich was walking about
his room with his hands behind his back, thinking of just what
Stepan Arkadyevich had been discussing with his wife.
  "I'm not interrupting you?" said Stepan Arkadyevich, on the sight of
his brother-in-law becoming suddenly aware of a sense of embarrassment
unusual with him. To conceal this embarrassment he took out a newly
purchased cigarette case that opened in a new way, and, sniffing the
leather, took a cigarette out of it.
  "No. Do you want anything?" Alexei Alexandrovich said reluctantly.
  "Yes, I wished... I wanted... Yes, I wanted to talk to you," said
Stepan Arkadyevich, with surprise aware of an unaccustomed timidity.
  This feeling was so unexpected and so strange that he did not
believe it was the voice of conscience telling him that what he
meant to do was wrong. Stepan Arkadyevich made an effort and struggled
with the timidity that had come over him.
  "I hope you believe in my love for my sister and my sincere
affection and respect for you," he said, reddening.
  Alexei Alexandrovich stood still and said nothing, but his face
struck Stepan Arkadyevich by its expression of an unresisting
sacrifice.
  "I intended... I wanted to have a little talk with you about my
sister and your mutual position," he said, still struggling with an
unaccustomed constraint.
  Alexei Alexandrovich smiled mournfully, looked at his
brother-in-law, and, without answering, went up to the table, took
from it an unfinished letter, and handed it to his brother-in-law.
  "I think unceasingly of the same thing. And here is what I had begun
writing, thinking I could say it better by letter, and that my
presence irritates her," he said, as he gave him the letter.
  Stepan Arkadyevich took the letter, looked with incredulous surprise
at the lusterless eyes fixed so immovably on him, and began to read:
  "I see that my presence is irksome to you. Painful as it is to me to
believe it, I see that it is so, and cannot be otherwise. I don't
blame you, and God is my witness that on seeing you at the time of
your illness I resolved with my whole heart to forget all that had
passed between us, and to begin a new life. I do not regret, and shall
never regret, what I have done; but I have desired one thing- your
good, the good of your soul- and now I see I have not attained that.
Tell me yourself what will give you true happiness and peace to your
soul. I put myself entirely in your hands, and trust to your feeling
of what is right."
  Stepan Arkadyevich handed back the letter, and, with the same
surprise, continued looking at his brother-in-law, not knowing what to
say. This silence was so awkward for both of them that Stepan
Arkadyevich's lips began twitching nervously, while he still gazed
without speaking at Karenin's face.
  "That's what I wanted to say to her," said Alexei Alexandrovich,
turning away.
  "Yes, yes..." said Stepan Arkadyevich, not able to answer for the
tears that were choking him. "Yes, yes, I understand you," he
brought out at last.
  "I want to know what she would like," said Alexei Alexandrovich.
  "I am afraid she does not understand her own position. She is not
a judge," said Stepan Arkadyevich, recovering himself. "She is
crushed, simply crushed by your generosity. If she were to read this
letter, she would be incapable of saying anything- she would only hang
her head lower than ever."
  "Yes, but what's to be done in that case? How explain... how find
out her wishes?"
  "If you will allow me to give my opinion, I think that it lies
with you to point out directly the steps you consider necessary to end
the situation."
  "So you consider it must be ended?" Alexei Alexandrovich interrupted
him. "But how?" he added, with a gesture of his hands before his eyes,
not usual with him. "I see no possible way out of it."
  "There is some way of getting out of every situation," said Stepan
Arkadyevich, standing up and becoming more cheerful. "There was a time
when you thought of breaking off... If you are convinced now that
you cannot make each other happy..."
  "Happiness may be variously understood. But suppose that I agree
to everything, that I want nothing: what way is there of getting out
of our situation?"
  "If you care to know my opinion,"- said Stepan Arkadyevich, with the
same smile of softening, almond-oil tenderness with which he had
been talking to Anna. His kindly smile was so winning that Alexei
Alexandrovich, feeling his own weakness and unconsciously swayed by
it, was ready to believe what Stepan Arkadyevich was saying. "She will
never speak out about it. But one thing is possible, one thing she
might desire," he went on; "that is the cessation of your relations,
and all memories associated with them. To my thinking, in your
situation the essential thing is the formation of a new attitude to
one another. And that can only rest on a basis of freedom on both
sides."
  "Divorce," Alexei Alexandrovich interrupted, in a tone of aversion.
  "Yes, I imagine that divorce... Yes, divorce," Stepan Arkadyevich
repeated, reddening. "That is from every point of view the most
rational course for married people who find themselves in the
situation you are in. What can be done if married people find that
life is impossible for them together? That may always happen."
  Alexei Alexandrovich sighed heavily and closed his eyes.
  "There's only one point to be considered: is either of the parties
desirous of forming new ties? If not, it is very simple," said
Stepan Arkadyevich, feeling more and more free from constraint.
  Alexei Alexandrovich, scowling with emotion, muttered something to
himself, and made no answer. All that seemed so simple to Stepan
Arkadyevich, Alexei Alexandrovich had thought over thousands of times.
And, so far from being simple, it all seemed to him utterly
impossible: divorce, the details of which he knew by this time, seemed
to him now out of the question, because the sense of his own dignity
and respect for religion forbade his taking upon himself a
fictitious charge of adultery, and still more, suffering his wife,
pardoned and beloved by him, to be caught in the fact and put to
public shame. Divorce appeared to him impossible also on other,
still more weighty grounds.
  What would become of his son in case of a divorce? To leave him with
his mother was out of the question. The divorced mother would have her
own illegitimate family, in which his status as a stepson, and his
education, would be probably bad. Keep him with him? He knew that
would be an act of vengeance on his part, and that he did not
desire. But, apart from this, what more than all made divorce seem
impossible to Alexei Alexandrovich was that, by consenting to a
divorce, he would be completely ruining Anna. The saying of Darya
Alexandrovna at Moscow, that in deciding on a divorce he was
thinking of himself, and not considering that by this he would be
ruining her irrevocably, had sunk into his heart. And connecting
this saying with his forgiveness of her, with his devotion to the
children, he understood it now in his own way. To consent to a
divorce, to give her her freedom, meant in his thoughts to take from
himself the last tie that bound him to life- the children whom he
loved; and to take from her the last prop that kept her on the path of
right, to thrust her down to her ruin. If she were divorced, he knew
she would join her life to Vronsky's, and their tie would be an
illegitimate and criminal one, since a wife, by the interpretation
of the ecclesiastical law, could not marry while her husband was
living. "She will join him, and in a year or two he will throw her
over, or she will form a new tie," thought Alexei Alexandrovich.
"And I, by agreeing to an unlawful divorce, shall be to blame for
her ruin." He had thought it all over hundreds of times, and was
convinced that a divorce was not at all simple, as Stepan
Arkadyevich had said, but was utterly impossible. He did not believe a
single word Stepan Arkadyevich said to him; to every word he had a
thousand objections to make, but he listened to him, feeling that
his words were the expression of that mighty brutal force which
controlled his life, and to which he would have to submit.
  "The only question is on what terms you agree to give her a divorce.
She does not want anything, does not dare ask you for anything- she
leaves it all to your magnanimity."
  "My God, my God! What for?" thought Alexei Alexandrovich,
remembering the details of divorce proceedings in which the husband
took the blame on himself, and with just the same gesture with which
Vronsky had done it, he hid his face in his hands in shame.
  "You are troubled, I understand that. But if you think it over..."
  "'And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the
other; and him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy
coat also,'" thought Alexei Alexandrovich.
  "Yes, yes!" he cried in a shrill voice. "I will take the disgrace on
myself, I will give up even my son, but... But wouldn't it be better
to let it alone? Still, you may do as you like...."
  And, turning away so that his brother-in-law could not see him, he
sat down on a chair at the window. There was bitterness, there was
shame in his heart, but with bitterness and shame he felt joy and
emotion at the height of his own meekness.
  Stepan Arkadyevich was touched. He was silent for a space.
  "Alexei Alexandrovich, believe me, she appreciates your
magnanimity," he said. "But it seems it was the will of God," he
added, and as he said it felt how foolish a remark it was, and with
difficulty repressed a smile at his own foolishness.
  Alexei Alexandrovich would have made some reply, but tears stopped
him.
  "This is an unhappy fatality, and one must accept it as such. I
accept the calamity as an accomplished fact, and am doing my best to
help both her and you," said Stepan Arkadyevich.
  When he went out of his brother-in-law's room he was touched, but
that did not prevent him from being glad he had successfully brought
the matter to a conclusion, for he felt certain Alexei Alexandrovich
would not go back on his words. To this satisfaction was added the
fact that an idea had just struck him for a conundrum turning on his
successful achievement- when the affair was over he would put it to
his wife and most intimate friends. He tried this conundrum in two
or three different ways. "But I'll work it out better than that," he
said to himself with a smile.
                             XXIII.

  Vronsky's wound had been a dangerous one, though it did not touch
the heart, and for several days he hovered between life and death. The
first time he was able to speak, Varia, his brother's wife, was
alone in the room.
  "Varia," he said, looking sternly at her, "I shot myself by
accident. And please never speak of it, and tell everyone so. Or
else it's too ridiculous."
  Without answering his words, Varia bent over him, and with a
delighted smile gazed into his face. His eyes were clear, not
feverish; but their expression was stern.
  "Thank God!" she said. "You're not in pain?"
  "A little here," he pointed to his breast.
  "Then let me change your bandages."
  In silence, stiffening his broad jaws, he looked at her while she
bandaged him up. When she had finished he said:
  "I'm not delirious. Please manage that there may be no talk of my
having shot myself on purpose."
  "No one says so. Only I hope you won't shoot yourself by accident
any more," she said, with a questioning smile.
  "I think I won't, but it would have been better..."
  And he smiled gloomily.
  In spite of these words and this smile, which so frightened Varia,
when the inflammation was over and he began to recover, he felt that
he was completely free from one part of his misery. By his action he
had, as it were, washed away the shame and humiliation he had felt
before. He could now think calmly of Alexei Alexandrovich. He
recognized all his magnanimity, but he did not now feel himself
humiliated by it. Besides, he got back again into the beaten track
of his life. He saw the possibility of looking men in the face again
without shame, and he could live in accordance with his own habits.
One thing he could not pluck out of his heart, though he never
ceased struggling with it- the regret, amounting to despair, at having
lost her forever. That, having expiated his sin against the husband,
he was now bound to renounce her, and never in future to stand between
her with her repentance and her husband, he had firmly decided in
his heart; but he could not tear out of his heart his regret at the
loss of her love; he could not erase from his memory those moments
of happiness which he had known with her and had so little prized at
the time, and which haunted him with all their charm.
  Serpukhovskoy had planned his appointment at Tashkend, and Vronsky
agreed to the proposal without the slightest hesitation. But the
nearer the time of departure came, the bitterer was the sacrifice he
was making to what he thought his duty.
  His wound had healed, and he was driving about making preparations
for his departure for Tashkend.
  "To see her once, and then to bury myself, to die," he thought, and,
as he was paying farewell visits, he uttered this thought to Betsy.
Charged with this commission, Betsy had gone to Anna, and brought
him back a negative reply.
  "So much the better," thought Vronsky, when he received the news.
"It was a weakness which would have shattered what strength I have
left."
  Next day Betsy herself came to him in the morning, and announced
that she had heard through Oblonsky, as a positive fact, that Alexei
Alexandrovich had agreed to a divorce, and that therefore Vronsky
could see Anna.
  Without even troubling himself to see Betsy out of his flat,
forgetting all his resolutions, without asking when he could see her
or where her husband was, Vronsky drove straight to the Karenins'.
He ran up the stairs, seeing no one and nothing, and with a rapid
step, almost breaking into a run, he went into her room. And without
considering, without noticing whether there was anyone in the room
or not, he flung his arms round her, and began to cover with kisses
her face, her hands, her neck.
  Anna had been preparing herself for this meeting, had thought what
she would say to him, but she did not succeed in saying anything;
his passion mastered her. She tried to calm him, to calm herself,
but it was too late. His feeling infected her. Her lips trembled so
that for a long while she could say nothing.
  "Yes, you have conquered me, and I am yours," she said at last,
pressing his hands to her bosom.
  "So it had to be," he said. "So long as we live, it must be so. I
know it now."
  "That's true," she said, getting whiter and whiter, and embracing
his head. "Still, there is something terrible in it after all that has
happened."
  "It will all pass, it will all pass; we shall be so happy. Our love,
if it only could be stronger, will be strengthened by there being
something terrible in it," he said, lifting his head and showing his
strong teeth in a smile.
  And she could not but respond with a smile- not to his words, but to
the love in his eyes. She took his hand and stroked her chilled cheeks
and cropped head with it.
  "I don't know you with this short hair. You've grown so pretty. A
boy. But how pale you are!"
  "Yes, I'm very weak," she said, smiling. And her lips began
trembling again.
  "We'll go to Italy; you will get strong," he said.
  "Can it be possible we could be like husband and wife, alone, our
own family?" she said, looking close into his eyes.
  "It only seems strange to me that it can ever have been otherwise."
  "Stiva says that he has agreed to everything, but I can't accept his
magnanimity," she said, looking dreamily past Vronsky's face. "I don't
want a divorce; it's all the same to me now. Only I don't know what he
will decide about Seriozha."
  He could not conceive how at this moment of their meeting she
could remember and think of her son, of divorce. What did it all
matter?
  "Don't speak of that, don't think of it," he said, turning her
hand in his, and trying to draw her attention to him; but still she
did not look at him.
  "Oh, why didn't I die! It would have been better," she said, and,
without sobbing, tears flowed down both her cheeks; but she tried to
smile, so as not to wound him.
  To decline the flattering and dangerous appointment at Tashkend
would have been, Vronsky had till then considered, disgraceful and
impossible. But now, without an instant's consideration, he declined
it, and observing dissatisfaction in the upper quarters at this
step, he immediately retired from the army.
  A month later Alexei Alexandrovich was left alone with his son in
his house at Peterburg, while Anna had gone abroad with Vronsky,
without having obtained a divorce, and having absolutely declined
all idea of one.
                         PART FIVE

                             I.

  Princess Shcherbatskaia considered that it was out of the question
for the wedding to take place before Lent, just five weeks off,
since not half the trousseau could possibly be ready by that time. But
she could not but agree with Levin that to fix it for after Lent would
be putting it off too late, as an old aunt of Prince Shcherbatsky's
was seriously ill and might die, and then the mourning would delay the
wedding still longer. And therefore, deciding to divide the
trousseau into two parts- a larger and a smaller trousseau- the
Princess consented to have the wedding before Lent. She determined
that she would get the smaller part of the trousseau all ready now,
and the larger part should be sent on later, and she was much vexed
with Levin because he was incapable of giving her a serious answer
to the question whether he agreed to this arrangement or not. The
arrangement was the more suitable as, immediately after the wedding,
the newly married couple were to go to the country, where the
belongings of the larger trousseau would not be wanted.
  Levin still continued in the same delirious condition, in which it
seemed to him that he and his happiness constituted the chief and sole
aim of all existence, and that he need not now think or care about
anything, that everything was being done and would be done for him
by others. He had not even plans and aims for the future, he left
its arrangement to others, knowing that everything would be
delightful. His brother, Sergei Ivanovich, and Stepan Arkadyevich, and
the Princess, guided him in doing what he had to do. All he did was to
agree entirely with everything suggested to him. His brother raised
money for him, the Princess advised him to leave Moscow after the
wedding. Stepan Arkadyevich advised him to go abroad. He agreed to
everything. "Do what you choose, if it amuses you, I'm happy, and my
happiness can be no greater and no less because of anything you do,"
he thought. When he told Kitty of Stepan Arkadyevich's advice that
they should go abroad, he was much surprised that she did not agree to
this, and had some definite requirements of her own in regard to their
future. She knew Levin had work he loved in the country. She did
not, as he saw, understand this work- she did not even care to
understand it. But that did not prevent her from regarding it as a
matter of great importance. And therefore she knew their home would be
in the country, and she wanted to go not abroad where she was not
going to live, but to the place where their home would be. This
definitely expressed purpose astonished Levin. But since he did not
care either way, he immediately asked Stepan Arkadyevich, as though it
were his duty, to go down to the country and to arrange everything
there to the best of his ability, with that taste of which he had so
much.
  "But, I say," Stepan Arkadyevich said to him one day after he had
come back from the country, where he had got everything ready for
the young people's arrival, "have you a certificate of having been
at confession?"
  "No. But what of it?"
  "You can't be married without it."
  "My, my, my!" cried Levin. "Why, I believe it's nine years since
I've taken the sacrament! I never thought of it."
  "You're a pretty fellow!" said Stepan Arkadyevich laughing, "and you
call me a Nihilist! But this won't do, you know. You must take the
sacrament."
  "When? There are four days left now."
  Stepan Arkadyevich arranged this also, and Levin had to prepare
himself for the sacrament. To Levin, as to any unbeliever who respects
the beliefs of others, it was exceedingly disagreeable to be present
at and to take part in church ceremonies. At this moment, in his
present softened state of feeling, sensitive to everything, this
inevitable act of hypocrisy was not merely painful to Levin, it seemed
to him utterly impossible. Now, in the heyday of his highest glory,
his fullest flower, he would have to be a liar or a blasphemer. He
felt incapable of being either. But though he repeatedly plied
Stepan Arkadyevich with questions as to the possibility of obtaining a
certificate without actually communicating, Stepan Arkadyevich
maintained that it was out of the question.
  "Besides, what is it to you- two days? And he's an awfully fine,
clever old fellow. He'll pull the tooth out for you so gently you
won't notice it."
  Standing at the first mass, Levin attempted to revive in himself his
youthful recollections of the intense religious emotion he had
passed through between the ages of sixteen and seventeen. But he was
at once convinced that it was utterly impossible to him. He
attempted to look at it all as an empty custom, having no sort of
meaning, like the custom of paying calls; but he felt that he could
not do that either. Levin found himself, like the majority of his
contemporaries, in the vaguest position in regard to religion. Believe
he could not, and at the same time he had no firm conviction that it
was all wrong. And consequently, not being able to believe in the
significance of what he was doing, nor to regard it with
indifference as an empty formality, during the whole period of
preparing for the sacrament he was conscious of a feeling of
discomfort and shame at doing what he did not himself understand,
and what, as an inner voice told him, was therefore false and wrong.
  During the service he would first listen to the prayers, trying to
attach some meaning to them not discordant with his own views; then
feeling that he could not understand and must condemn them, he tried
not to listen to them, but to attend to the thoughts, observations,
and memories which floated through his brain with extreme vividness
during this idle time of standing in church.
  He had stood through the mass, the evening service, and the midnight
service, and the next day he got up earlier than usual, and, without
having tea, went at eight o'clock in the morning to the church for the
morning service and the confession.
  There was no one in church but a beggar soldier, two old women,
and the churchmen. A young deacon, whose long back showed in two
distinct halves through his thin undercassock, met him, and, at once
going to a little table at the wall, read the exhortations. During the
reading, especially at the frequent and rapid repetition of the same
words, "Lord, have mercy on us!" which sounded like "mercynuslor!"
Levin felt that his thought was shut and sealed up, and that it must
not be touched or stirred now, or else confusion would be the
result; and so standing behind the deacon he went on thinking of his
own affairs, neither listening nor examining what was said. "It's
wonderful what expression there is in her hand," he thought,
remembering how they had been sitting the day before at a corner
table. They had nothing to talk about, as was almost always the case
at this time, and laying her hand on the table she kept opening and
shutting it, and laughed herself as she watched her action. He
remembered how he had kissed her hand and then had examined the
lines on the pink palm. "Another 'mercynuslor!'" thought Levin,
crossing himself, bowing, and looking at the supple spring of the
deacon's back bowing before him. "She took my hand then and examined
the lines. 'You've got a splendid hand,' she said." And he looked at
his own hand and the short hand of the deacon. "Yes, now it will
soon be over," he thought. "No, it seems to be starting up again,"
he thought, listening to the prayers. "No, it's just ending: there
he is bowing down to the ground. That's always at the end."
  The deacon's hand in a plush cuff unobtrusively accepted a
three-rouble note, and the deacon said he would put Levin's name
down in the register, and, his new boots creaking jauntily over the
flagstones of the empty church, he went to the altar. A moment later
he peeped out thence and beckoned to Levin. Thought, till then
locked up, began to stir in Levin's head, but he made haste to drive
it away. "It will come right somehow," he thought, and went toward the
ambo. He went up the steps, and turning to the right, saw the
priest. The priest, a little ancient with a scanty grizzled beard
and weary, good-natured eyes, was standing at the lectern, turning
over the pages of a missal. With a slight bow to Levin he began
immediately reading prayers in an accustomed voice. When he had
finished them he bowed down to the ground and turned, facing Levin.
  "Christ is present here unseen, receiving your confession," he said,
pointing to the crucifix. "Do you believe in all the doctrines of
the Holy Apostolic Church?" the priest went on, turning his eyes
away from Levin's face and folding his hands under his stole.
  "I have doubted- I doubt everything," said Levin in a voice that
jarred on himself, and he ceased speaking.
  The priest waited a few seconds to see if he would not say more, and
closing his eyes he said quickly, with a broad, Vladimirsky accent:
  "Doubt is natural to the weakness of mankind, but we must pray
that God in His mercy will strengthen us. What are your special sins?"
he added, without the slightest interval, as though anxious not to
waste time.
  "My chief sin is doubt. I have doubts of everything, and for the
most part I am in doubt."
  "Doubt is natural to the weakness of mankind," the priest repeated
the same words. "What do you doubt about principally?"
  "I doubt everything. I sometimes even have doubts of the existence
of God," Levin could not help saying, and he was horrified at the
impropriety of what he was saying. But Levin's words did not, it
seemed, make much impression on the priest.
  "What sort of doubt can there be of the existence of God?" he said
hurriedly, with a barely perceptible smile.
  Levin did not speak.
  "What doubt can you have of the Creator when you behold His
creation?" the priest went on in the rapid customary recitative.
"Who has decked the heavenly firmament with its lights? Who has
clothed the earth in its beauty? How explain it without the
Creator?" he said, looking inquiringly at Levin.
  Levin felt that it would be improper to enter upon a metaphysical
discussion with the priest, and so he said in reply merely what was
a direct answer to the question.
  "I don't know," he said.
  "You don't know! Then how can you doubt that God created all?" the
priest said, with good-humored perplexity.
  "I don't understand it at all," said Levin, blushing, and feeling
that his words were stupid, and that they could not be anything but
stupid in such a position.
  "Pray to God and beseech Him. Even the holy fathers had doubts,
and prayed to God to strengthen their faith. The devil has great
power, and we must resist him. Pray to God, beseech Him. Pray to God,"
he repeated hurriedly.
  The priest paused for some time, as though meditating.
  "You, I hear, are about to marry the daughter of my parishioner
and son in the spirit, Prince Shcherbatsky?" he resumed, with a smile.
"An excellent young lady."
  "Yes," answered Levin, blushing for the priest. "What does he want
to ask me about this at confession for?" he thought.
  And, as though answering his thought, the priest said to him:
  "You are about to enter into holy matrimony, and God may bless you
with offspring. Are you?- Well, what sort of bringing-up can you
give your babes if you do not overcome the temptation of the devil,
enticing you to infidelity?" he said, with gentle reproachfulness. "If
you love your child as a good father, you will not desire only wealth,
luxury, honor for your infant; you will be anxious for his
salvation, his spiritual enlightenment with the light of truth. Eh?
What answer will you make him when the innocent babe asks you:
'Papa! Who made all that enchants me in this world- the earth, the
waters, the sun, the flowers, the grass?' Can you say to him: 'I don't
know?' You cannot but know, since the Lord God in His infinite mercy
has revealed it to us. Or your child will ask you: 'What awaits me
in the life beyond the grave?' What will you say to him when you
know nothing? How will you answer him? Will you leave him to the
allurements of the world and the devil? That's not right," he said,
and he stopped, putting his head on one side and looking at Levin with
his kindly, gentle eyes.
  Levin made no answer this time, not because he did not want to enter
upon a discussion with the priest, but because no one had ever asked
him such questions- and when his babes did ask him those questions, it
would be time enough to think about answering them.
  "You are entering upon a time of life," pursued the priest, "when
you must choose your path and keep to it. Pray to God that He may in
His mercy aid you and have mercy on you!" he concluded. "Our Lord
and God, Jesus Christ, in the abundance and riches of His
loving-kindness, forgives this child..." and, finishing the prayer
of absolution, the priest blessed him and dismissed him.
  On getting home that day, Levin had a delightful sense of relief
at the awkward position being over and having been got through without
his having to tell a lie. Apart from this, there remained a vague
memory that what the kind, fine old fellow had said had not been at
all as stupid as he had fancied at first, and that there was something
in it that must be cleared up.
  "Of course, not now," thought Levin, "but at some later day."
Levin felt more than ever now that there was something not clear and
not clean in his soul, and that, in regard to religion, he was in
the same position which he perceived so clearly and disliked in
others, and for which he blamed his friend Sviiazhsky.
  Levin spent that evening with his betrothed at Dolly's, and was in
very high spirits. To explain to Stepan Arkadyevich the state of
excitement in which he found himself, he said that he was happy,
like a dog being trained to jump through a hoop, who, having at last
caught the idea, and done what was required of him, whines and wags
its tail, and jumps up to the table and the window sills in its
delight.
                             II.

  On the day of the wedding, according to the Russian custom (the
Princess and Darya Alexandrovna insisted on strictly keeping all the
customs), Levin did not see his betrothed, and dined at his hotel with
three bachelor friends, casually brought together at his rooms.
These were Sergei Ivanovich, Katavassov, a university friend, now
professor of natural science, whom Levin had met in the street and
insisted on taking home with him, and Chirikov, his best man, a Moscow
justice of the peace, Levin's companion in his bear hunts. The
dinner was a very merry one: Sergei Ivanovich was in his happiest
mood, and was much amused by Katavassov's originality. Katavassov,
feeling his originality was appreciated and understood, made the
most of it. Chirikov always gave a lively and good-humored support
to conversation of any sort.
  "See, now," said Katavassov, drawling his words from a habit
acquired in the lecture room, "what a capable fellow was our friend
Konstantin Dmitrievich. I'm speaking of absent company- he doesn't
exist for us now. At the time he left the university he was fond of
science, took an interest in humanity; now one-half of his abilities
is devoted to deceiving himself, and the other to justifying the
deceit."
  "A more determined enemy of matrimony than you I never saw," said
Sergei Ivanovich.
  "Oh, no, I'm not an enemy of matrimony. I'm in favor of division
of labor. People who can do nothing else ought to rear people, while
the rest work for their happiness and enlightenment. That's how I look
at it. To muddle up two trades there are too many amateurs; I'm not
one of their number."
  "How happy I shall be when I hear that you're in love!" said
Levin. "Please invite me to the wedding."
  "I'm in love now."
  "Yes, with a cuttlefish! You know," Levin turned to his brother,
"Mikhail Semionovich is writing a work on the digestive organs of
the..."
  "Now, make a muddle of it! It doesn't matter what about. And the
fact is, I certainly do love cuttlefish."
  "But that's no hindrance to your loving your wife."
  "The cuttlefish is no hindrance. The wife is the hindrance."
  "Why so?"
  "Oh, you'll see! You care about farming, hunting- well, you'll
see!..."
  "Arkhip was here today; he said there were no end of elk in Prudnoe,
and two bears," said Chirikov.
  "Well, you must go and get them without me."
  "Ah, that's the truth," said Sergei Ivanovich. "And you may say
good-by to bear hunting for the future- your wife won't allow it!"
  Levin smiled. The picture of his wife not letting him go was so
pleasant that he was ready to renounce forever the delights of looking
upon bears.
  "Still, it's a pity they should get those two bears without you.
Do you remember last time at Khapilovo? And now it would be a
delightful hunt!" said Chirikov.
  Levin had not the heart to disillusion him of the notion that
there could be something delightful apart from her, and so said
nothing.
  "There's some sense in this custom of saying good-by to bachelor
life," said Sergei Ivanovich. "However happy you may be, you must
regret your freedom."
  "And confess there is a feeling that you want to jump out of the
window, like Gogol's bridegroom?"
  "Of course there is, but he won't confess," said Katavassov, and
he broke into loud laughter.
  "Oh, well, the window's open.... Let's start off this instant to
Tver! There's a big she-bear; one can go right up to the lair.
Seriously, let's go by the five o'clock! And here let them do what
they like," said Chirikov smiling.
  "Well, now, on my honor," said Levin smiling, "I can't find in my
heart that feeling of regret for my freedom."
  "Yes, there's such a chaos in your heart just now that you can't
find anything there," said Katavassov. "Wait a bit, when you set it to
rights a little, you'll find it!"
  "No; if so, I should have felt a little, apart from my feeling"
(he could not say "love" before them) "and happiness, a certain regret
at losing my freedom.... On the contrary, I am glad at the very loss
of my freedom."
  "Awful! It's a hopeless case!" said Katavassov. "Well, let's drink
to his recovery, or wish that a hundredth part of his dreams may be
realized- and that would be happiness such as never has been seen on
earth!"
  Soon after dinner the guests went away to dress in time for the
wedding.
  When he was left alone, and recalled the conversation of these
bachelor friends, Levin asked himself: Had he in his heart that regret
for his freedom of which they had spoken? He smiled at the question.
"Freedom! What is freedom for? Happiness is only in loving and wishing
her wishes, thinking her thoughts; that is to say, not freedom at all-
that's happiness!"
  "But do I know her thoughts, her wishes, her feelings?" some voice
suddenly whispered to him. The smile died away from his face, and he
grew thoughtful. And suddenly a strange feeling came upon him. There
came over him a dread and doubt- doubt of everything.
  "What if she does not love me? What if she's marrying me simply to
be married? What if she doesn't see herself what she's doing?" he
asked himself. "She may come to her senses, and only when she is being
married realize that she does not and cannot love me." And strange,
most evil thoughts of her began to come to him. He was jealous of
Vronsky, as he had been a year ago, as though the evening he had
seen her with Vronsky had been yesterday. He suspected she had not
told him everything.
  He jumped up quickly. "No, this can't go on!" he said to himself
in despair. "I'll go to her; I'll ask her; I'll say for the last time:
We are free, and hadn't we better stay so? Anything's better than
endless misery, disgrace, unfaithfulness!" With despair in his heart
and bitter anger against all men, against himself, against her, he
went out of the hotel and drove to her house.
  He found her in one of the rear rooms. She was sitting on a chest
and making some arrangements with her maid, sorting over heaps of
dresses of different colors, spread on the backs of chairs and on
the floor.
  "Ah!" she cried, seeing him, and beaming with delight. "Kostia!
Konstantin Dmitrievich!" (These latter days she used these names
almost alternately.) "I didn't expect you! I'm going through my
girlish wardrobe to see what's for whom...."
  "Oh! That's very lovely!" he said gloomily, looking at the maid.
  "You can go, Duniasha, I'll call you presently," said Kitty.
"Kostia, what's the matter?" she asked, definitely adopting this
familiar name as soon as the maid had gone out. She noticed his
strange face, agitated and gloomy, and a panic came over her.
  "Kitty! I'm in torture. I can't be in torture alone," he said with
despair in his voice, standing before her and looking imploringly into
her eyes. He saw already from her loving, truthful face, that
nothing could come of what he had meant to say, but yet he wanted
her to reassure him herself. "I've come to say that there's still
time. This can all be stopped and set right."
  "What? I don't understand. What is the matter?"
  "What I have said a thousand times over, and can't help
thinking... that I'm not worthy of you. You couldn't consent to
marry me. Think a little. You've made a mistake. Think it over
thoroughly. You can't love me... if... Better say so," he said,
without looking at her. "I shall be wretched. Let people say what they
like; anything's better than misery.... Far better now while there's
still time...."
  "I don't understand," she answered, panic-stricken; "you mean you
want to give it up... that you don't want it?"
  "Yes- if you don't love me."
  "You're out of your mind!" she cried, turning crimson with vexation.
But his face was so piteous that she restrained her vexation, and
flinging some clothes off an armchair, she sat down beside him.
"What are you thinking? Tell me all."
  "I am thinking you can't love me. What can you love me for?"
  "My God! What can I do?..." she said, and burst into tears.
  "Oh! What have I done?" he cried, and kneeling before her, he fell
to kissing her hands.
  When the old Princess came into the room five minutes later, she
found them completely reconciled. Kitty had not simply assured him
that she loved him, but had gone so far- in answer to his question,
what she loved him for- as to explain what for. She told him that
she loved him because she understood him completely, because she
knew what he would like, and because everything he liked was good. And
this seemed to him perfectly clear. When the Princess came to them,
they were sitting side by side on the chest, sorting the dresses and
disputing over Kitty's wanting to give Duniasha the brown dress she
had been wearing when Levin proposed to her, while he insisted that
that dress must never be given away, but that Duniasha should have the
blue one.
  "How is it you don't see? She's a brunette, and it won't suit
her.... I've worked it all out."
  Hearing why he had come, the Princess was half-humorously,
half-seriously angry with him, and sent him home to dress and not to
hinder Kitty's hairdressing, as Charles the coiffeur was just coming.
  "As it is, she's been eating nothing lately and is losing her looks,
and then you must come and upset her with your nonsense," she said
to him. "Get along with you, my dear!"
  Levin, guilty and shamefaced, but pacified, went back to his
hotel. His brother, Darya Alexandrovna, and Stepan Arkadyevich, all in
full dress, were waiting for him to bless him with an icon. There
was no time to lose. Darya Alexandrovna had to drive home again to
fetch her curled and pomaded son, who was to carry the icon in the
bride's carriage. Then a carriage had to be sent for the best man, and
another, that would take Sergei Ivanovich away, would have to be
sent back.... Altogether there were a great many most complicated
matters to be considered and arranged. One thing was unmistakable-
that there must be no delay, as it was already half-past six.
  Nothing special happened at the ceremony of benediction with the
icon. Stepan Arkadyevich stood in a comically solemn pose beside his
wife, took the icon, and, telling Levin to bow down to the ground,
he blessed him with his kindly, ironical smile, and kissed him three
times; Darya Alexandrovna did the same, and immediately was in a hurry
to get off, and again plunged into the intricate question of the due
order of the various carriages.
  "Come, I'll tell you how we'll manage: you drive in our carriage
to fetch him, and Sergei Ivanovich, if he'll be so good, will drive
there and then send his carriage."
  "Of course; I shall be delighted."
  "We'll come on directly with him. Are your things sent off?" asked
Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "Yes," answered Levin, and he told Kouzma to lay out his clothes for
him to dress.
                             III.

  A crowd of people, principally women, was thronging round the church
lighted up for the wedding. Those who had not succeeded in getting
into the main entrance were crowding about the windows, pushing,
wrangling, and peeping through the gratings.
  More than twenty carriages had already been drawn up in ranks
along the street by the police. A police officer, regardless of the
frost, stood at the entrance, gorgeous in his uniform. More
carriages were continually driving up, and ladies wearing flowers
and carrying their trains, and men taking off their kepis or black
hats, kept walking into the church. Inside the church both lusters
were already lighted, and all the candles before the icons. The golden
nimbus on the red ground of the ikonostasis, and the gilt relief on
the icons and the silver of the lusters and candlesticks, and the
floor-flags, and the rugs, and the banners above in the choir, and the
steps of the ambo, and the old blackened books, and the cassocks and
surplices- all were flooded with light. On the right side of the
warm church, in the crowd of evening dresses and white ties, of
uniforms, and of silk, velvet, satin, hair and flowers, of bare
shoulders and arms and long gloves, there was discreet but lively
conversation that echoed strangely in the high cupola. Every time
there was heard the creak of the opened door the conversation in the
crowd died away, and everybody looked round expecting to see the bride
and bridegroom come in. But the door had opened more than ten times,
and each time it was either a belated guest or guests, who joined
the circle of the invited on the right, or some spectator, who had
eluded or softened the police officer, and went to join the crowd of
outsiders on the left. Both the guests and the outside public had by
now passed through all the phases of anticipation.
  At first they imagined that the bride and bridegroom would arrive
immediately, and attached no importance at all to their being late.
Then they began to look more and more often toward the door, and to
talk of whether anything could have happened. Then the long delay
began to be positively discomforting, and relations and guests tried
to look as if they were not thinking of the bridegroom at all, but
were engrossed in conversation.
  The protodeacon, as though to remind them of the value of his
time, coughed impatiently, making the windowpanes rattle in their
frames. In the choir the bored choristers could be heard trying
their voices and blowing their noses. The priest was continually
sending first the church clerk and then the deacon to find out whether
the bridegroom had not come, more and more often he went himself, in a
lilac vestment and an embroidered sash, to the side door, expecting to
see the bridegroom. At last one of the ladies, glancing at her
watch, said, "It really is strange, though!" and all the guests became
uneasy and began loudly expressing their wonder and dissatisfaction.
One of the bridegroom's best men went to find out what had happened.
Kitty meanwhile had long ago been quite ready, and, in her white dress
and long veil and wreath of orange blossoms, was standing in the
drawing room of the Shcherbatskys' house with her sister, Madame
Lvova, who was her bridal mother. She was looking out of the window,
and had been for over half an hour anxiously expecting to hear from
her best man that her bridegroom was at the church.
  Levin meanwhile, in his trousers, but without his coat and
waistcoat, was walking to and fro in his room at the hotel,
continually putting his head out of door and looking up and down the
corridor. But in the corridor there was no sign of the person he was
looking for and he came back in despair, and waving his hands
addressed Stepan Arkadyevich, who was smoking serenely.
  "Was ever a man in such a fearful fool's position?" he said.
  "Yes, it is stupid," Stepan Arkadyevich assented, smiling
soothingly. "But don't worry, it'll be brought directly."
  "No, what is to be done!" said Levin, with smothered fury. "And
these fool open waistcoats! Out of the question!" he said, looking
at the crumpled front of his shirt. "And what if the things have
been taken on to the railway station!" he roared in desperation.
  "Then you must put on mine."
  "I ought to have done so long ago, if at all."
  "It's not well to look ridiculous.... Wait a bit! It will come
round."
  The point was that when Levin asked for his evening suit, Kouzma,
his old servant, had brought him the coat, waistcoat, and everything
that was wanted.
  "But the shirt!" cried Levin.
  "You've got a shirt on," Kouzma answered, with a placid smile.
  Kouzma had not thought of leaving out a clean shirt, and on
receiving instructions to pack up everything and send it round to
the Shcherbatskys' house, from which the young people were to set
out the same evening, he had done so, packing everything but the dress
suit. The shirt worn since the morning was crumpled and out of the
question with the fashionable open waistcoat. It was a long way to
send to the Shcherbatskys'. They sent out to buy a shirt. The
servant came back; everything was shut up- it was Sunday. They sent to
Stepan Arkadyevich's and brought a shirt- it was impossibly wide and
short. They sent finally to the Shcherbatskys' to unpack the things.
The bridegroom was expected at the church while he was pacing up and
down his room like a wild beast in a cage, peeping out into the
corridor, and with horror and despair recalling what absurd things
he had said to Kitty and what she might be thinking now.
  At last the guilty Kouzma flew panting into the room with the shirt.
  "Only just in time. They were just lifting it into the van," said
Kouzma.
  Three minutes later Levin ran full speed into the corridor,
without looking at his watch for fear of aggravating his sufferings.
  "You won't help matters like that," said Stepan Arkadyevich with a
smile, hurrying with more deliberation after him. "It will come round,
it will come round- I tell you."
                             IV.

  "They've come!" "Here he is!" "Which one?" "Rather young, eh?" "Why,
my dear soul, she looks more dead than alive!" were the comments in
the crowd, when Levin, meeting his bride in the entrance, walked
with her into the church.
  Stepan Arkadyevich told his wife the cause of the delay, and the
guests were whispering it with smiles to one another. Levin saw
nothing and no one; he did not take his eyes off his bride.
  Everyone said she had lost her looks dreadfully of late, and was not
nearly as pretty on her wedding day as usual; but Levin did not
think so. He looked at her hair done up high, with the long white veil
and white flowers and the high, scalloped de Medici collar, that in
such a maidenly fashion hid her long neck at the sides and only showed
it in front, and her strikingly slender figure, and it seemed to him
that she looked better than ever- not because these flowers, this
veil, this gown from Paris added anything to her beauty; but
because, in spite of the elaborate sumptuousness of her attire, the
expression of her sweet face, of her eyes, of her lips was still her
own characteristic expression of guileless truthfulness.
  "I was beginning to think you meant to run away," she said, and
smiled to him.
  What happened to me is so stupid I'm ashamed to speak of it!" he
said, reddening, and he was obliged to turn to Sergei Ivanovich, who
came up to him.
  "This is a pretty story of yours about the shirt!" said Sergei
Ivanovich, shaking his head and smiling.
  "Yes, yes!" answered Levin, without an idea of what they were
talking about.
  "Now, Kostia, you have to decide," said Stepan Arkadyevich with an
air of mock dismay, "a weighty question. You are at this moment just
in the humor to appreciate all its gravity. They ask me, are they to
light the candles that have been lighted before or candles that have
never been lighted? It's a matter of ten roubles," he added,
relaxing his lips into a smile. "I have decided, but I was afraid
you might not agree."
  Levin saw it was a joke, but he could not smile.
  "Well, how's it to be then- unused or used candles?- that is the
question."
  "Yes, yes, unused ones."
  "Oh, I'm very glad. The question's decided!" said Stepan
Arkadyevich, smiling. "How silly men become, though, in this
situation," he said to Chirikov, when Levin, after looking absently at
him, had moved back to his bride.
  "Kitty, mind you're the first to step on the carpet," said
Countess Nordstone, coming up. "You're a fine person!" she said to
Levin.
  "Aren't you frightened, eh?" said Marya Dmitrievna, an old aunt.
  "Are you cold? You're pale. Stop a minute, stoop down," said Kitty's
sister, Madame Lvova, and with her plump, pretty hands she smilingly
set straight the flowers on her head.
  Dolly came up, tried to say something, but could not speak, cried,
and then laughed naturally.
  Kitty looked at all of them with the same absent eyes as Levin.
  Meanwhile the officiating clergy had got into their vestments, and
the priest and deacon came out to the lectern, which stood in the
porch of the church. The priest turned to Levin saying something.
Levin did not hear what the priest said.
  "Take the bride's hand and lead her up," the best man said to Levin.
  It was a long while before Levin could make out what was expected of
him. For a long time they tried to set him right and made him begin
again- because he kept taking Kitty by the wrong arm or with the wrong
arm- till he understood at last that what he had to do was, without
changing his position, to take her right hand in his right hand.
When at last he had taken the bride's hand in the correct way, the
priest walked a few paces in front of them and stopped at the lectern.
The crowd of friends and relations moved after them, with a buzz of
talk and a rustle of trains. Someone stooped down and straightened out
the bride's train. The church became so still that the drops of wax
could be heard falling from the candles.
  The little old priest in his calotte, with his long silvery-gray
locks of hair parted behind his ears, was fumbling with something at
the lectern, putting out his little old hands from under the heavy
silver vestment with the gold cross on the back of it.
  Stepan Arkadyevich approached him cautiously, whispered something,
and, giving a wink at Levin, walked back again.
  The priest lighted two candles, wreathed with flowers, and holding
them sideways so that the wax dropped slowly from them he turned,
facing the bridal pair. The priest was the same old man who had
confessed Levin. He looked with weary and melancholy eyes at the bride
and bridegroom, sighed, and, putting his right hand out from under his
vestment, blessed the bridegroom with it, and also, with a shade of
solicitous tenderness, laid his crossed fingers on the bowed head of
Kitty. Then he gave them the candles, and, taking the censer, moved
slowly away from them.
  "Can it be true?" thought Levin, and he looked round at his bride.
Looking down at her he saw her face in profile, and from the
scarcely perceptible quiver of her lips and eyelashes he knew she
was aware of his eyes upon her. She did not look round, but the high
scalloped collar, that reached her little pink ear, trembled
faintly. He saw that a sigh was held back in her throat, and the
little hand in the long glove shook as it held the candle.
  All the fuss of the shirt, of being late, all the talk of friends
and relations, their annoyance, his ludicrous position- all suddenly
passed away and he was filled with joy and dread.
  The handsome, stately protodeacon wearing a silver robe, and his
curly locks standing out at each side of his head, stepped smartly
forward, and lifting his stole on two fingers, stood opposite the
priest.
  "Blessed be the name of the Lord," the solemn syllables rang out
slowly one after another, setting the air quivering with waves of
sound.
  "Blessed is the name of our God, from the beginning, as now, and
forever and aye," the little old priest answered in a submissive,
piping voice, still fingering something at the lectern. And the full
chorus of the unseen choir rose up, filling the whole church, from the
windows to the vaulted roof, with broad waves of melody. It grew
stronger, rested for an instant, and slowly died away.
  They prayed, as they always do, for peace from on high and for
salvation, for the Holy Synod, and for the Czar; they prayed, too, for
the servants of God, Konstantin and Ekaterina, now plighting their
troth.
  "Vouchsafe to them love made perfect, peace, and help, O Lord, we
beseech Thee," the whole church seemed to breathe with the voice of
the protodeacon.
  Levin heard the words, and they impressed him. "How did they guess
that it is help, just help that one wants?" he thought, recalling
all his fears and doubts of late. "What do I know? what can I do in
this fearful business," he thought, "without help? Yes, it is help I
want now."
  When the deacon had finished the liturgical prayer, the priest
turned to the bridal pair with his book: "Eternal God, who joinest
together in love them that were separate," he read in a gentle, piping
voice, "who hast ordained the union of holy wedlock that cannot be set
asunder, Thou who didst bless Isaac and Rebecca and their descendants,
according to Thy Holy Covenant, bless Thou Thy servants, Konstantin
and Ekaterina, leading them in the path of all good works. For
gracious and merciful art Thou, our Lord, and glory be to Thee, the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, now and forever and aye."-
"Amen!" the unseen choir sent rolling again through the air.
  "'Joinest together in love them that were separate.' What deep
meaning in those words, and how they correspond with what one feels at
this moment," thought Levin. "Is she feeling the same as I?"
  And, looking round, he met her eyes. And from their expression he
concluded that she was understanding it just as he was. But this was a
mistake; she almost completely missed the meaning of the words of
the service; she had not heard them, in fact. She could not listen
to them and take them in, so strong was the one feeling that filled
her breast and grew stronger and stronger. That feeling was joy at the
completion of the process that for the last month and a half had
been going on in her soul, and had during those six weeks been a joy
and a torture to her. On the day when in the drawing room of the house
in the Arbat street she had gone up to him in her brown dress, and had
given herself to him without a word- on that day, at that hour,
there took place in her heart a complete severance from all her old
life, and a quite different, new, utterly strange life had begun for
her, while the old life was actually going on as before. Those six
weeks had for her been a time of the utmost bliss and the utmost
misery. All her life, all her desires and hopes were concentrated on
this one man, still uncomprehended by her, to whom she was bound by
a feeling of alternate attraction and repulsion, even less
comprehended than the man himself, and all the while she was going
on living in the outward conditions of her old life. Living the old
life, she was horrified at herself, at her utter insurmountable
callousness to all her own past, to things, to habits, to the people
she had loved, who loved her- to her mother, who was wounded by her
indifference, to her kind, tender father, till then dearer than all
the world. At one moment she was horrified at this indifference, at
another she rejoiced at what had brought her to this indifference. She
could not frame a thought, nor a wish, apart from life with this
man; but this new life was not yet, and she could not even picture
it clearly to herself. There was only anticipation, the dread and
joy of the new and the unknown. And now behold anticipation and
uncertainty and remorse at the abandonment of the old life- all this
was ending, and the new was beginning. This new life could not but
have terrors for her by its obscurity; but, terrible or not, the
change had been wrought six weeks before in her soul, and this was
merely the final sanction of what had long been completed in her
heart.
  Turning again to the lectern, the priest with some difficulty took
Kitty's little ring, and, asking Levin for his hand, put it on the
first joint of his finger. "The servant of God, Konstantin, plights
his troth to the servant of God, Ekaterina." And putting his big
ring on Kitty's touchingly weak, pink tiny finger, the priest said the
same thing.
  And the bridal pair tried several times to understand what they
had to do, and each time made some mistake and were corrected by the
priest in a whisper. At last, having duly performed the ceremony,
having made with the rings the sign of the cross over them, the priest
handed Kitty the big ring, and Levin the little one. Again they were
puzzled, and passed the rings from hand to hand, still without doing
what was expected.
  Dolly, Chirikov, and Stepan Arkadyevich stepped forward to set
them right. There was an interval of hesitation, whispering, and
smiles; but the expression of solemn emotion on the faces of the
betrothed pair did not change: on the contrary, in their perplexity
over their hands they looked more grave and deeply moved than
before, and the smile with which Stepan Arkadyevich whispered to
them that now they would each put on their own ring died away on his
lips. He had a feeling that any smile would jar on them.
  "Thou who didst from the beginning create male and female," the
priest read after the exchange of rings, "from Thee woman was given to
man to be a helpmeet to him, and for the procreation of children. O
Lord, our God, who hast poured down the blessings of Thy Truth
according to Thy Holy Covenant upon Thy chosen servants, our
fathers, from generation to generation, bless Thy servants
Konstantin and Ekaterina, and make their troth fast in faith, and
union of hearts, and in truth, and in love...."
  Levin felt more and more that all his ideas of marriage, all his
dreams of how he would order his life, were mere childishness, and
that it was something he had not understood hitherto, and now
understood less than ever, though it was being performed upon him. The
lump in his throat rose higher and higher; tears that would not be
checked came into his eyes.
                             V.

  In the church there was all Moscow, all the friends and relations;
and during the ceremony of plighting troth, in the brilliantly lighted
church, there was an incessant flow of discreetly subdued talk in
the circle of gaily dressed women and girls, and men in white ties,
evening dress, and uniform. The talk was principally kept up by the
men, while the women were absorbed in watching every detail of the
ceremony, which always touches them so much.
  In the little group nearest the bride were her two sisters: Dolly,
and the younger one, the self-possessed beauty, Madame Lvova, who
had just arrived from abroad.
  "Why is it Marie's in lilac? It's as bad as black at a wedding,"
said Madame Korsunskaia.
  "With her complexion, it's her one salvation," responded Madame
Drubetskaia. "I wonder why they had the wedding in the evening? It's
like shop people...."
  "So much prettier. I was married in the evening too...." answered
Madame Korsunskaia, and she sighed, remembering how charming she had
been that day, and how absurdly in love her husband was, and how
different it all was now.
  "They say if anyone is best man more than ten times, he'll never
be married. I wanted to be one for the tenth time, but the post was
taken," said Count Siniavin to the pretty Princess Charskaia, who
had designs on him.
  Princess Charskaia only answered with a smile. She looked at
Kitty, thinking how and when she would stand with Count Siniavin in
Kitty's place, and how she would remind him then of his joke today.
  Shcherbatsky told the old Hoffraulein, Madame Nikoleva, that he
meant to put the crown on Kitty's chignon for luck.
  "She ought not to have worn a chignon," answered Madame Nikoleva,
who had long ago made up her mind that if the elderly widower she
was angling for married her, the wedding should be of the simplest. "I
don't like such faste."
  Sergei Ivanovich was talking to Darya Dmitrievna, jestingly assuring
her that the custom of going away after the wedding was becoming
common because newly married people always felt a little ashamed of
themselves.
  "Your brother may feel proud of himself. She's a marvel of
sweetness. I believe you're envious."
  "Oh, I've got over that, Darya Dmitrievna," he answered, and a
melancholy and serious expression suddenly came over his face.
  Stepan Arkadyevich was telling his sister-in-law his joke about
divorce.
  "The wreath wants setting straight," she answered, without listening
to him.
  "What a pity she's lost her looks so," Countess Nordstone said to
Madame Lvova. "Still, he's not worth her little finger, is he?"
  "Oh, I like him so- not because he's my future beau-frere," answered
Madame Lvova. "And how well he's behaving! It's so difficult, too,
to look well in such a position, not to be ridiculous. And he's not
ridiculous, and not affected; one can see he's moved."
  "You expected it, I suppose?"
  "Almost. She always cared for him."
  "Well, we shall see which of them will step on the rug first. I
warned Kitty."
  "It will make no difference," said Madame Lvova, "we're all obedient
wives; it's in our family."
  "Oh, I stepped on the rug before Vassilii on purpose. And you,
Dolly?"
  Dolly stood beside them; she heard them, but she did not answer. She
was deeply moved. The tears stood in her eyes, and she could not
have spoken without crying. She was rejoicing over Kitty and Levin;
going back in thought to her own wedding, she glanced at the radiant
figure of Stepan Arkadyevich, forgot all the present, and remembered
only her own innocent love. She recalled not herself only, but all her
women friends and acquaintances. She thought of them on the one day of
their triumph, when they had stood like Kitty under the wedding crown,
with love and hope and dread in their hearts, renouncing the past, and
stepping forward into the mysterious future. Among the brides that
came back to her memory, she thought too of her darling Anna, of whose
proposed divorce she had just been hearing. And she had stood just
as innocent, in orange blossoms and bridal veil. And now? "It's
terribly strange," she said to herself.
  It was not merely the sisters, the women friends, and the female
relations of the bride, who were following every detail of the
ceremony. Women who were quite strangers, mere spectators, were
watching it excitedly, holding their breath, in fear of losing a
single movement or expression of the bride and bridegroom, and angrily
not answering, often not hearing, the remarks of the callous men,
who kept making joking or irrelevant observations.
  "Why has she been crying? Is she being married against her will?"
  "Against her will- to a fine fellow like that? A Prince, isn't he?"
  "Is that her sister in the white satin? Just listen how the deacon
booms out, 'and obey!'"
  "Are the choristers from the church of the Miracle?"
  "No- from the Synodal school."
  "I'm told- he's going to take her home to his country place at once.
I asked the footman. Awfully rich, they say. That's why she's being
married to him."
  "No- they're a well-matched pair."
  "I say, Marya Vassilyevna, you claimed those flyaway crinolines were
not being worn. Just look at her in the puce dress- an ambassador's
wife, they say she is- see, how her skirt bounces!... So and so!"
  "What a pretty dear the bride is- like a lamb decked with flowers!
Well, say what you will, we women feel for our sister."
  Such were the comments in the crowd of gazing women who had
succeeded in slipping in at the church doors.
                             VI.

  When the ceremony of plighting troth was over, the sacristan
spread before the lectern in the middle of the church a piece of
pink silken stuff, the choir sang a complicated and elaborate psalm,
in which the bass and tenor sang responses to one another, and the
priest, turning round, pointed the bridal pair to the pink silk rug.
Though both had often heard a great deal about the saying that the one
who steps first on the rug will be the head of the house, neither
Levin nor Kitty were capable of recollecting it, as they took the
few steps toward it. They did not hear the loud remarks and disputes
that followed, some maintaining he had stepped on it first, and others
that both had stepped on it together.
  After the customary questions, whether they desired to enter upon
matrimony, and whether they were pledged to anyone else, and their
answers, which sounded strange to themselves, a new ceremony began.
Kitty listened to the words of the prayer, trying to make out their
meaning, but she could not. The feeling of triumph and radiant
happiness flooded her soul more and more as the ceremony went on,
and deprived her of all power of attention.
  They prayed: "Endow them with continence and fruitfulness, and
vouchsafe that their hearts may rejoice looking upon their sons and
daughters." They alluded to God's creation of a wife from Adam's
rib, "and for this cause a man shall leave father and mother, and
cleave unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh," and that "this
is a great mystery;" they prayed that God would make them fruitful and
bless them, like Isaac and Rebecca, Joseph, Moses and Zipporah, and
that they might look upon their children's children. "That's all
splendid," thought Kitty, catching the words, "all that's just as it
should be," and a smile of happiness, unconsciously reflected in
everyone who looked at her, beamed on her radiant face.
  "Put it on completely!" voices were heard urging when, after the
priest had put on their wedding crowns, and Shcherbatsky, his hand
shaking in its three-button glove, was holding the crown high above
her head.
  "Put it on!" she whispered smiling.
  Levin looked round at her, and was struck by the joyful radiance
on her face, and unconsciously her feeling infected him. He too,
like her, felt joyous and happy.
  They enjoyed hearing the Epistle read, and the roll of the
protodeacon's voice at the last verse, awaited with such impatience by
the outside public. They enjoyed drinking out of the shallow cup of
warm red wine and water, and they were still more pleased when the
priest, flinging back his stole and taking both their hands in his,
led them round the lectern to the accompaniment of bass voices
chanting: "Isaiah rejoice!" Shcherbatsky and Chirikov, supporting
the crowns and stumbling over the bride's train, smiling too and
seeming delighted at something, were at one moment left behind, at the
next treading on the bridal pair as the priest came to a halt. The
spark of joy kindled in Kitty seemed to have infected everyone in
the church. It seemed to Levin that the priest and the deacon too
wanted to smile, just as he did.
  Taking the crowns off their heads the priest read the last prayer
and congratulated the young couple. Levin looked at Kitty, and he
had never before seen her look as she did. She was charming with the
new radiance of happiness in her face. Levin longed to say something
to her, but he did not know whether it was all over. The priest got
him out of his difficulty. He smiled his kindly smile and said gently,
"Kiss your wife- and you kiss your husband," and took the candles
out of their hands.
  Levin kissed her smiling lips with timid care, gave her his arm,
and, with a new strange sense of closeness, walked out of the
church. He did not believe, he could not believe, that it was true. It
was only when their wondering and timid eyes met that he believed in
it, because he felt that they were one.
  After supper, the same night, the young people left for the country.
                             VII.

  Vronsky and Anna had been traveling for three months together in
Europe. They had visited Venice, Rome and Naples, and had just arrived
at a small Italian town where they meant to stay some time.
  A handsome headwaiter, with thick pomaded hair parted from the
neck upward, wearing an evening coat, a broad white cambric shirt
front, and a bunch of watch charms dangling above his small bay
window, stood with his hands in his pockets, looking contemptuously
from under his eyelids, while he gave some frigid reply to a gentleman
who had stopped still. Catching the sound of footsteps coming from the
other side of the entry toward the staircase, the headwaiter turned
round, and, seeing the Russian Count, who had taken their best
rooms, he took his hands out of his pockets deferentially, and with
a bow informed him that a courier had come, and that the business
about the palazzo had been arranged. The steward was prepared to
sign the agreement.
  "Ah! I'm glad to hear it," said Vronsky. "Is Madame at home or not?"
  "Madame has been out for a walk but has returned now," answered
the waiter.
  Vronsky took off his soft, wide-brimmed hat and passed his
handkerchief over his heated brow and hair, which had grown half
over his ears, and was brushed back covering the bald patch on his
head. And, glancing casually at the gentleman, who still stood there
gazing intently at him, he would have gone on.
  "This gentleman is a Russian, and was inquiring after you," said the
headwaiter.
  With mingled feelings of annoyance at never being able to get away
from acquaintances anywhere, and longing to find some sort of
diversion from the monotony of his life, Vronsky looked once more at
the gentleman, who had retreated and stood still again, and at the
same moment a light came into the eyes of both.
  "Golenishchev!"
  "Vronsky!"
  It really was Golenishchev, a comrade of Vronsky's in the Corps of
Pages. In the Corps Golenishchev had belonged to the liberal party; he
left the Corps without entering the army, and had never taken office
under the government. Vronsky and he had gone completely different
ways on leaving the Corps, and had only met once since.
  At that meeting Vronsky perceived that Golenishchev had taken up a
sort of lofty intellectually liberal line, and was consequently
disposed to look down upon Vronsky's interests and calling in life.
Hence Vronsky had met him with the chilling and haughty manner he so
well knew how to assume, the meaning of which was: "You may like or
dislike my ways of life, that's a matter of the most perfect
indifference to me; you will have to treat me with respect if you want
to know me." Golenishchev had been contemptuously indifferent to the
tone taken by Vronsky. That meeting might have been expected to
estrange them still more. But now they beamed and exclaimed with
delight on recognizing one another. Vronsky would never have
expected to be so pleased to see Golenishchev, but probably he was not
himself aware how bored he was. He forgot the disagreeable
impression of their last meeting, and with a face of frank delight
held out his hand to his old comrade. The same expression of delight
replaced the look of uneasiness on Golenishchev's face.
  "How glad I am to meet you!" said Vronsky, showing his strong
white teeth in a friendly smile.
  "I heard the name Vronsky, but I didn't know which one. I'm very,
very glad!"
  "Let's go in. Come, tell me what you're doing."
  "I've been living here for two years. I'm working."
  "Ah!" said Vronsky, with sympathy. "Let's go in."
  And with the habit common among Russians, instead of saying in
Russian what he wanted to keep from the servants, he began to speak in
French.
  "Do you know Madame Karenina? We are traveling together. I am
going to see her now," he said in French, carefully scrutinizing
Golenishchev's face.
  "Ah, I did not know" (though he did know), Golenishchev answered
carelessly. "Have you been here long?" he added.
  "Three days," Vronsky answered, once more scrutinizing his
friend's face intently.
  "Yes, he's a decent fellow, and will look at the thing properly,"
Vronsky said to himself, catching the significance of Golenishchev's
face and the change of subject. "I can introduce him to Anna- he looks
at it properly."
  During the three months that Vronsky had spent abroad with Anna,
he had always on meeting new people asked himself how the new person
would look at his relations with Anna, and for the most part, in
men, he had met with the "proper" way of looking at it. But if he
had been asked, and those who looked at it "properly" had been asked
exactly how they did look at it, both he and they would have been
greatly puzzled to answer.
  In reality, those who in Vronsky's opinion had the "proper" view had
no sort of view at all, but behaved in general as well-bred persons do
behave in regard to all the complex and insoluble problems with
which life is encompassed on all sides; they behaved with propriety,
avoiding allusions and unpleasant questions. They assumed an air of
fully comprehending the import and force of the situation, of
accepting and even approving of it, but of considering it
superfluous and uncalled-for to put all this into words.
  Vronsky at once divined that Golenishchev was of this class, and
therefore was doubly pleased to see him. And, in fact,
Golenishchev's manner to Madame Karenina, when he was taken to call on
her, was all that Vronsky could have desired. Obviously without the
slightest effort he steered clear of all subjects which might lead
to embarrassment.
  He had never met Anna before, and was struck by her beauty, and,
still more, by the naturalness with which she accepted her position.
She blushed when Vronsky brought in Golenishchev, and he was extremely
charmed by this childish blush overspreading her candid and handsome
face. But what he liked particularly was the way in which at once,
as though on purpose, so that there might be no misunderstanding
with an outsider, she called Vronsky simply Alexei, and said they were
moving into a house they had just taken- what was here called a
palazzo. Golenishchev liked this direct and simple attitude to her own
position. Looking at Anna's manner of simplehearted, spirited
gaiety, and knowing Alexei Alexandrovich and Vronsky, Golenishchev
fancied that he understood her perfectly. He fancied that he
understood what she was utterly unable to understand: how it was that,
having made her husband wretched, having abandoned him and her son and
lost her good name, she yet felt full of spirits, gaiety, and
happiness.
  "It's in the guidebook," said Golenishchev, referring to the palazzo
Vronsky had taken. "There's a first-rate Tintoretto there. One of
his latest period."
  "I tell you what: it's a lovely day, let's go and have another
look at it," said Vronsky, addressing Anna.
  "I shall be very glad to; I'll go and put on my hat. Would you say
it's hot?" she said, stopping short in the doorway and looking
inquiringly at Vronsky. And again a vivid flush overspread her face.
  Vronsky saw from her eyes that she did not know on what terms he
cared to be with Golenishchev, and so was afraid of not behaving as he
would wish.
  He bestowed a long, tender look at her.
  "No, not very," he said.
  And it seemed to her that she understood everything- most of all,
that he was pleased with her; and, smiling to him, she walked with her
rapid step out of the door.
  The friends glanced at one another, and a look of hesitation came
into both faces, as though Golenishchev, unmistakably admiring her,
would have liked to say something about her, and could not find the
right thing to say, while Vronsky desired and dreaded his doing so.
  "Well then," Vronsky began, to start a conversation of some sort,
"so you're settled here? You're still at the same work, then?" he went
on, recalling that he had been told Golenishchev was writing
something.
  "Yes, I'm writing the second part of the Two Elements," said
Golenishchev, coloring with pleasure at the question- "that is, to
be exact, I am not writing it yet; I am preparing, collecting
materials. It will be of far wider scope, and will touch on almost all
questions. We in Russia refuse to see that we are the heirs of
Byzantium," and he launched into a long and heated explanation of
his views.
  Vronsky at the first moment felt embarrassed at not even knowing
of the first part of the Two Elements, of which the author spoke as
something well known. But as Golenishchev began to lay down his
opinions and Vronsky was able to follow them even without knowing
the Two Elements, he listened to him with some interest, for
Golenishchev spoke well. But Vronsky was startled and annoyed by the
nervous irascibility with which Golenishchev talked of the subject
that engrossed him. As he went on talking, his eyes glittered more and
more angrily; he was more and more hurried in his replies to imaginary
opponents, and his face grew more and more excited and worried.
Remembering Golenishchev, a thin, lively, good-natured and well-bred
boy, always at the head of the class, Vronsky could not make out the
reason for his irritability, and he did not like it. What he
particularly disliked was that Golenishchev, a man belonging to a good
set, should put himself on a level with some scribbling fellows with
whom he was irritated and angry. Was it worth it? Vronsky disliked it,
yet he felt that Golenishchev was unhappy, and was sorry for him.
Unhappiness, almost mental derangement, was visible on his mobile,
rather handsome face, as, without even noticing Anna's coming in, he
went on hurriedly and hotly expressing his views.
  When Anna came in in her hat and cape, her lovely hand rapidly
swinging her parasol, and stood beside him, it was with a feeling of
relief that Vronsky broke away from the plaintive eyes of Golenishchev
which fastened persistently upon him, and with a fresh rush of love
looked at his charming companion, full of life and happiness.
Golenishchev recovered himself with an effort, and at first was
dejected and gloomy, but Anna, disposed as she was at that time to
feel friendly with everyone, soon revived his spirits by her direct
and lively manner. After trying various subjects of conversation,
she got him upon painting, of which he talked very well, and she
listened to him attentively. They walked to the house they had taken
and looked over it.
  "I am very glad of one thing," said Anna to Golenishchev when they
were on their way back, "Alexei will have a capital atelier. You
must certainly take that room," she said to Vronsky in Russian,
using the affectionately familiar form, as though she saw that
Golenishchev would become intimate with them in their isolation, and
that there was no need of reserve before him.
  "Do you paint?" said Golenishchev turning round quickly to Vronsky.
  "Yes, I used to study long ago, and now I have begun to do a
little," said Vronsky, reddening.
  "He has great talent," said Anna with a delighted smile. "I'm no
judge, of course. But good judges have said the same."
                             VIII.

  Anna, in that first period of her emancipation and rapid return to
health, felt herself unpardonably happy and full of the joy of life.
The thought of her husband's unhappiness did not poison her happiness.
On one side that memory was too awful to be thought of. On the other
side her husband's unhappiness had given her too much happiness to
be regretted. The memory of all that had happened after her illness:
her reconciliation with her husband, the rupture, the news of
Vronsky's wound, his visit, the preparations for divorce, the
departure from her husband's house, the parting from her son- all that
seemed to her like a delirious dream, from which she had waked up
abroad, alone with Vronsky. The thought of the harm caused to her
husband aroused in her a feeling like repulsion, and akin to what a
drowning man might feel who has shaken off another man clinging to
him. That man did drown. It was an evil action, of course, but it
was the sole means of escape, and better not to brood over these
fearful facts.
  One consolatory reflection upon her conduct had occurred to her at
the first moment of the final rupture, and when now she recalled all
the past, she remembered that one reflection. "I have inevitably
made that man wretched," she thought; "but I don't want to profit by
his misery. I, too, am suffering, and shall suffer; I am losing what I
prized above everything- I am losing my good name and my son. I have
done wrong, and so I don't want happiness, I don't want a divorce, and
shall suffer from my shame and the separation from my child." But,
however sincerely Anna had meant to suffer, she was not suffering.
Shame there was none. With the tact of which both had such a large
share, they had succeeded in avoiding Russian ladies abroad, and so
had never placed themselves in a false position, and everywhere they
had met people who pretended that they perfectly understood their
position, far better indeed than they did themselves. Separation
from the son she loved- even that did not cause her anguish in these
early days. The baby girl- his child- was so sweet, and had so won
Anna's heart, since she was all that was left her, that Anna rarely
thought of her son.
  The desire for life, waxing stronger with recovered health, was so
intense, and the conditions of life were so new and pleasant, that
Anna felt unpardonably happy. The more she got to know Vronsky, the
more she loved him. She loved him for himself, and for his love for
her. Her complete ownership of him was a continual joy to her. His
presence was always sweet to her. All the traits of his character,
which she learned to know better and better, were unutterably dear
to her. His appearance, changed by his civilian dress, was as
fascinating to her as though she were some young girl in love. In
everything he said, thought, and did, she saw something particularly
noble and elevated. Her adoration of him alarmed her indeed; she
sought and could not find in him anything not fine. She dared not show
him her sense of her own insignificance beside him. It seemed to her
that, knowing this, he might sooner cease to love her; and she dreaded
nothing now so much as losing his love, though she had no grounds
for fearing it. But she could not help being grateful to him for his
attitude to her, and showing that she appreciated it. He, who had in
her opinion such a marked aptitude for a political career, in which he
would have been certain to play a leading part- he had sacrificed
his ambition for her sake, and never betrayed the slightest regret. He
was more lovingly respectful to her than ever, and the constant care
that she should not feel the awkwardness of her position never
deserted him for a single instant. He, so manly a man, never opposed
her, had indeed, with her, no will of his own, and was anxious, it
seemed, for nothing but to anticipate her wishes. And she could not
but appreciate this, even though the very intensity of his
solicitude for her, the atmosphere of care with which he surrounded
her, sometimes weighed upon her.
  Vronsky, meanwhile, in spite of the complete realization of what
he had so long desired, was not perfectly happy. He soon felt that the
realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand out
of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the
mistake men make in picturing to themselves happiness as the
realization of their desires. For a time after joining his life to
hers, and putting on civilian dress, he had felt all the delight of
freedom in general, of which he had known nothing before, and of
freedom in his love- and he was content, but not for long. He was soon
aware that there was springing up in his heart a desire for desires-
longing. Without conscious intention he began to clutch at every
passing caprice, taking it for a desire and an object. Sixteen hours
of the day must be occupied in some way, since they were living abroad
in complete freedom, outside the conditions of social life which
filled up time in Peterburg. As for the amusements of bachelor
existence, which had provided Vronsky with entertainment on previous
tours abroad, they could not be thought of, since the sole attempt
of the sort had led to a sudden attack of depression in Anna, quite
out of proportion with the cause- a late supper with bachelor friends.
Relations with the society of the place- foreign and Russian- were
equally out of the question, owing to the irregularity of their
position. The inspection of objects of interest, apart from the fact
that everything had been seen already, had not for Vronsky, a
Russian and a sensible man, the inexplicable significance Englishmen
are able to attach to that pursuit.
  And, just as the hungry animal eagerly clutches every object it
can get, hoping to find nourishment in it, Vronsky quite unconsciously
clutched first at politics, then at new books, and then at pictures.
  As he had, ever since he was a child, a taste for painting, and
as, not knowing what to spend his money on, he had begun collecting
engravings, he came to a stop at painting, began to take interest in
it, and concentrated upon it the unoccupied fund of desires which
demanded satisfaction.
  As he had a capacity for understanding art, and for true and
tasteful imitation in the art of painting, he supposed himself to have
the real thing essential for an artist, and after hesitating for
some time which style of painting to select- religious, historical,
realistic, or genre painting- he set to work to paint. He
appreciated all kinds, and could have felt inspired by any one of
them; but he had no conception of the possibility of knowing nothing
at all of any school of painting, and of being inspired directly by
what is within the soul, without caring whether what is painted will
belong to any recognized school. Since he knew nothing of this, and
drew his inspiration, not directly from life, but indirectly from life
embodied in art, his inspiration came very quickly and easily, and
as quickly and easily came his success in painting something very
similar to the sort of painting he was trying to imitate.
  More than any other style he liked the French- graceful and
effective- and in that style he began to paint Anna's portrait in
Italian costume, and the portrait seemed to him, and to everyone who
saw it, extremely successful.
                             IX.

  The old neglected palazzo, with its lofty plastic plafonds and
frescoes on the walls, with its floors of mosaic, with its heavy
yellow stuff curtains on the windows, with its vases on pedestals, and
its open fireplaces, its carved doors and gloomy reception rooms
hung with pictures- this palazzo did much, by its very appearance
after they had moved into it, to confirm in Vronsky the agreeable
illusion that he was not so much a Russian country gentleman, a
retired officer of the life guards, as an enlightened amateur and
patron of the arts, himself a modest artist who had renounced the
world, his connections, and his ambition for the sake of the woman
he loved.
  The pose chosen by Vronsky with their removal into the palazzo was
completely successful, and having, through Golenishchev, made the
acquaintance of a few interesting people, for a time he was satisfied.
He painted studies from nature under the guidance of an Italian
professor of painting, and studied medieval Italian life. Medieval
Italian life so fascinated Vronsky that even his hat, and a plaid
flung over his shoulder, were worn in the medieval style, which,
indeed, was extremely becoming to him.
  "Here we live, and know nothing of what's going on," Vronsky said to
Golenishchev, when the latter came to see him one morning. "Have you
seen Mikhailov's picture?" he said, handing him a Russian gazette he
had received that morning, and pointing to an article on a Russian
artist, living in the very same town, and just finishing a picture
which had long been talked about, and had been bought beforehand.
The article reproached the government and the academy for letting so
remarkable an artist be left without encouragement and support.
  "I've seen it," answered Golenishchev. "Of course, he's not
without talent, but it's all in a wrong direction. It's all the
Ivanov-Strauss-Renan attitude to Christ and to religious painting."
  "What is the subject of the picture?" asked Anna.
  "Christ before Pilate. Christ is represented as a Jew with all the
realism of the new school."
  And the question of the subject of the picture having brought him to
one of his favorite theories, Golenishchev launched forth into a
disquisition on it.
  "I can't understand how they can fall into such a gross mistake.
Christ always has His definite embodiment in the art of the great
masters. And therefore, if they want to depict, not God, but a
revolutionist or a sage, let them take from history a Socrates, a
Franklin, a Charlotte Corday, but not Christ. They take the very
figure which cannot be taken for their art, and then..."
  "And is it true that this Mikhailov is in such poverty?" asked
Vronsky, thinking that, as a Russian Maecenas, it was his duty to
assist the artist regardless of whether the picture were good or bad.
  "Hardly. He's a remarkable portrait painter. Have you ever seen
his portrait of Madame Vassilkova? But I believe he doesn't care about
painting any more portraits, and so, likely as not, he may be in want.
I maintain that..."
  "Couldn't we ask him to paint a portrait of Anna Arkadyevna?" said
Vronsky.
  "Why mine?" said Anna. "After yours I don't want another portrait.
Better have one of Annie" (so she called her baby girl). "Here she
is," she added, looking out of the window at the handsome Italian
nurse, who was carrying the child out into the garden, and immediately
glancing, unperceived, at Vronsky. The handsome nurse, from whom
Vronsky was painting a head for his picture, was the one hidden
grief in Anna's life. He painted with her as his model, admired her
beauty and medievalism, and Anna dared not confess to herself that she
was afraid of becoming jealous of this nurse, and was for that
reason particularly gracious and condescending both to her and her
little son.
  Vronsky, too, glanced out of the window and into Anna's eyes, and,
turning at once to Golenishchev, he said:
  "Do you know this Mikhailov?"
  "I have met him. But he's a queer fish, and quite without
breeding. You know, one of those savage new people one is forever
coming across nowadays; one of those freethinkers, you know, who are
reared d'emblee in theories of atheism, negation, and materialism.
In former days," said Golenishchev, not observing, or not willing to
observe, that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, "in former days
the freethinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of
religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle
came to free thought; but now there has sprung up a new type of native
freethinker who grows up without even having heard of principles of
morality or of religion, of the existence of authorities, who grows up
directly in ideas of negation in everything, that is to say, a savage.
Well, he's of that class. He's the son, it appears, of some Moscow
butler, and has never had any sort of bringing-up. When he got into
the academy and made his reputation he tried, as he's no fool, to
educate himself. And he turned to what seemed to him the very source
of culture- the magazines. In old times, you see, a man who wanted
to educate himself- a Frenchman, for instance- would have set to
work to study all the classics: theologians and tragedians and
historians and philosophers, and, you see, all the intellectual work
that came in his way. But in our day he goes straight for the
literature of negation, very quickly assimilates all the extracts of
the science of negation, and he's all set. And that's not all-
twenty years ago he would have found in that literature traces of
conflict with authorities, with the creeds of the ages; he would
have perceived from this conflict that there was something else; but
now he comes at once upon a literature in which the old creeds do
not even furnish matter for discussion, but it is stated baldly that
there is nothing else; just evolution, natural selection, the struggle
for existence- and that's all. In my article I've..."
  "I tell you what," said Anna, who had for a long while been
exchanging wary glances with Vronsky, and knew that he was not in
the least interested in the education of this artist, but was simply
absorbed by the idea of assisting him, and ordering a portrait of him;
"I tell you what," she said, resolutely interrupting Golenishchev, who
was still talking away, "let's go and see him!"
  Golenishchev recovered his self-possession and readily agreed.
But, as the artist lived in a remote ward of the town, it was
decided to take a carriage.
  An hour later Anna, with Golenishchev by her side and Vronsky on the
front seat of the carriage, facing them, drove up to an ugly new house
in a remote ward. On learning from the porter's wife, who came out
to them, that Mikhailov saw visitors at his studio, but that at that
moment he was in his lodging only a couple of steps off, they sent her
to him with their cards, asking permission to see his pictures.
                             X.

  The artist Mikhailov was, as always, at work when the cards of Count
Vronsky and Golenishchev were brought to him. In the morning he had
been working in his studio at his big picture. On getting home he flew
into a rage with his wife for not having managed to put off the
landlady, who had been asking for money.
  "I've said it to you twenty times, don't enter into details.
You're fool enough at all times, and when you start explaining
things in Italian you're a triple fool," he said after a long dispute.
  "Don't let it run so long; it's not my fault. If I had the money..."
  "Leave me in peace, for God's sake!" Mikhailov shrieked, with
tears in his voice, and, stopping his ears, he went off into his
working room, on the other side of a partition wall, and closed the
door after him. "There's no sense in her!" he said to himself, sat
down to the table, and, opening a portfolio, he set to work at once
with peculiar fervor at a sketch he had begun.
  Never did he work with such fervor and success as when things went
ill with him, and especially when he quarreled with his wife. "Oh!
damn them all!" he thought as he went on working. He was making a
sketch for the figure of a man in a violent rage. A sketch had been
made before, but he was dissatisfied with it. "No, that one was
better.... Where is it?" He went back to his wife, and, scowling and
not looking at her, asked his eldest little girl: Where was that piece
of paper he had given them? The paper with the discarded sketch on
it was found, but it was dirty, and spotted with candle grease. Still,
he took the sketch, laid it on his table, and, moving a little away,
screwing up his eyes, he fell to gazing at it. All at once he smiled
and gesticulated gleefully.
  "That's it! That's it!" he said, and, at once picking up the pencil,
he began drawing rapidly. The spot of tallow had given the man a new
pose.
  He had sketched this new pose, when all at once he recalled the face
of a shopkeeper of whom he had bought cigars, a vigorous face with a
prominent chin, and he sketched this very face, this chin, on to the
figure of the man. He laughed aloud with delight. The figure from a
lifeless imagined thing had become living, and such that it could
never be changed. That figure lived, and was clearly and
unmistakably defined. The sketch might be corrected in accordance with
the requirements of the figure; the legs, indeed, could and must be
put differently, and the position of the left hand must be quite
altered; the hair, too, might be thrown back. But in making these
corrections he was not altering the figure but simply getting rid of
what concealed the figure. He was, as it were, stripping off the veils
which hindered it from being distinctly seen; each new feature only
brought out the whole figure in all its force and vigor, as it had
suddenly come to him from the spot of tallow. He was carefully
finishing the figure when the cards were brought him.
  "Coming, coming!"
  He went in to his wife.
  "Come, Sasha, don't be cross!" he said, smiling timidly and
affectionately at her. "You were to blame. I was to blame. I'll make
it all right." And, having made peace with his wife, he put on an
olive-green overcoat with a velvet collar and a hat, and went toward
his studio. The successful figure he had already forgotten. Now he was
delighted and excited at the visit of these people of consequence,
Russians, who had come in their carriage.
  Of his picture, the one that stood now on his easel, he had at the
bottom of his heart one conviction- that no one had ever painted a
picture like it. He did not believe that this picture was better
than all the pictures of Raphael, but he knew that what he tried to
convey in that picture no one ever had conveyed. This he knew
positively, and had known a long while, ever since he had begun to
paint it. But other people's criticisms, whatever they might be, had
yet immense consequence in his eyes, and they agitated him to the
depths of his soul. Any remark, the most insignificant, which showed
that the critic saw even the tiniest part of what he himself saw in
the picture, agitated him to the depths of his soul. He always
attributed to his judges a more profound comprehension than he had
himself, and always expected from them something he did not himself
see in the picture. And often in their criticisms he fancied that he
found this.
  He walked rapidly to the door of his studio, and in spite of his
excitement he was struck by the soft light on Anna's figure as she
stood in the shade of the entrance listening to Golenishchev, who
was eagerly telling her something, while she evidently wanted to
look round at the artist. He was himself unconscious how, as he
approached them, he seized on this impression and absorbed it, as he
had the chin of the shopkeeper who had sold him the cigars, and put it
away somewhere to be brought out when he wanted it. The visitors,
not agreeably impressed beforehand by Golenishchev's account of the
artist, were still less so by his personal appearance. Thickset and of
middle height, with nimble movements, with his brown hat,
olive-green coat and narrow trousers- though wide trousers had been
a long while in fashion- most of all, with the ordinariness of his
broad face, and the combined expression of timidity and anxiety to
keep up his dignity, Mikhailov made an unpleasant impression.
  "Please step in," he said, trying to look indifferent, and going
into the passage he took a key out of his pocket and opened the door.
                             XI.

  On entering the studio, Mikhailov once more scanned his visitors and
noted down in his imagination Vronsky's expression too, and especially
his jaws. Although his artistic sense was unceasingly at work
collecting materials, although he felt a continually increasing
excitement as the moment of criticizing his work drew nearer, he
rapidly and subtly formed, from imperceptible signs, a mental image of
these three persons. That fellow (Golenishchev) was a Russian living
here. Mikhailov did not remember his surname nor where he had met him,
nor what he had said to him. He only remembered his face as he
remembered all the faces he had ever seen; but he remembered, too,
that it was one of the faces laid by in his memory in the immense
class of the falsely consequential and poor in expression. The
abundant hair and very open forehead gave an appearance of consequence
to the face, which had only one expression- a petty, childish, peevish
expression, concentrated just above the bridge of the narrow nose.
Vronsky and Madame Karenina must be, Mikhailov supposed, distinguished
and wealthy Russians, knowing nothing about art, like all those
wealthy Russians, but posing as amateurs and connoisseurs. "Most
likely they've already looked at all the antiques, and now they're
making the round of the studios of the new people- the German
humbug, and the cracked Pre-Raphaelite English fellow- and have only
come to me to make the point of view complete," he thought. He was
well acquainted with the way dilettanti have (the cleverer they were
the worse he found them) of looking at the works of contemporary
artists with the sole object of being in a position to say that art is
lost, and the more one sees of the new men the more one sees how
inimitable the works of the great old masters have remained. He
expected all this; he saw it all in their faces, he saw it in the
careless indifference with which they talked among themselves,
stared at the lay figures and busts, and walked about in leisurely
fashion, waiting for him to uncover his picture. But in spite of this,
while he was turning over his studies, pulling up the blinds and
taking off the sheet, he was in intense excitement, especially as,
in spite of his conviction that all distinguished and wealthy Russians
were certain to be beasts and fools, he liked Vronsky, and still
more Anna.
  "Here, if you please," he said, moving on one side with his nimble
gait and pointing to his picture, "it's the exhortation by Pilate.
Matthew, chapter 27," he said, feeling his lips were beginning to
tremble with emotion. He moved away and stood behind them.
  For the few seconds during which the visitors were gazing at the
picture in silence, Mikhailov too gazed at it with the indifferent eye
of an outsider. For those few seconds he was sure in anticipation that
a higher, juster criticism would be uttered by them, by those very
visitors whom he had been despising so a moment before. He forgot
all he had thought about his picture before, during the three years he
had been painting it; he forgot all its qualities, which had been
absolutely certain to him- he saw the picture with their
indifferent, new, outside eyes, and saw nothing good in it. He saw
in the foreground Pilate's irritated face and the serene face of
Christ, and in the background the figures of Pilate's retinue and
the face of John watching what was happening. Every face that, with
such exertion, such blunders and corrections had grown up within him
with its special character, every face that had given him such
torments and such raptures, and all these faces so many times
transposed for the sake of the harmony of the whole, all the shades of
color and tones that he had attained with such labor- all of this
together seemed to him now, looking at it with their eyes, the
merest vulgarity, something that had been done a thousand times
over. The face dearest to him, the face of Christ, the center of the
picture, which had given him such ecstasy as it unfolded itself to
him, was utterly lost to him when he glanced at the picture with their
eyes. He saw a well-painted (no, not even that- he distinctly saw
now a mass of defects) repetition of those endless Christs of
Titian, Raphael, Rubens, and the same soldiers and Pilate. It was
all common, poor, and stale, and badly painted- weak and motley.
They would be justified in repeating hypocritically courteous speeches
in the presence of the painter, and pitying him and laughing at him
when they were alone again.
  The silence (though it lasted no more than a minute) became too
intolerable to him. To break it, and to show he was not agitated, he
made an effort and addressed Golenishchev.
  "I think I've had the pleasure of meeting you," he said, looking
uneasily first at Anna, then at Vronsky, in fear of losing any shade
of their expression.
  "To be sure! We met at Rossi's; do you remember, at that soiree when
that Italian lady recited- the new Rachel?" Golenishchev answered
easily, removing his eyes without the slightest regret from the
picture and turning to the artist.
  Noticing, however, that Mikhailov was expecting a criticism of the
picture, he said:
  "Your picture has got on a great deal since I saw it last time;
and what strikes me particularly now, as it did then, is the figure of
Pilate. One so knows the man: a good-natured, capital fellow, but an
official through and through, who knows not what he doth. But I
fancy..."
  All of Mikhailov's mobile face beamed at once; his eyes sparkled. He
tried to say something, but he could not speak for excitement, and
pretended to be coughing. Low as was his opinion of Golenishchev's
capacity for understanding art, trifling as was the true remark upon
the fidelity of the expression of Pilate as an official, and offensive
as might have seemed the utterance of so unimportant an observation
while nothing was said of more serious points, Mikhailov was in an
ecstasy of delight at this observation. He had himself thought about
Pilate's figure just what Golenishchev had said. The fact that this
reflection was but one of millions of reflections, which, as Mikhailov
knew for certain, would be true, did not diminish for him the
significance of Golenishchev's remark. His heart warmed to
Golenishchev for this remark, and from a state of depression he
suddenly passed to ecstasy. At once the whole of his picture lived
before him in all the indescribable complexity of everything living.
Mikhailov again tried to say that that was how he understood Pilate,
but his lips quivered intractably, and he could not pronounce the
words. Vronsky and Anna too said something in that subdued voice which
(partly to avoid hurting the artist's feelings and partly to avoid
giving loud utterance to something silly- so easily done when
talking of art) people use at exhibitions of pictures. Mikhailov
fancied that the picture had made an impression on them too. He went
up to them.
  "How marvelous Christ's expression is!" said Anna. Of all she saw
she liked that expression most of all, and she felt that it was the
center of the picture, and so praise of it would be pleasant to the
artist. "One can see that He is pitying Pilate."
  This again was one of the million true reflections that could be
found in his picture and in the figure of Christ. She said that He was
pitying Pilate. In Christ's expression there ought to be indeed an
expression of pity, since there is an expression of love, of unearthly
peace, of preparedness for death, and a sense of the vanity of
words. Of course, there is the expression of an official in Pilate,
and of pity in Christ, considering that one is the incarnation of
the fleshly, and the other of the spiritual, life. All this and much
more flashed into Mikhailov's thoughts. And his face beamed with
delight again.
  "Yes, and how that figure is done- what atmosphere! One can walk
round it," said Golenishchev, unmistakably betraying by this remark
that he did not approve of the meaning and idea of the figure.
  "Yes, there's a wonderful mastery!" said Vronsky. "How those figures
in the background stand out! There you have technique," he said,
addressing Golenishchev, alluding to a conversation between them about
Vronsky's despair of attaining this technique.
  "Yes, yes, marvelous!" Golenishchev and Anna assented.
  In spite of the excited condition in which he was, the sentence
about technique had sent a pang to Mikhailov's heart, and looking
angrily at Vronsky he suddenly scowled. He had often heard this word
"technique," and was utterly unable to understand what was meant by
it. He knew that by this term was meant a mechanical dexterity for
painting or drawing, entirely apart from its subject. He had noticed
often that even in actual praise technique was opposed to essential
quality, as though one could paint well something that was bad. He
knew that a great deal of attention and care was necessary in taking
off the veils, to avoid injuring the creation itself, and to take
off all the veils; but there was no art of painting- no technique of
any sort- about it. If to a little child or to his cook were
revealed what he saw, either would have been able to peel the veils
off what was seen. And the most experienced and adroit painter could
not by mere mechanical faculty paint anything if the lines of the
subject were not revealed to him first. Besides, he saw that if it
came to talking about technique, it was impossible to praise him for
it. In all he had painted he saw faults that hurt his eyes, coming
from want of care in taking off the veils- faults he could not correct
now without spoiling the whole. And in almost all the figures and
faces he saw, too, remnants of the veils not perfectly removed that
spoiled the picture.
  "One thing might be said, if you will allow me to make the
remark..." observed Golenishchev.
  "Oh, I shall be delighted, I beg of you to do so," said Mikhailov
with a forced smile.
  "That is, you make Him the man-god, and not the God-man. But I
know that was what you meant to do."
  "I cannot paint a Christ that is not in my heart," said Mikhailov
morosely.
  "Yes; but in that case, if you will allow me to say what I
think... Your picture is so fine that my observation cannot detract
from it, and, besides, it is only my personal opinion. With you it
is different. Your very motive is different. But let us take Ivanov. I
imagine that if Christ is brought down to the level of an historical
character, it would have been better for Ivanov to select some other
historical subject, fresh, untouched."
  "But if this is the greatest subject presented to art?"
  "If one looked one would find others. But the point is that art
cannot suffer doubt and discussion. And before the picture of Ivanov
the question arises for the believer and the unbeliever alike, 'Is
it God, or is it not God?' and the unity of the impression is
destroyed."
  "Why so? I think that, for educated people," said Mikhailov, "the
question cannot exist."
  Golenishchev did not agree with this, and confounded Mikhailov by
his support of his first idea of the unity of the impression being
essential to art.
  Mikhailov was greatly perturbed, but he could say nothing in defense
of his own idea.
                             XII.

  Anna and Vronsky had long been exchanging glances, regretting
their friend's flow of cleverness. At last Vronsky, without waiting
for the artist, walked away to another small picture.
  "Oh, how exquisite! What a lovely thing! A gem! How exquisite!" they
cried with one voice.
  "What is it they're so pleased with?" thought Mikhailov. He had
positively forgotten that picture he had painted three years ago. He
had forgotten all the agonies and the ecstasies he had lived through
with that picture when, for several months, it had been the one
thought haunting him day and night. He had forgotten, as he always
forgot, the pictures he had finished. He did not even like to look
at it, and had only brought it out because he was expecting an
Englishman who wanted to buy it.
  "Oh, that's only an old study," he said.
  "How fine!" said Golenishchev, he too, with unmistakable
sincerity, falling under the spell of the picture.
  Two boys were angling in the shade of a willow tree. The elder had
just dropped in the hook, and was carefully pulling the float from
behind a bush, entirely absorbed in what he was doing. The other, a
little younger, was lying in the grass leaning on his elbows, with his
tangled, flaxen head in his hands, staring at the water with his
dreamy blue eyes. What was he thinking of?
  The enthusiasm over this picture stirred some of the old feeling for
it in Mikhailov, but he feared and disliked this waste of feeling
for things past, and so, even though this praise was grateful to
him, he tried to draw his visitors away to a third picture.
  But Vronsky asked whether the picture was for sale? To Mikhailov
at that moment, excited by visitors, it was extremely distasteful to
speak of money matters.
  "It is put up there to be sold," he answered, scowling gloomily.
  When the visitors had gone, Mikhailov sat down opposite the
picture of Pilate and Christ, and in his mind went over what had
been said, and what, though not said, had been implied by those
visitors. And, strange to say, what had had such weight with him,
while they were there and while he mentally put himself at their point
of view, suddenly lost all importance for him. He began to look at his
picture with all his own full, artist's vision, and was soon in that
mood of conviction of the perfectibility, and so of the
significance, of his picture- a conviction essential to the
intensest fervor, excluding all other interests- in which alone he
could work.
  Christ's foreshortened leg was not right, though. He took his
palette and began to work. As he corrected the leg he looked
continually at the figure of John in the background, which his
visitors had not even noticed, but which he knew was beyond
perfection. When he had finished the leg he wanted to touch that
figure, but he felt too much excited for that. He was equally unable
to work when he was cold and when he was too much affected and saw
everything too clearly. There was only one stage in the transition
from coldness to inspiration, at which work was possible. Today he was
too much agitated. He would have covered the picture, but he
stopped, holding the cloth in his hand, and, smiling blissfully, gazed
a long while at the figure of John. At last, tearing himself away with
evident regret, he dropped the cloth, and, exhausted but happy, went
home.
  Vronsky, Anna, and Golenishchev, on their way home, were
particularly lively and cheerful. They talked of Mikhailov and his
pictures. The word talent, by which they meant an inborn, almost
physical, aptitude apart from brain and heart, and in which they tried
to find an expression for all the artist had gained from life,
recurred particularly often in their talk, as though it were necessary
for them to sum up what they had no conception of, though they
wanted to talk of it. They said that there was no denying his
talent, but that his talent could not develop for want of education-
the common defect of our Russian artists. But the picture of the
boys had imprinted itself on their memories, and they were continually
coming back to it. "What an exquisite thing! How he has succeeded in
it, and how simply! He doesn't even comprehend how good it is. Yes,
I mustn't let it slip; I must buy it," said Vronsky.
                             XIII.

  Mikhailov sold Vronsky his picture, and agreed to paint a portrait
of Anna. On the day fixed he came and began the work.
  From the fifth sitting the portrait impressed everyone, especially
Vronsky, not only by its resemblance, but by its characteristic
beauty. It was strange how Mikhailov could have discovered precisely
the beauty characteristic of her. "One needs to know and love her as I
have loved her to discover the very sweetest expression of her
soul," Vronsky thought, though it was only from this portrait that
he had himself learned this sweetest expression of her soul. But the
expression was so true that he, and others too, fancied they had
long known it.
  "I have been struggling on for ever so long without doing anything,"
he said of his own portrait of her, "and he just looked and painted
it. That's where technique comes in."
  "That will come," was the consoling reassurance given him by
Golenishchev, in whose view Vronsky had both talent, and, what was
most important, education, giving him an exalted outlook on art.
Golenishchev's faith in Vronsky's talent was propped up by his own
need of Vronsky's sympathy and approval for his own essays and
ideas, and he felt that the praise and support must be mutual.
  In another man's house, and especially in Vronsky's palazzo,
Mikhailov was quite a different man from what he was in his studio. He
behaved with hostile deference, as though he were afraid of coming
closer to people he did not respect. He called Vronsky "Your
Excellency," and, notwithstanding Anna's and Vronsky's invitations, he
would never stay to dinner, nor come except for the sittings. Anna was
even more friendly to him than to other people, and was very
grateful for her portrait. Vronsky was more than courteous with him,
and was obviously interested to know the artist's opinion of his
picture. Golenishchev never let slip an opportunity of instilling
sound ideas about art into Mikhailov. But Mikhailov remained equally
chilly to all of these people. Anna was aware from his eyes that he
liked to look at her, but he avoided conversation with her.
Vronsky's talk about his painting he met with stubborn silence, and he
was as stubbornly silent when he was shown Vronsky's picture. He was
unmistakably bored by Golenishchev's conversation, and he did not
attempt to oppose him.
  Altogether Mikhailov, with his reserved and disagreeable, and,
apparently, hostile attitude, was quite disliked by them as they got
to know him better; and they were glad when the sittings were over,
and they were left with a magnificent portrait in their possession,
and he gave up coming.
  Golenishchev was the first to give expression to an idea that had
occurred to all of them- which was that Mikhailov was simply envious
of Vronsky.
  "Not envious, let us say, since he has talent; but it annoys him
that a wealthy man of the highest society, and a Count, too (you
know these fellows detest all that), can, without any particular
trouble, do as well, if not better, than he who has devoted all his
life to it. And, more than all, it's a question of education, which he
lacks."
  Vronsky defended Mikhailov, but at the bottom of his heart he
believed this, because in his view a man of a different, lower world
would be sure to be envious.
  Anna's portrait- the same subject painted from nature both by him
and by Mikhailov- ought to have shown Vronsky the difference between
him and Mikhailov; but he did not see it. Only after Mikhailov's
portrait was painted did he leave off painting his own portrait of
Anna, deciding that it was no longer needed. His picture of medieval
life he went on with. And he himself, and Golenishchev, and, still
more, Anna, thought it very good, because it was far more like the
celebrated pictures they knew than Mikhailov's picture.
  Mikhailov meanwhile, although Anna's portrait greatly fascinated
him, was even more glad than they were when the sittings were over,
and he had no longer to listen to Golenishchev's disquisitions upon
art, and could forget about Vronsky's painting. He knew that Vronsky
could not be prevented from amusing himself with painting; he knew
that he and all dilettanti had a perfect right to paint what they
liked, but it was distasteful to him. A man could not be prevented
from making himself a big wax doll, and kissing it. But if the man
were to come with the doll and sit before a man in love, and begin
caressing his doll as the lover caressed the woman he loved, it
would be distasteful to the lover. Just such a distasteful sensation
was what Mikhailov felt at the sight of Vronsky's painting: he felt it
both ludicrous and irritating, both pitiable and offensive.
  Vronsky's interest in painting and the Middle Ages did not last
long. He had enough taste for painting to be unable to finish his
picture. The picture came to a standstill. He was vaguely aware that
its defects, inconspicuous at first, would be glaring if he were to go
on with it. The same experience befell him as Golenishchev, who felt
that he had nothing to say, and continually deceived himself with
the theory that his idea was not yet mature, that he was working it
out and collecting material. This exasperated and tortured
Golenishchev, but Vronsky was incapable of deceiving and torturing
himself, and even more incapable of exasperation. With his
characteristic decision, without explanation or apology, he simply
ceased work at painting.
  But, without this occupation, the life of Vronsky and of Anna, who
wondered at his loss of interest in it, struck them as intolerably
tedious in an Italian town; the palazzo suddenly seemed so obtrusively
old and dirty, the spots on the curtains, the cracks in the floors,
the broken plaster on the cornices, became so disagreeably obvious,
and the everlasting sameness of Golenishchev, and the Italian
professor, and the German traveler, became so wearisome, that they had
to make some change. They resolved to go to Russia, to the country. In
Peterburg Vronsky intended to arrange a partition of the land with his
brother, while Anna meant to see her son. The summer they intended
to spend on Vronsky's great family estate.
                             XIV.

  Levin had been married two months. He was happy, but not at all in
the way he had expected to be. At every step he found disenchantment
in his former dreams, and new, unexpected enchantment. He was happy;
but on entering upon family life he saw at every step that it was
utterly different from what he had imagined. At every step he
experienced what a man would experience who, after admiring the
smooth, happy course of a little boat on a lake, should get himself
into that little boat. He saw that it was not all sitting still, and
floating smoothly; that one had to think too, not for an instant
forgetting where one was floating; and that there was water under one,
and that one must row; and that his unaccustomed hands would be
sore; and that it was only easy to look at; but that doing it,
though very delightful was very difficult.
  As a bachelor, when he had watched other people's married life,
had seen the petty cares, the squabbles, the jealousy, he had only
smiled contemptuously in his heart. In his future married life there
could be, he was convinced, nothing of that sort; even the external
forms, indeed, he fancied, must be utterly unlike the life of others
in everything. And all of a sudden, instead of his life with his
wife being made on an individual pattern, it was, on the contrary,
entirely made up of the pettiest details, which he had so despised
before, but which now, by no will of his own, had gained an
extraordinary and indisputable importance. And Levin saw that the
organization of all these details was by no means so easy as he had
fancied before. Although Levin believed himself to have the most exact
conceptions of domestic life, unconsciously, like all men, he pictured
domestic life only as enjoyment of love, with nothing to hinder and no
petty cares to distract. He ought, as he conceived the position, to do
his work, and to find repose from it in the happiness of love. She
ought to be beloved, and nothing more. But, like all men, he forgot
that she too would want work. And he was surprised that she, his
poetic, exquisite Kitty, could not merely in the first weeks, but even
in the first days of their married life, think, remember, and busy
herself about tablecloths, and furniture, about mattresses for
visitors, about a tray, about the cook, and the dinner, and so on.
While they were still engaged, he had been struck by the
definiteness with which she had declined the tour abroad and decided
to go into the country, as though she knew of something she wanted,
and could still think of something outside her love. This had jarred
upon him then, and now her trivial cares and anxieties jarred upon him
several times. But he saw that this was essential for her. And, loving
her as he did, though he did not understand the reason for them, and
jeered at these domestic pursuits, he could not help admiring them. He
jeered at the way in which she arranged the furniture they had brought
from Moscow; rearranged their rooms; hung up curtains; prepared
rooms for visitors, and for Dolly; saw after an abode for her new
maid; ordered dinner of the old cook; came into collision with Agathya
Mikhailovna, taking from her the charge of the stores. He saw how
the old cook smiled, admiring her, and listening to her inexperienced,
impossible orders; how mournfully and tenderly Agathya Mikhailovna
shook her head over the young mistress's new arrangements in the
pantry. He saw that Kitty was extraordinarily sweet when, laughing and
crying, she came to tell him that her maid, Masha, was used to looking
upon her as her young lady, and so no one obeyed her. It seemed to him
sweet, but strange, and he thought it would have been better without
this.
  He did not know how great a sense of change she was experiencing;
she, who at home had sometimes wanted some pickled cabbage, or sweets,
without the possibility of getting either, now could order what she
liked, buy pounds of sweets, spend as much money as she liked, and
order any cakes she pleased.
  She was dreaming with delight now of Dolly's coming to them with her
children, especially because she would order for the children their
favorite cakes, and Dolly would appreciate all her new housekeeping.
She did not know herself why and wherefore, but the arranging of her
house had an irresistible attraction for her. Instinctively feeling
the approach of spring, and knowing that there would be days of
rough weather too, she built her nest as best she could, and was in
haste at the same time to build and to learn how to do it.
  This care for domestic details in Kitty, so opposed to Levin's ideal
of exalted happiness, was at first one of the disenchantments; and
this sweet care of her household, the aim of which he did not
understand, but could not help loving, was one of the new
enchantments.
  Another disenchantment and enchantment consisted of their
quarrels. Levin could never have conceived that between him and his
wife any relations could arise other than tender, respectful and
loving, and all at once, in the very early days, they quarreled, so
that she said he did not care for her, that he cared for no one but
himself, burst into tears, and waved her hands.
  This first quarrel arose from Levin's having gone out to a new
grange and having been away half an hour too long, because he had
tried to get home by a short cut and had lost his way. He drove home
thinking of nothing but her, of her love, of his own happiness, and,
the nearer he drew to home, the warmer was his tenderness for her.
He ran into the room with the same feeling, with an even stronger
feeling, than he had had when he reached the Shcherbatskys' house to
propose. And suddenly he was met by a lowering expression he had never
seen in her. He would have kissed her, she pushed him away.
  "What is it?"
  "You've been enjoying yourself..." she began, trying to be calm
and spiteful.
  But as soon as she opened her mouth, she burst into a stream of
reproach, of senseless jealousy, of all that had been torturing her
during that half-hour which she had spent sitting motionless at the
window. It was only then, for the first time, that he clearly
understood what he had not understood when he led her out of the
church after the wedding. He felt now that he was not simply close
to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began. He felt
this from the agonizing sensation of division that he experienced at
that instant. He was offended for the first instant, but the very same
second he felt that he could not be offended by her, that she was
himself. He felt for the first moment as a man feels when, having
suddenly received a violent blow from behind, he turns round, angry
and eager to avenge himself, to look for his antagonist, and finds
that it is he himself who has accidentally struck himself, that
there is no one to be angry with, and that he must put up with and try
to soothe the pain.
  Never afterward did he feel it with such intensity, but this first
time he could not for a long while get over it. His natural feeling
urged him to defend himself, to prove to her she was wrong; but to
prove her wrong would mean irritating her still more and making the
rupture greater that was the cause of all his suffering. One
habitual feeling impelled him to get rid of the blame and to pass it
on her; another feeling, even stronger, impelled him as quickly as
possible to smooth over the rupture without letting it grow greater.
To remain under such undeserved reproach was wretched, but to make her
suffer by justifying himself was worse still. Like a man half-awake in
an agony of pain, he wanted to tear out, to fling away the seat of
pain, and, coming to his senses, he felt that the seat of pain was
himself. He could do nothing but try to help the seat of pain bear it,
and this he tried to do.
  They made peace. She, recognizing that she was wrong, though she did
not say so, became tenderer to him, and they experienced new,
redoubled happiness in their love. But that did not prevent such
quarrels from happening again, and exceedingly often too, on the
most unexpected and trivial grounds. These quarrels frequently arose
from the fact that they did not yet know what was of importance to
each, and that all this early period they were both often in a bad
temper. When one was in a good temper, and the other in a bad
temper, the peace was not broken; but when both happened to be in an
ill-humor, quarrels sprang up from such incomprehensibly trifling
causes that they could never remember afterward what they had
quarreled about. It is true that when they were both in a good
temper their enjoyment of life was redoubled. But still this first
period of their married life was a difficult time for them.
  During all this early period they had a peculiarly vivid sense of
tension, as it were, a tugging in opposite directions of the chain
by which they were bound. Altogether their honeymoon- that is to
say, the month after their wedding- from which, through tradition,
Levin had expected so much, was not merely not a time of sweetness,
but remained in the memories of both as the bitterest and most
humiliating period in their lives. They both alike tried in later life
to blot out from their memories all the monstrous, shameful
incidents of that morbid period, when both were rarely in a normal
frame of mind, when both were rarely quite themselves.
  It was only in the third month of their married life, after their
return from Moscow, where they had been staying for a month, that
their life began to go more smoothly.
                             XV.

  They had just come back from Moscow, and were glad to be alone. He
was sitting at the writing table in his study, writing. She, wearing
the dark lilac dress she had worn during the first days of their
married life, and put on again today- a dress particularly
remembered and loved by him- was sitting on the sofa, the same
old-fashioned leather sofa which had always stood in the study in
Levin's father's and grandfather's days. She was sewing at broderie
anglaise. He thought and wrote, never losing the happy consciousness
of her presence. His work, both on the land and on the book, in
which the principles of the new land system were to be laid down,
had not been abandoned; but just as formerly his work and ideas had
seemed to him petty and trivial in comparison with the darkness that
overspread all life, now they seemed as unimportant and petty in
comparison with the life that lay before him suffused with the
brilliant light of happiness. He went on with his work, but he felt
now that the center of gravity of his attention had passed to
something else, and that consequently he looked at his work quite
differently and more clearly. Formerly this work had been for him an
escape from life. Formerly he had felt that without this work his life
would be too gloomy. Now this work was necessary for him so that
life might not be too uniformly bright. Taking up his manuscript,
reading through what he had written, he found with pleasure that the
work was worth his working at. Many of his old ideas seemed to him
superfluous and extreme, but many blanks became distinct to him when
he reviewed the whole thing in his memory. He was writing now a new
chapter on the causes of the present disadvantageous condition of
agriculture in Russia. He maintained that the poverty of Russia arises
not merely from the anomalous distribution of landed property and from
misdirected reforms, but that what had contributed of late years to
this result was a civilization from without, abnormally grafted upon
Russia- especially facilities of communication such as railways,
leading to centralization in towns, the development of luxury, and the
consequent development of manufactures, credit, and its
accompaniment of speculation- all to the detriment of agriculture.
It seemed to him that in a normal development of wealth in a state all
these phenomena would arise only when a considerable amount of labor
had been put into agriculture, when it had come under regular, or at
least definite, conditions; that the wealth of a country ought to
increase proportionally, and especially in such a way that other
sources of wealth should not outstrip agriculture; that in harmony
with a certain stage of agriculture there should be means of
communication corresponding to it, and that in our unsettled condition
of the land, railways, called into being by political and not by
economic needs, were premature, and, instead of promoting agriculture,
as was expected of them, they were competing with agriculture and
promoting the development of manufactures and credit, and so arresting
its progress; and that just as the one-sided and premature development
of one organ in an animal would hinder its general development, so
in the general development of wealth in Russia, credit, facilities
of communication, manufacturing activity, indubitably necessary in
Europe, where they had arisen in their proper time, had with us only
done harm, by throwing into the background the chief question, next in
turn, of the organization of agriculture.
  While he was at his writing, she was thinking how unnaturally
cordial her husband had been to young Prince Charsky, who had, with
great want of tact, flirted with her the day before they left
Moscow. "He's jealous," she thought. "My God! How sweet and silly he
is! He's jealous of me! If he only knew that all others are no more to
me than Piotr the cook!" she thought, looking at his head and red neck
with a feeling of possession strange to herself. "Though it's a pity
to take him from his work (but he has plenty of time!), I must look at
his face; will he feel I'm looking at him? I wish he'd turn
round.... I'll will him to!" and she opened her eyes wide, as though
to intensify the influence of her gaze.
  "Yes, they draw away all the sap and give a false resplendence,"
he muttered, stopped writing, and, feeling that she was looking at him
and smiling, he looked round.
  "Well?" he queried, smiling, and getting up.
  "He looked round," she thought.
  "It's nothing; I wanted you to look round," she said, watching
him, and trying to guess whether he was vexed at being interrupted
or not.
  "How happy we are alone together! I am, that is," he said, going
up to her with a radiant smile of happiness.
  "I'm just as happy. I'll never go anywhere, especially not to
Moscow."
  "And what were you thinking about?"
  "I? I was thinking... No, no, go on writing; don't break off," she
said, pursing up her lips, "and I must cut out these little holes now,
do you see?"
  She took up her scissors and began cutting them out.
  "No; tell me- what was it?" he said, sitting down beside her and
watching the circular motion of the tiny scissors.
  "Oh! what was I thinking about? I was thinking about Moscow, about
the nape of your neck."
  "Why should I, of all people, have such happiness! It's unnatural.
Too good," he said kissing her hand.
  "I feel quite the opposite; the better things are, the more
natural it seems to me."
  "And you've got a little curl loose," he said, carefully turning her
head round. "A little curl, oh yes. No, no, we are busy at our work!"
  Work did not progress further, and they darted apart from one
another like culprits when Kouzma came in to announce that tea was
ready.
  "Have they come from town?" Levin asked Kouzma.
  "They've just come; they're unpacking the things."
  "Come quickly," she said to him as she went out of the study, "or
else I shall read the letters without you."
  Left alone, after putting his manuscripts together in the new
portfolio bought by her, he washed his hands at the new washstand with
the new elegant fittings, which had all made their appearance with
her. Levin smiled at his own thoughts, and shook his head
disapprovingly at those thoughts; a feeling akin to remorse fretted
him. There was something shameful, effeminate, Capuan, as he called it
to himself, in his present mode of life. "It's not right to go on like
this," he thought. "It'll soon be three months, and I'm doing next
to nothing. Today, almost for the first time, I set to work seriously-
and what happened? I did nothing but begin and throw it aside. I
have almost given up even my ordinary pursuits. I scarcely walk or
drive about at all to look after things on my land. Either I am
loath to leave her, or I see she's dull alone. And I used to think
that, before marriage, life was nothing much, somehow didn't count,
but that after marriage life began in earnest. And here almost three
months have passed, and I have spent my time so idly and unprofitably.
No, this won't do; I must begin. Of course, it's not her fault.
She's not to blame in any way. I ought to be firmer myself, to
maintain my masculine independence of action; or else I shall get into
such ways, and she'll get used to them too.... Of course she's not
to blame," he told himself.
  But it is hard for anyone who is dissatisfied not to blame someone
else, and especially the person nearest of all to one, for the basis
of one's dissatisfaction. And it vaguely came into Levin's mind that
she herself was not to blame (she could not be to blame for anything),
but what was to blame was her education, too superficial and
frivolous. ("That fool Charsky: I know she wanted to stop him, but
didn't know how to.") "Yes, apart from her interest in the house (that
she has), apart from dress and broderie anglaise, she has no serious
interests. No interest in my work, in the estate, in the peasants, nor
in music, though she's rather good at it, nor in reading. She does
nothing, and is perfectly satisfied." Levin, in his heart, censured
this, and did not as yet understand that she was preparing for that
period of activity which was to come for her when she would at once be
the wife of her husband and mistress of the house, and would bear, and
nurse, and bring up children. He knew not that she was instinctively
aware of this, and preparing herself for this time of terrible toil,
did not reproach herself for the moments of carelessness and happiness
in her love, which she was enjoying now, while gaily building her nest
for the future.
                             XVI.

  When Levin went upstairs, his wife was sitting near the new silver
samovar and the new tea service, and, having settled old Agathya
Mikhailovna at a little table with a full cup of tea, was reading a
letter from Dolly, with whom they were in continual and frequent
correspondence.
  "You see, your lady's settled me here, told me to sit a bit with
her," said Agathya Mikhailovna, smiling amicably at Kitty.
  In these words of Agathya Mikhailovna Levin read the final act of
the drama which had been enacted of late between her and Kitty. He saw
that, in spite of Agathya Mikhailovna's feelings being hurt by a new
mistress taking the reins of government out of her hands, Kitty had
yet conquered her and made her love her.
  "Here, I opened your letter too," said Kitty, handing him an
illiterate letter. "It's from that woman, I think- your
brother's..." she said. "I did not read it through. This is from my
people and from Dolly. Fancy! Dolly took Tania and Grisha to a
children's ball at the Sarmatskys': Tania was a French marquise."
  But Levin did not hear her. Flushing, he took the letter from
Marya Nikolaevna, his brother's former mistress, and began to read it.
This was the second letter he had received from Marya Nikolaevna. In
the first letter, Marya Nikolaevna wrote that his brother had sent her
packing for no fault of hers, and, with touching simplicity, added
that though she was in want again, she asked for nothing, and wished
for nothing, but was only tormented by the thought that Nikolai
Dmitrievich would come to grief without her, owing to the weak state
of his health, and begged his brother to look after him. Now she wrote
quite differently. She had found Nikolai Dmitrievich, had again made
it up with him in Moscow, and had moved with him to a provincial town,
where he had received a post in the government service. But, she
wrote, he had quarreled with the head official, and was on his way
back to Moscow, only he had been taken so ill on the road that it
was doubtful if he would ever leave his bed again. "It's always of you
he has talked, and, besides he has no more money left."
  "Read this; Dolly writes about you," Kitty was beginning, with a
smile; but she stopped suddenly, noticing the changed expression on
her husband's face. "What is it? What's the matter?"
  "She writes to me that Nikolai, my brother, is at death's door. I
shall go to him."
  Kitty's face changed at once. Thoughts of Tania as a marquise, of
Dolly, all had vanished.
  "When are you going?" she said.
  "Tomorrow."
  "And I will go with you- may I?" she said.
  "Kitty! What are you thinking of?" he said reproachfully.
  "What am I thinking of?" offended that he should seem to take her
suggestion unwillingly and with vexation.
  "Why shouldn't I go? I shan't be in your way. I..."
  "I'm going because my brother is dying," said Levin. "Why should
you..."
  "Why? For the same reason as you."
  "And, at a moment of such gravity for me, she only thinks of her
being dull by herself," thought Levin. And this subterfuge in a matter
of such gravity infuriated him.
  "It's out of the question," he said sternly.
  Agathya Mikhailovna, seeing that it was coming to a quarrel,
gently put down her cup and withdrew. Kitty did not even notice her.
The tone in which her husband had said the last words offended her,
especially because he evidently did not believe what she had said.
  "I tell you, that if you go, I shall come with you; I shall
certainly come," she said hastily and wrathfully. "Why out of the
question? Why do you say it's out of the question?"
  "Because it'll be going God knows where, by all sorts of roads and
to all sorts of hotels.... You would be a hindrance to me," said
Levin, trying to be cool.
  "Not at all. I don't want anything. Where you can go, I can..."
  "Well, for one thing then, because this woman's there whom you can't
meet."
  "I don't know and don't care to know who's there and what. I know
that my husband's brother is dying, and my husband is going to him,
and I go with my husband so that..."
  "Kitty! Don't get angry. But just think a little: this is a matter
of such importance that I can't bear to think that you should bring in
a feeling of weakness, of dislike to being left alone. Come, you'll be
dull alone, so go and stay at Moscow a little."
  "There, you always ascribe base, vile motives to me," she said
with tears of wrath and wounded pride. "I didn't mean anything- it
wasn't weakness, it wasn't anything.... I feel that it's my duty to be
with my husband when he's in trouble, but you try on purpose to hurt
me, you try on purpose not to understand...."
  "No; this is awful! To be such a slave!" cried Levin, getting up,
and unable to restrain his vexation any longer. But at the same second
he felt that he was beating himself.
  "Then why did you marry? You could have been free. Why did you, if
you regret it?" she said, getting up and running away into the drawing
room.
  When he went to her, she was sobbing.
  He began to speak, trying to find words not to dissuade but simply
to soothe her. But she did not heed him, and would not agree to
anything. He bent down to her and took her hand, which resisted him.
He kissed her hand, kissed her hair, kissed her hand again- still
she was silent. But when he took her face in both his hands, and
said "Kitty!" she suddenly collected herself, still shed some tears,
and they were reconciled.
  It was decided that they should go together the next day. Levin told
his wife that he believed she wanted to go simply in order to be of
use, agreed that Marya Nikolaevna's being with his brother did not
make her going improper, but he set off dissatisfied, at the bottom of
his heart, both with her and with himself. He was dissatisfied with
her for being unable to make up her mind to let him go when it was
necessary (and how strange it was for him to think that he, so
lately hardly daring to believe in such happiness as the possibility
of her loving him- now was unhappy because she loved him too much!),
and he was dissatisfied with himself for not showing more strength
of will. Even greater was the feeling of disagreement at the bottom of
his heart as to her not needing to consider the woman who was with his
brother, and he thought with horror of all the contingencies they
might meet with. The mere idea of his wife, his Kitty, being in the
same room with a common wench, set him shuddering with horror and
loathing.
                             XVII.

  The hotel of the provincial town where Nikolai Levin was lying ill
was one of those provincial hotels which are constructed on the newest
model of modern improvements, with the best intentions of cleanliness,
comfort, and even elegance, but, owing to the public that patronizes
them, are with astounding rapidity transformed into filthy taverns
with a pretension of modern improvement and made by the very
pretension worse than the old-fashioned, honestly filthy hotels.
This hotel had already reached that stage, and the soldier in a filthy
uniform smoking in the entry, supposed to stand for a hall porter, and
the cast-iron, perforated, somber and disagreeable staircase, and
the free and easy waiter in a filthy dress coat, and the common dining
room with a dusty bouquet of wax flowers adorning the table, and
filth, dust and disorder everywhere, and, at the same time, the sort
of modern, up-to-date, self-complacent, railway uneasiness of this
hotel, aroused a most painful feeling in Levin after their fresh young
life, especially because the impression of falsity made by the hotel
was so out of keeping with what awaited them.
  As is invariably the case, after they had been asked at what price
they wanted rooms, it appeared that there was not one decent room
for them; one decent room had been taken by the inspector of
railroads, another by a lawyer from Moscow, a third by Princess
Astafieva just arrived from the country. There remained only one
filthy room, next to which they promised that another should be
empty by the evening. Feeling angry with his wife because what he
had expected had come to pass- that at the moment of arrival, when his
heart throbbed with emotion and anxiety to know how his brother was
getting on, he should have to be seeing after her, instead of
rushing straight to his brother- Levin conducted her to the room
assigned them.
  "Go, do go!" she said, looking at him with timid and guilty eyes.
  He went out of the door without a word, and at once stumbled over
Marya Nikolaevna, who had heard of his arrival and had not dared to go
in to see him. She was just the same as when he had seen her in
Moscow; the same woolen gown, and bare arms and neck, and the same
good-naturedly stupid, pock-marked face, only a little plumper.
  "Well, how is he? How is he?"
  "Very bad. He can't get up. He has been expecting you all this
while. He... Are you... with your wife?"
  Levin did not for the first moment understand what confused her, but
she immediately enlightened him.
  "I'll go away. I'll go down to the kitchen," she brought out.
"Nikolai Dmitrievich will be delighted. He heard about it, and knows
her, and remembers her abroad."
  Levin realized that she meant his wife, and did not know what answer
to make.
  "Come along, come along to him!" he said.
  But, as soon as he moved, the door of his room opened and Kitty
peeped out. Levin crimsoned both from shame and anger at his wife, who
had put herself and him in such a difficult position; but Marya
Nikolaevna crimsoned still more. She positively shrank together and
flushed to the point of tears, and, clutching the ends of her shawl in
both hands, twisted them in her red fingers without knowing what to
say and what to do.
  For the first instant Levin saw an expression of eager curiosity
in the eyes with which Kitty looked at this incomprehensible to her,
awful woman; but it lasted only a single instant.
  "Well! How is he?" she turned to her husband and then to her.
  "But one can't go on talking in the passage like this!" Levin
said, looking angrily at a gentleman who walked jauntily at that
instant across the corridor, as though about his affairs.
  "Well then, come in," said Kitty, turning to Marya Nikolaevna, who
had recovered herself- but, noticing her husband's face of dismay- "or
go on; go, and then come for me," she said, and went back into the
room. Levin went to his brother's room.
  He had not in the least expected what he saw and felt in his
brother's room. He had expected to find him in the same state of
self-deception which he had heard was so frequent with the
consumptive, and which had struck him so much during his brother's
visit in the autumn. He had expected to find the physical signs of the
approach of death more marked- greater weakness, greater emaciation,
but still almost the same condition of things. He had expected himself
to feel the same distress at the loss of the brother he loved and
the same horror in face of death as he had felt then, only in a
greater degree. And he had prepared himself for this; but he found
something utterly different.
  In a little dirty room with the painted panels of its walls filthy
with spittle; with conversation audible from the next room through the
thin partition, in a stifling atmosphere saturated with impurities, on
a bedstead moved away from the wall, there lay, covered with a
quilt, a body. One arm of this body was above the quilt, and the
wrist, huge as a rake handle, was attached, inconceivably it seemed,
to the thin, long bobbin smooth from the beginning to the middle.
The head lay sideways on the pillow. Levin could see the scanty
locks wet with sweat on the temples and the tensed, seemingly
transparent forehead.
  "It cannot be that that fearful body was my brother Nikolai?"
thought Levin. But he went closer, saw the face, and doubt became
impossible. In spite of the terrible change in the face, Levin had
only to glance at those eager eyes at his approach, only to catch
the faint movement of the mouth under the sticky mustache, to
realize the terrible truth that this dead body was his living brother.
  The glittering eyes looked sternly and reproachfully at the
brother as he drew near. And immediately this glance established a
living relationship between living men. Levin immediately felt the
reproach in the eyes fixed on him, and felt remorse at his own
happiness.
  When Konstantin took him by the hand, Nikolai smiled. The smile
was faint, scarcely perceptible, and in spite of the smile the stern
expression of the eyes was unchanged.
  "You did not expect to find me like this," he articulated with
effort.
  "Yes... no," said Levin, hesitating over his words. "How was it
you didn't let me know before- that is, at the time of my wedding? I
made inquiries in all directions."
  He had to talk so as not to be silent, and he did not know what to
say, especially as his brother made no reply, and simply stared
without dropping his eyes, and apparently penetrated to the inner
meaning of each word. Levin told his brother that his wife had come
with him. Nikolai expressed pleasure, but said he was afraid of
frightening her by his condition. A silence followed. Suddenly Nikolai
stirred, and began to say something. Levin expected something of
peculiar gravity and importance from the expression of his face, but
Nikolai began speaking of his health. He found fault with the
doctor, regretting he had not a celebrated Moscow doctor. Levin saw
that he still had hopes.
  Seizing the first moment of silence, Levin got up, anxious to
escape, if only for an instant, from his agonizing emotion, and said
that he would go and fetch his wife.
  "Very well, and I'll tell Masha to tidy up here. It's dirty and
stinking here, I expect. Masha! Clear up the room," the sick man
said with effort. "And when you've cleared up, you go away," he added,
looking inquiringly at his brother.
  Levin made no answer. Going out into the corridor, he stopped short.
He had said he would fetch his wife, but now, taking stock of the
emotion he was feeling, he decided that, on the contrary, he would try
to persuade her not to go in to the sick man. "Why should she suffer
as I am suffering?" he thought.
  "Well, how is he?" Kitty asked with a frightened face.
  "Oh, it's awful, it's awful! What did you come for?" said Levin.
  Kitty was silent for a few seconds, looking timidly and ruefully
at her husband; then she went up and took him by the elbow with both
hands.
  "Kostia! Take me to him; it will be easier for us to bear it
together. Only take me, take me to him, please, and go away," she
said. "You must understand that for me to see you, and not to see him,
is far more painful. There I might be a help to you and to him.
Please, let me!" she besought her husband, as though the happiness
of her life depended on it.
  Levin was obliged to agree, and, regaining his composure, and
completely forgetting about Marya Nikolaevna by now, he went again
in to his brother with Kitty.
  Stepping lightly, and continually glancing at her husband, showing
him a valorous and sympathetic face, Kitty went into the sickroom,
and, turning without haste, noiselessly closed the door. With
inaudible steps she went quickly to the sick man's bedside, and
going up so that he would not have to turn his head, she immediately
clasped in her fresh young hand the skeleton of his huge hand, pressed
it, and began speaking with that soft eagerness, sympathetic and
inoffensive, which is peculiar merely to women.
  "We have met, though we were not acquainted, at Soden," she said.
"You never thought I was to be your sister."
  "You would not have recognized me?" he said, with a smile which
had become radiant at her entrance.
  "Yes, I should. What a good thing you let us know! Not a day has
passed that Kostia has not mentioned you, and been anxious."
  But the sick man's interest did not last long.
  Before she had finished speaking, there had come back into his
face the stern, reproachful expression of the dying man's envy of
the living.
  "I am afraid you are not quite comfortable here," she said,
turning away from his fixed stare, and looking about the room. "We
must ask about another room," she said to her husband, "so that we
might be nearer."
                             XVIII.

  Levin could not look calmly at his brother; he could not himself
be natural and calm in his presence. When he went in to the sick
man, his eyes and his attention were unconsciously dimmed, and he
did not see and did not distinguish the details of his brother's
position. He smelt the awful odor, saw the dirt, disorder, and
miserable condition, and heard the groans, and felt that nothing could
be done to help. It never entered his head to analyze the details of
the sick man's situation, to consider how that body was lying under
the quilt, how those emaciated legs and thighs and spine were lying
huddled up, and whether they could not be made more comfortable,
whether anything could not be done to make things, if not better, at
least not so bad. It made his blood run cold when he began to think of
all these details. He was absolutely convinced that nothing could be
done to prolong his brother's life or to relieve his suffering. But
a consciousness of Levin's regarding all aid as out of the question
was felt by the sick man, and exasperated him. And this made it
still more painful for Levin. To be in the sickroom was agony to
him, not to be there was still worse. And he was continually, on
various pretexts, going out of the room, and coming in again,
because he was unable to remain alone.
  But Kitty thought, and felt, and acted quite differently. On
seeing the sick man she pitied him. And pity in her womanly heart
did not arouse at all that feeling of horror and loathing that it
aroused in her husband, but a desire to act, to find out all the
details of his state, and to remedy them. And since she had not the
slightest doubt that it was her duty to help him, she had no doubt
either that it was possible, and immediately set to work. The very
details, the mere thought of which reduced her husband to terror,
immediately engaged her attention. She sent for the doctor, sent to
the chemist's, set the maid who had come with her and Marya Nikolaevna
to sweep and dust and scrub; she herself washed up something, washed
out something else, laid something under the quilt. Something was by
her direction brought into the sickroom, something else was carried
out. She herself went several times to her room, regardless of the men
she met in the corridor, got out and brought in sheets, pillowcases,
towels, and shirts.
  The waiter, who was busy with a party of engineers dining in the
dining hall, came several times with an irate countenance in answer to
her summons, and could not avoid carrying out her orders, as she
gave them with such gracious insistence that there was no evading her.
Levin did not approve of all this; he did not believe it would be of
any good to the patient. Above all, he was afraid the patient would be
angry at it. But the sick man, though he seemed to be indifferent
about it, was not angry, but only abashed and on the whole seemed
interested in what she was doing with him. Coming back from the doctor
to whom Kitty had sent him, Levin, on opening the door, came upon
the sick man at the instant when, by Kitty's direction, they were
changing his linen. The long white ridge of his spine, with the
huge, prominent shoulder blades and jutting ribs and vertebrae, was
bare, and Marya Nikolaevna and the waiter were struggling with the
sleeve of the nightshirt, and could not get the long, limp arm into
it. Kitty, hurriedly closing the door after Levin, did not look in
that direction, but the sick man groaned, and she moved rapidly toward
him.
  "Come, a little quicker," she said.
  "Oh, don't you come," said the sick man angrily. "I'll do it
myself...."
  "What did you say?" queried Marya Nikolaevna.
  But Kitty heard and saw he was ashamed and uncomfortable at being
naked before her.
  "I'm not looking, I'm not looking!" she said, putting the arm in.
"Marya Nikolaevna, you come this side- you do it," she added.
  "Please, run over for me, there's a little bottle in my small
bag," she said, turning to her husband, "you know, in the side pocket;
bring it, please, and meanwhile they'll finish clearing up here."
  Returning with the bottle, Levin found the sick man settled
comfortably and everything about him completely changed. The heavy
smell was replaced by the smell of aromatic vinegar, which Kitty
with pouting lips and puffed-out, rosy cheeks was squirting through
a small tube. There was no dust visible anywhere; a rug was laid by
the bedside. On the table stood medicine bottles and decanters
tidily arranged, and the linen needed was folded up there, and Kitty's
broderie anglaise. On the other table by the patient's bed there
were candles, and drink, and powders. The sick man himself, washed and
combed, lay in clean sheets on high raised pillows, in a clean
nightshirt with a white collar about his astoundingly thin neck,
and, with a new expression of hope, was looking fixedly at Kitty.
  The doctor brought by Levin, and found by him at the club, was not
the one who had been attending Nikolai Levin, and whom he disliked.
The new doctor took up a stethoscope and sounded the patient, shook
his head, prescribed medicine, and with extreme minuteness explained
first how to take the medicine and then what diet was to be adhered
to. He advised eggs, raw or hardly cooked, and Seltzer water, with new
milk at a certain temperature. When the doctor had gone away the
sick man said something to his brother, of which Levin could
distinguish only the last words: "Your Katia." By the expression
with which he gazed at her, Levin saw that he was praising her. He
beckoned to him Katia, as he called her.
  "I'm much better already," he said. "Why, with you I should have got
well long ago. How fine everything is!" He took her hand and drew it
toward his lips, but, as though afraid she would dislike it, he
changed his mind, let it go, and only stroked it. Kitty took his
hand in both of hers and squeezed it.
  "Now turn me over on the left side and go to bed," he said.
  No one could make out what he said but Kitty; she alone
understood. She understood because she was all the while mentally
keeping watch on what he needed.
  "On the other side," she said to her husband, "he always sleeps on
that side. Turn him over- it's so disagreeable calling the servants.
I'm not strong enough. Can you?" she said to Marya Nikolaevna.
  "I'm afraid...." answered Marya Nikolaevna.
  Terrible as it was to Levin to put his arms round that terrible
body, to take hold, under the quilt, of that of which he preferred
to know nothing, under his wife's influence he made his resolute
face that she knew so well, and, putting his arms into the bed took
hold of the body, but in spite of his own strength, he was struck by
the strange heaviness of those powerless limbs. While he was turning
him over, conscious of the huge emaciated arm about his neck, Kitty
swiftly and noiselessly turned the pillow, beat it up, and settled
in it the sick man's head, smoothing back his hair, which was sticking
again to his moist brow.
  The sick man kept his brother's hand in his own. Levin felt that
he meant to do something with his hand and was pulling it somewhere.
Levin yielded with a sinking heart: yes, he drew it to his mouth and
kissed it. Levin, shaking with sobs and unable to articulate a word,
went out of the room.
                             XIX.

  "Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast
revealed them unto babes." So Levin thought about his wife as he
talked to her that evening.
  Levin thought of the text, not because he considered himself "wise
and prudent." He did not consider himself wise and prudent, but he
could not help knowing that he had more intellect than his wife and
Agathya Mikhailovna, and he could not help knowing that when he
thought of death, he thought with all the force of his intellect. He
knew too that the brains of many great men, whose thoughts he had
read, had brooded over death and yet knew not a hundredth part of what
his wife and Agathya Mikhailovna knew about it. Different as those two
women were, Agathya Mikhailovna and Katia, as his brother Nikolai
had called her, and as Levin particularly liked to call her now,
they were quite alike in this. Both knew, without a shade of doubt,
what sort of thing life was, and what was death, and though neither of
them could have answered, and would not even have understood the
questions that presented themselves to Levin, both had no doubt of the
significance of this event, and were precisely alike in their way of
looking at it, which they shared with millions of people. The proof
that they knew for a certainty the nature of death lay in the fact
that they knew without a second of hesitation how to deal with the
dying, and were not frightened by them. Levin, and other men like him,
though they could have said a great deal about death, obviously did
not know this since they were afraid of death, and were absolutely
at a loss what to do when people were dying. If Levin had been alone
now with his brother Nikolai, he would have looked at him with terror,
and with still greater terror waited, and would not have known what
else to do.
  More than that, he did not know what to say, how to look, how to
move. To talk of outside things seemed to him shocking, impossible; to
talk of death and depressing subjects- also impossible. To be silent
was also impossible. "If I look at him he will think I am studying
him, I am afraid of him; if I don't look at him, he'll think I'm
thinking of other things. If I walk on tiptoe, he will be vexed; to
tread firmly, I'm ashamed." Kitty evidently did not think of
herself, and had no time to think about herself: she was thinking
about him because she knew something, and all went well. She even told
him about herself and about her wedding, and smiled and sympathized
with him, and petted him, and talked of cases of recovery, and all
went well; therefore, she must know. The proof that her behavior and
Agathya Mikhailovna's was not instinctive, animal, irrational, lay
in that apart from the physical treatment, the relief of suffering,
both Agathya Mikhailovna and Kitty required for the dying man
something else more important than the physical treatment, and
something which had nothing in common with physical conditions.
Agathya Mikhailovna, speaking of a man recently dead, had said: "Well,
thank God, he took the sacrament and received Extreme Unction; God
grant each one of us such a death." Katia, in just the same way,
besides all her care about linen, bedsores, drink, found time the very
first day to persuade the sick man of the necessity of taking the
sacrament and receiving Extreme Unction.
  On getting back from the sickroom to their own two rooms for the
night, Levin sat with hanging head, not knowing what to do. To say
nothing of supper, of preparing for bed, of considering what they were
going to do, he could not even talk to his wife; he was ashamed to.
Kitty, on the contrary, was more active than usual. She was even
livelier than usual. She ordered supper to be brought, herself
unpacked their things, and herself helped to make the beds, and did
not even forget to sprinkle them with Persian insecticide. She
showed that alertness, that swiftness of reflection which comes out in
men before a battle, in conflict, in the dangerous and decisive
moments of life- those moments when a man shows once and for all his
value, and that all his past has not been wasted but has been a
preparation for these moments.
  Everything went rapidly in her hands, and before it was twelve
o'clock all their things were arranged tidily and orderly in such a
way that the hotel rooms seemed like home, like her rooms: the beds
were made, brushes, combs, looking glasses were put out, table napkins
were spread.
  Levin felt that it was unpardonable to eat, to sleep, to talk even
now, and it seemed to him that every movement he made was unseemly.
She arranged the brushes, but she did it all so that there was nothing
shocking in it.
  They could neither of them eat, however, and for a long while they
could not sleep, and did not even go to bed.
  "I am very glad I persuaded him to receive Extreme Unction
tomorrow," she said, sitting in her dressing jacket before her folding
looking glass, combing her soft, fragrant hair with a small-toothed
comb. "I have never seen it, but I know, mamma has told me, there
are prayers said for recovery."
  "Do you suppose he can possibly recover?" said Levin, watching a
slender tress at the back of her round little head that was
continually hidden when she passed the comb through the front.
  "I asked the doctor; he said he couldn't live more than three
days. But can they be sure? I'm very glad, anyway, that I persuaded
him," she said, looking askance at her husband through her hair.
"Anything is possible," she added with that peculiar, rather sly
expression that was always in her face when she spoke of religion.
  Since their conversation about religion during their engagement
neither of them had ever started a discussion of the subject, but
she performed all the ceremonies of going to church, saying her
prayers, and so on, always with the unvarying conviction that this
ought to be so. In spite of his assertion to the contrary, she was
firmly persuaded that he was as much a Christian as she, and indeed
a far better one; and all that he said about it was simply one of
his absurd masculine freaks, just as he would say about her broderie
anglaise- that good people patch holes but that she cut them out on
purpose, and so on.
  "Yes, you see this woman, Marya Nikolaevna, did not know how to
manage all this," said Levin. "And... I must own I'm very, very glad
you came. You are such purity that..." He took her hand and did not
kiss it (to kiss her hand in such closeness to death seemed to him
improper); he merely squeezed it with a penitent air, looking at her
brightening eyes.
  "It would have been miserable for you to be alone," she said, and
lifting her hands which hid her cheeks, flushing with pleasure,
twisted her coil of hair on the nape of her neck and pinned it
there. "No," she went on, "she did not know how.... Luckily, I learned
lot at Soden."
  "Surely there are no people there so ill?"
  "Worse."
  "What's so awful to me is that I can't but see him as he was when he
was young. You would not believe how charming he was as a youth, but I
did not understand him then."
  "I can quite, quite believe it. How I feel that we might have been
friends!" she said; and, distressed at what she had said, she looked
round at her husband, and tears came into her eyes.
  "Yes, might have been," he said mournfully. "He's just one of
those people of whom they say that they are not for this world."
  "But we have many days before us; we must go to bed," said Kitty,
glancing at her tiny watch.
                             XX.

                            DEATH.

  The next day the sick man received the sacrament and Extreme
Unction. During the ceremony Nikolai Levin prayed fervently. His great
eyes fastened on the holy icon that was set out on a card table
covered with a colored napkin, expressed such passionate prayer and
hope that it was awful to Levin to see it. Levin knew that this
passionate prayer and hope would only make him feel more bitterly
the parting from the life he so loved. Levin knew his brother and
the workings of his intellect: he knew that his unbelief came not from
life being easier for him without faith, but had grown up because,
step by step, the contemporary scientific interpretation of natural
phenomena crushed out the possibility of faith; and so he knew that
his present return was not a legitimate one, brought about by way of
the same working of his intellect, but simply a temporary,
interested return to faith in a desperate hope of recovery. Levin knew
too that Kitty had strengthened his hope by accounts of the
marvelous recoveries she had heard of Levin knew all this; and it
was agonizingly painful to him to behold the supplicating, hopeful
eyes and the emaciated wrist, lifted with difficulty, making the
sign of the cross on the tense brow, and the prominent shoulders and
hollow, gasping chest, which one could not feel consistent with the
life the sick man was praying for. During the sacrament Levin
offered prayers, and did what he, an unbeliever, had done a thousand
times. He said, addressing God: "If Thou dost exist, make this man
recover" (of course this same thing has been repeated many times),
"and Thou wilt save him and me."
  After Extreme Unction the sick man became suddenly much better. He
did not cough once in the course of an hour, smiled, kissed Kitty's
hand, thanking her with tears, and said he was comfortable, free
from pain, and that he felt strong and had an appetite. He even raised
himself when his soup was brought, and asked for a cutlet as well.
Hopelessly ill as he was, obvious as it was at the first glance that
he could not recover, Levin and Kitty were for that hour both in the
same state of excitement, happy, though fearful of being mistaken.
  "Is he better?"- "Yes, much."- "It's wonderful."- "There's nothing
wonderful in it."- "Anyway, he's better,"- they said in a whisper,
smiling to one another.
  This self-deception was not of long duration. The sick man fell into
a quiet sleep, but he was waked up half an hour later by his cough.
And all at once every hope vanished in those about him and in himself.
The reality of his suffering crushed all hopes in Levin and Kitty, and
in the sick man himself, leaving no doubt, no memory even of past
hopes.
  Without referring to what he had believed in half an hour before, as
though ashamed even to recall it, he asked for iodine to inhale in a
bottle covered with perforated paper. Levin gave him the bottle, and
the same look of passionate hope with which he had taken the sacrament
was now fastened on his brother, demanding from him the confirmation
of the doctor's words that inhaling iodine worked wonders.
  "Isn't Katia here?" he gasped, looking round while Levin reluctantly
assented to the doctor's words. "No- then I can say it.... It was
for her sake I went through that farce. She's so sweet; but you and
I can't deceive ourselves. This is what I believe in," he said, and,
squeezing the bottle in his bony hand, he began breathing over it.
  At eight o'clock in the evening Levin and his wife were drinking tea
in their room, when Marya Nikolaevna ran in to them breathlessly.
She was pale, and her lips were quivering.- "He is dying!" she
whispered. "I'm afraid he will die right away."
  Both of them ran to him. He was sitting raised up, with one elbow on
the bed, his long back bent, and his head hanging low.
  "How do you feel?" Levin asked in a whisper, after a silence.
  "I feel I'm setting off," Nikolai said with difficulty, but with
extreme distinctness, deliberately squeezing the words out of himself.
He did not raise his head, but simply turned his eyes upward,
without their reaching his brother's face. "Katia, go away!" he added.
  Levin jumped up, and with a peremptory whisper made her go out.
  "I'm setting off," he said again.
  "Why do you think so?" said Levin, so as to say something.
  "Because I'm setting off," he repeated, as though he had a liking
for the phrase. "It's the end."
  Marya Nikolaevna went up to him.
  "You had better lie down; you'd be easier," she said.
  "I shall lie down soon enough," he pronounced slowly, "when I'm
dead," he said sarcastically, wrathfully. "Well, you can put me down
if you like."
  Levin laid his brother on his back, sat down beside him, and gazed
at his face, holding his breath. The dying man lay with closed eyes,
but the muscles twitched from time to time on his forehead, as with
one thinking deeply and intensely. Levin involuntarily thought with
him of what it was that was happening to him now, but in spite of
all his mental efforts to keep him company, he saw by the expression
of that calm, stern face, and by the playing muscle above his brow,
that for the dying man there was growing clearer and clearer all
that was still as dark as ever for Levin.
  "Yes, yes, so," the dying man articulated slowly at intervals. "Wait
a little." He was silent again. "Right!" he pronounced all at once
reassuringly, as though all were solved for him. "O Lord!" he
murmured, and sighed deeply.
  Marya Nikolaevna felt his feet. "They're getting cold," she
whispered.

  For a long while, a very long while, it seemed to Levin, the sick
man lay motionless. But he was still alive, and from time to time he
sighed. Levin by now was exhausted from mental strain. He felt that
with no mental effort could he understand what it was that was
right. He felt that he could not follow the dying man's thinking. He
could not even think of the problem of death itself, but, with no will
of his own, thoughts kept coming to him of what he had to do next-
closing the dead man's eyes, dressing him, ordering the coffin. And,
strange to say, he felt utterly cold, and was not conscious of
sorrow nor of loss, less still of pity for his brother. If he had
any feeling for his brother at that moment, it was rather envy for the
knowledge the dying man had now, which he could not have.
  A long time more he sat over him so, continually expecting the
end. But the end did not come. The door opened and Kitty appeared.
Levin got up to stop her. But at the moment he was getting up, he
caught the sound of the dying man stirring.
  "Don't go away," said Nikolai and held out his hand. Levin gave
him his, and angrily waved to his wife to go away.
  With the dying man's hand in his hand, he sat for half an hour, an
hour, another hour. He did not think of death at all now. He
wondered what Kitty was doing; who lived in the next room; whether the
doctor lived in a house of his own. He longed for food and for
sleep. He cautiously drew away his hand and felt the feet. The feet
were cold, but the sick man was still breathing. Levin tried once more
to move away on tiptoe, but the sick man stirred again and said:
"Don't go."

  The dawn came; the sick man's condition was unchanged. Levin
stealthily withdrew his hand, and, without looking at the dying man,
went off to his own room and went to sleep. When he woke up, instead
of news of his brother's death which he expected, he learned that
the sick man had returned to his earlier condition. He had begun
sitting up again, coughing, had begun eating again, talking again, and
again had ceased to talk of death, again had begun to express hope
of his recovery, and had become more irritable and gloomier than ever.
No one, neither his brother nor Kitty, could soothe him. He was
angry with everyone, and said nasty things to everyone, reproached
everyone for his sufferings, and insisted that they should get him a
celebrated doctor from Moscow. To all inquiries made of him as to
how he felt, he made the same answer with an expression of
vindictive reproachfulness: "I'm suffering horribly, intolerably!" The
sick man was suffering more and more, especially from bedsores,
which it was impossible now to remedy, and grew more and more angry
with everyone about him, blaming them for everything, and especially
for not having brought him a doctor from Moscow. Kitty tried in
every possible way to relieve him, to soothe him; but it was all in
vain, and Levin saw that she herself was exhausted both physically and
morally, though she would not admit it. The sense of death, which
had been evoked in all by his taking leave of life on the night when
he had sent for his brother, was broken up. Everyone knew that he must
inevitably die soon, that he was half-dead already. Everyone wished
for nothing but that he should die as soon as possible, and
everyone, concealing this, gave him medicines, tried to find
remedies and doctors, and deceived him, and themselves, and one
another. All this was falsehood, disgusting, irreverent deceit. And
owing to the bent of his character, and because he loved the dying man
more than anyone else did, Levin was most painfully conscious of
this deceit.
  Levin, who had long been possessed by the idea of reconciling his
brothers, at least in face of death, had written to his brother,
Sergei Ivanovich, and having received an answer from him, he read this
letter to the sick man. Sergei Ivanovich wrote that he could not
come himself, and in touching terms he begged his brother's
forgiveness.
  The sick man said nothing.
  "What am I to write to him?" said Levin. "I hope you are not angry
with him?"
  "No, not in the least!" Nikolai answered, vexed at the question.
"Tell him to send me a doctor."
  Three more days of agony followed; the sick man was still in the
same condition. The sense of longing for his death was felt by
everyone now who saw him: by the waiters, and the hotelkeeper, and all
the people staying in the hotel, and the doctor, and Marya Nikolaevna,
and Levin, and Kitty. The sick man alone did not express this feeling,
but on the contrary was furious at their not getting him doctors,
and went on taking medicine and talking of life. Only at rare moments,
when the opium gave him an instant's relief from his never-ceasing
pain, he would sometimes, half-asleep, utter what was ever more
intense in his heart than in all the others: "Oh, if it were only
the end!" or, "When will it be over?"
  His sufferings, steadily growing more intense, did their work and
prepared him for death. There was no position in which he was not in
pain, there was not a minute in which he was unconscious of it, not
a limb, not a part of his body that did not ache and cause him
agony. Even the memories, the impressions, the thoughts of this body
awakened in him now the same aversion as the body itself. The sight of
other people, their remarks, his own reminiscences- everything was for
him a source of agony. Those about him felt this, and instinctively
did not allow themselves to move freely, to talk, to express their
wishes before him. All his life was merged in the one feeling of
suffering and desire to be rid of it.
  There was evidently coming over him that revulsion which would
make him look upon death as the goal of his desires, as happiness.
Hitherto each individual desire, aroused by suffering or privation,
such as hunger, fatigue, thirst, had been satisfied by some bodily
function giving pleasure. But now no physical craving or suffering
received relief, and the effort to relieve them only caused fresh
suffering. And so all desires were merged in one- the desire to be rid
of all his sufferings and their source, the body. But he had no
words to express this desire of deliverance, and so he did not speak
of it, and from habit asked for the satisfaction of desires which
could not now be satisfied. "Turn me over on the other side," he would
say, and immediately after he would ask to be turned back again as
before. "Give me some broth. Take away the broth. Talk of something:
why are you silent?" And directly they began to talk he would close
his eyes, and would show weariness, indifference, and loathing.
  On the tenth day from their arrival in the town, Kitty was unwell.
She suffered from headache and sickness, and she could not get up
all the morning.
  The doctor opined that the indisposition arose from fatigue and
excitement, and prescribed rest.
  After dinner, however, Kitty got up and went as with her work to the
sick man. He looked at her sternly when she came in, and smiled
contemptuously when she said she had been unwell. That day he was
continually blowing his nose, and groaning piteously.
  "How do you feel?" she asked him.
  "Worse," he articulated with difficulty. "In pain!"
  "In pain, where?"
  "Everywhere."
  "It will be over today, you will see," said Marya Nikolaevna. Though
it was said in a whisper, the sick man, whose hearing Levin had
noticed was very keen, must have heard. Levin said "Hush!" to her, and
looked round at the sick man. Nikolai had heard; but these words
produced no effect on him. His eyes had still the same intense,
reproachful look.
  "Why do you think so?" Levin asked her, when she had followed him
into the corridor.
  "He has begun picking at himself," said Marya Nikolaevna.
  "How do you mean?"
  "Like this," she said, tugging at the folds of her woolen skirt.
Levin noticed, indeed, that all that day the patient pulled at
himself, as it were, trying to snatch something away.
  Marya Nikolaevna's prediction came true. Toward night the sick man
was not able to lift his hands, and could only gaze before him with
the same intensely concentrated expression in his eyes. Even when
his brother or Kitty bent over him, so that he could see them, he
looked just the same. Kitty sent for the priest to read the prayer for
the dying.
  While the priest was reading it, the dying man did not show any sign
of life; his eyes were closed. Levin, Kitty and Marya Nikolaevna stood
at the bedside. The priest had not quite finished reading the prayer
when the dying man stretched, sighed, and opened his eyes. The priest,
on finishing the prayer, put the cross to the cold forehead, then
slowly returned it to the stand, and, after standing in silence for
two minutes more, he touched the huge, bloodless hand that was turning
cold.
  "He is gone," said the priest, and would have moved away; but
suddenly there was a faint stir in the mustaches of the dead man, that
seemed glued together, and quite distinctly in the hush they heard
from the bottom of the chest the sharply defined sounds:
  "Not quite.... Soon."
  And a minute later the face brightened, a smile came out under the
mustaches, and the women who had gathered round began carefully laying
out the corpse.
  The sight of his brother, and the nearness of death, revived in
Levin that sense of horror in the face of the insolvable enigma,
together with the nearness and inevitability of death, that had come
upon him that autumn evening when his brother had come to him. This
feeling was now even stronger than before; even less than before did
he feel capable of apprehending the meaning of death, and its
inevitability rose up before him more terrible than ever. But now,
thanks to his wife's presence, that feeling did not reduce him to
despair. In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt
that love saved him from despair, and that his love, under the
menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer.
  The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before
his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to
love and to life.
  The doctor confirmed his former suppositions in regard to Kitty. Her
indisposition consisted of pregnancy.
                             XXI.

  From the moment when Alexei Alexandrovich understood from his
interviews with Betsy and with Stepan Arkadyevich that all that was
expected of him was to leave his wife in peace, without burdening
her with his presence, and that his wife herself desired this, he felt
so distraught that he could come to no decision by himself; he did not
know himself what he wanted now, and, putting himself in the hands
of those who were so pleased to interest themselves in his affairs, he
met everything with unqualified assent. It was only when Anna had left
his house, and the English governess sent to ask him whether she
should dine with him or separately, that for the first time he clearly
comprehended his position, and was appalled by it.
  Most difficult of all in this position was the fact that he could
not in any way connect and reconcile his past with the present. It was
not the past when he had lived happily with his wife that troubled
him. The transition from that past to a knowledge of his wife's
unfaithfulness he had already lived through miserably; that state
had been painful, but he could understand it. If his wife had then, on
declaring to him her unfaithfulness, left him, he would have been
wounded, unhappy, but he would not have been in the hopeless position-
incomprehensible to himself- in which he felt himself now. He could
not now reconcile his immediate past, his tenderness, his love for his
sick wife, and for the other man's child with what was now the case-
with the fact that, seemingly in return for all this, he now found
himself alone, put to shame, a laughingstock, needed by no one, and
despised by everyone.
  For the first two days after his wife's departure Alexei
Alexandrovich received petitioners and his head clerk, drove to the
committee, and went down to dinner in the dining room as usual.
Without giving himself a reason for what he was doing, he strained
every nerve of his being for those two days, simply to preserve an
appearance of composure, and even of indifference. Answering inquiries
about the disposition of Anna Arkadyevna's rooms and belongings, he
had exercised immense self-control to appear like a man in whose
eyes what had occurred was not unforeseen nor out of the ordinary
course of events, and he attained his aim: no one could have
detected in him any signs of despair. But on the second day after
her departure, when Kornei gave him a bill from a fashionable draper's
shop, which Anna had forgotten to pay, and announced that the
shopman was waiting, Alexei Alexandrovich told him to show the man up.
  "Excuse me, Your Excellency, for venturing to trouble you. But if
you direct us to apply to Her Excellency, would you graciously
oblige us with her address?"
  Alexei Alexandrovich pondered, as it seemed to the shopman, and
all at once, turning round, he sat down to the table. Burying his head
in his hands, he sat for a long while in that position, made several
attempts to speak, and stopped short.
  Kornei, perceiving his master's emotion, asked the shopman to call
another time. Left alone, Alexei Alexandrovich realized that he had
not the strength to keep up the role of firmness and composure any
longer. He gave orders for the carriage that was awaiting him to be
taken back, and for no one to be admitted, and he did not go down to
dinner.
  He felt that he could not endure the weight of universal contempt
and exasperation, which he had distinctly seen in the faces of the
shopman and of Kornei and of everyone, without exception, whom he
had met during these two days. He felt that he could not turn aside
from himself the hatred of men, because that hatred did not come
from his being bad (in that case he could have tried to be better),
but from his being shamefully and repulsively unhappy. He knew that
for this, for the very fact that his heart was torn with grief, they
would be merciless to him. He felt that men would crush him as dogs
strangle a mangled dog, yelping with pain. He knew that his sole means
of security against people was to hide his wounds from them, and
instinctively he tried to do this for two days, but now he felt
incapable of keeping up the unequal struggle.
  His despair was even intensified by the consciousness that he was
utterly alone in his sorrow. In all Peterburg there was not a human
being to whom he could express what he was feeling, who would feel for
him, not as a high official, not as a member of society, but simply as
a suffering man; indeed, he had not such a one in the whole world.
  Alexei Alexandrovich grew up an orphan. There were two brothers.
They did not remember their father, and their mother died when
Alexei Alexandrovich was ten years old. The property was a small
one. Their uncle, Karenin, a government official of high standing,
at one time a favorite of the late Czar, had brought them up.
  On completing his high school and university courses with medals,
Alexei Alexandrovich had, with his uncle's aid, immediately started in
a prominent position in the service, and from that time forward he had
devoted himself exclusively to political ambition. In the high
school and the university, and afterward in the service, Alexei
Alexandrovich had never formed a close friendship with anyone. His
brother had been the person nearest to his heart, but he had a post in
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and was always abroad, where he had
died shortly after Alexei Alexandrovich's marriage.
  While he was governor of a province, Anna's aunt, a wealthy
provincial lady, had brought him- middle-aged as he was, though
young for a governor- together with her niece, and had succeeded in
putting him in such a position that he had either to declare himself
or to leave town. Alexei Alexandrovich hesitated a great while.
There were at the time as many reasons for the step as against it, and
there was no overbalancing consideration to outweigh his invariable
rule of abstaining when in doubt. But Anna's aunt had through a common
acquaintance insinuated that he had already compromised the girl,
and that he was in honor bound to propose to her. He proposed, and
concentrated on his betrothed and his wife all the feeling of which he
was capable.
  The attachment he felt to Anna precluded in his heart every need
of intimate relations with others. And now, among all his
acquaintances, he had not one friend. He had plenty of so-called
connections, but no friendships. Alexei Alexandrovich had plenty of
people whom he could invite to dinner, to whose sympathy he could
appeal in any public affair he was concerned about, whose interest
he could reckon upon for anyone he wished to help, with whom he
could candidly discuss other people's business and affairs of state.
But his relations with these people were confined to one clearly
defined channel, and had a certain routine from which it was
impossible to depart. There was one man, a comrade of his at the
university, with whom he had become friendly later, and with whom he
could have spoken of a personal sorrow; but this friend had a post
in the Department of Education in a remote part of Russia. Of the
people in Peterburg the most intimate and most likely were his head
clerk and his doctor.
  Mikhail Vassilievich Sludin, the head clerk, was a
straightforward, intelligent, goodhearted and conscientious man, and
Alexei Alexandrovich was aware of his personal good will. But their
five years of official work together seemed to have put a barrier
between them that cut off warmer relations.
  After signing the papers brought him, Alexei Alexandrovich had sat
for a long while in silence, glancing at Mikhail Vassilievich, and
several times he attempted to speak, but could not. He had already
prepared the phrase: "You have heard of my trouble?" But he ended by
saying as usual: "So you'll get this ready for me?" and with that
dismissed him.
  The other person was the doctor, who had also a kindly feeling for
him; but there had long existed a silent understanding between them
that both were weighed down by work, and always in a hurry.
  Of his women friends, foremost among them Countess Lidia Ivanovna,
Alexei Alexandrovich never thought. All women, simply as women, were
terrible and distasteful to him.
                             XXII.

  Alexei Alexandrovich had forgotten the Countess Lidia Ivanovna but
she had not forgotten him. At the bitterest moment of his lonely
despair she came to him, and, without waiting to be announced,
walked straight into his study. She found him as he was sitting with
his head in both hands.
  "F'ai force la consigne," she said, walking in with rapid steps
and breathing hard with excitement and rapid exertion. "I have heard
all! Alexei Alexandrovich! Dear friend!" she went on, warmly squeezing
his hand in both of hers and gazing with her fine pensive eyes into
his.
  Alexei Alexandrovich, frowning, got up, and, disengaging his hand,
moved a chair up for her.
  "Won't you sit down, Countess? I'm seeing no one because I'm unwell,
Countess," he said, and his lips twitched.
  "Dear friend!" repeated Countess Lidia Ivanovna, never taking her
eyes off his, and suddenly her eyebrows rose at the inner corners,
describing a triangle on her forehead, her ugly yellow face becoming
still uglier, but Alexei Alexandrovich felt that she was sorry for him
and was preparing to cry. And he too was softened; he snatched her
plump hand and proceeded to kiss it.
  "Dear friend!" she said in a voice breaking with emotion. "You ought
not to give way to grief. Your sorrow is a great one, but you ought to
find consolation."
  "I am crushed, I am annihilated, I am no longer a man!" said
Alexei Alexandrovich, letting go her hand, but still gazing into her
brimming eyes. "My position is so awful because I can find nowhere,
I cannot find within me, strength to support me."
  "You will find support; seek it- not in me, though I beseech you
to believe in my friendship," she said, with a sigh. "Our support is
love, that love that He has vouchsafed us. His burden is light," she
said, with the look of ecstasy Alexei Alexandrovich knew so well.
"He will be your support and your succor."
  Although there was in these words a flavor of that sentimental
emotion at her own lofty feelings, and that new mystical fervor
which had lately gained ground in Peterburg, and which seemed to
Alexei Alexandrovich disproportionate, still it was pleasant to him to
hear this now.
  "I am weak. I am crushed. I foresaw nothing, and now I understand
nothing."
  "Dear friend!" repeated Lidia Ivanovna.
  "It's not the loss of what I no longer have; it's not that!" pursued
Alexei Alexandrovich. "I do not grieve for that. But I cannot help
feeling ashamed before other people for the position I am placed in.
It is wrong, but I can't help it- I can't help it."
  "It was not you who performed that noble act of forgiveness, at
which I was moved to ecstasy, and everyone else too, but He, working
within your heart," said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, raising her eyes
rapturously, "and so you cannot be ashamed of your act."
  Alexei Alexandrovich knit his brows, and, crooking his hands, he
cracked his fingers.
  "One must know all the details," he said in his high voice. "A man's
strength has its limits, Countess, and I have reached my limits. The
whole day I have had to be making arrangements, arrangements about
household matters arising" (he emphasized the word arising) "from my
new, solitary position. The servants, the governess, the
accounts.... These pinpricks have stabbed me to the heart, and I
have not the strength to bear it. At dinner... yesterday, I was almost
getting up from the dinner table. I could not bear the way my son
looked at me. He did not ask me the meaning of it all, but he wanted
to ask, and I could not bear the look in his eyes. He was afraid to
look at me, but that is not all..." Alexei Alexandrovich would have
referred to the bill that had been brought him, but his voice shook,
and he stopped. That bill on blue paper, for a hat and ribbons, he
could not recall without a rush of self-pity.
  "I understand, dear friend," said Lidia Ivanovna. "I understand it
all. Succor and comfort you will find not in me, though I have come
only to aid you, if I can. If I could take from off you all these
petty, humiliating cares... I understand that a woman's word, a
woman's superintendence, is needed. You will intrust it to me?"
  Silently and gratefully Alexei Alexandrovich squeezed her hand.
  "Together we will take care of Seriozha. Practical affairs are not
my strong point. But I will set to work. I will be your housekeeper.
Don't thank me. I do it not from myself..."
  "I cannot help thanking you."
  "But, dear friend, do not give way to the feeling of which you
spoke- being ashamed of what is the Christian's highest glory: he
who humbles himself shall be exalted. And you cannot thank me. You
must thank Him, and pray to Him for succor. In Him alone we find
peace, consolation, salvation, and love," she said, and turning her
eyes heavenward, she began praying, as Alexei Alexandrovich gathered
from her silence.
  Alexei Alexandrovich listened to her now, and those expressions
which had seemed to him, if not distasteful, at least exaggerated, now
seemed to him natural and consolatory. Alexei Alexandrovich had
disliked this new enthusiastic fervor. He was a believer, who was
interested in religion primarily in its political aspect, and the
new doctrine which ventured upon several new interpretations, just
because it paved the way to discussion and analysis, was in
principle disagreeable to him. He had hitherto taken up a cold and
even antagonistic attitude to this new doctrine, and with Countess
Lidia Ivanovna, who had been carried away by it, he had never
argued, but by silence had assiduously parried her attempts to provoke
him into argument. Now for the first time he heard her words with
pleasure, and did not inwardly oppose them.
  "I am very, very grateful to you, both for your deeds and for your
words," he said, when she had finished praying.
  Countess Lidia Ivanovna once more squeezed both of her friend's
hands.
  "Now I will enter upon my duties," she said with a smile after a
pause, as she wiped away the traces of tears. "I am going to Seriozha.
Only in the last extremity shall I apply to you." And she got up and
went out.
  Countess Lidia Ivanovna went into Seriozha's part of the house, and,
dropping tears on the scared child's cheeks, she told him that his
father was a saint and his mother was dead.

  Countess Lidia Ivanovna kept her promise. She did actually take upon
herself the care of the organization and management of Alexei
Alexandrovich's household. But she had not overstated the case when
saying that practical affairs were not her strong point. All her
arrangements had to be modified because they could not be carried out,
and they were modified by Kornei, Alexei Alexandrovich's valet, who,
though no one was aware of the fact, now managed Karenin's
household, and quietly and discreetly reported to his master, while
the latter was dressing, all it was necessary for him to know. But
Lidia Ivanovna's help was none the less real; she gave Alexei
Alexandrovich moral support in the consciousness of her love and
respect for him, and still more (as it was soothing to her to believe)
by having almost turned him to Christianity- that is, from an
indifferent and apathetic believer she had turned him into an ardent
and steadfast adherent of the new interpretation of Christian
doctrine, which had been gaining ground of late in Peterburg. It was
easy for Alexei Alexandrovich to believe in this teaching. Alexei
Alexandrovich, like Lidia Ivanovna indeed, and others who shared their
views, was completely devoid of profundity of imagination, that
spiritual faculty in virtue of which the ideas evoked by the
imagination become so actual that they must needs be in harmony with
other ideas, and with reality itself. He saw nothing impossible and
absurd in the idea that death, though existing for unbelievers, did
not exist for him, and that, as he was possessed of the most perfect
faith, of the measure of which he was himself the judge, there was
therefore no sin in his soul, and he was experiencing complete
salvation here on earth.
  It is true that the erroneousness and shallowness of this conception
of his faith was dimly perceptible to Alexei Alexandrovich, and he
knew that when, without the slightest idea that his forgiveness was
the action of a higher power, he had surrendered directly to the
feeling of forgiveness, he had felt more happiness than now, when he
was thinking every instant that Christ was in his heart, and that in
signing official papers he was doing His will. But for Alexei
Alexandrovich it was a necessity to think in that way; it was such a
necessity for him in his humiliation to have some elevated standpoint,
however imaginary, from which, looked down upon by all, he could
look down on others, that he clung, as to his one salvation, to his
delusion of salvation.
                             XXIII.

  The Countess Lidia Ivanovna had, as a very young and enthusiastic
girl, been married to a wealthy man of high rank, a very good-natured,
jovial, and extremely dissipated rake. One month after marriage her
husband abandoned her, and her enthusiastic protestations of affection
he met with an irony and even hostility which people, knowing the
Count's good heart, and seeing no defects in the enthusiastic Lidia,
were at a loss to explain. Though they were divorced and lived
apart, yet whenever the husband met the wife, he invariably behaved to
her with the same malignant irony, the cause of which was
incomprehensible.
  Countess Lidia Ivanovna had long given up being in love with her
husband, but from that time she had never given up being in love
with someone. She was in love with several people at once, both men
and women; she had been in love with almost everyone who had been
particularly distinguished in any way. She was in love with all the
new princes and princesses who married into the Imperial family; she
had been in love with one archbishop, one vicar, and one parish
priest; she had been in love with one journalist, three Slavophils,
with Komissarov, with one minister, one doctor, one English
missionary, and Karenin. All these passions, constantly waning or
growing more ardent, did not prevent her from keeping up the most
extended and complicated relations with the Court and fashionable
society. But from the time that, after Karenin's trouble, she had
taken him under special protection, from the time that she had set
to work in Karenin's household looking after his welfare, she felt
that all her other attachments were not the real thing, and that she
was now genuinely in love, and with no one but Karenin. The feeling
she now experienced for him seemed to her stronger than any of her
former feelings. Analyzing her feeling, and comparing it with former
passions, she distinctly perceived that she would not have been in
love with Komissarov if he had not saved the life of the Czar; that
she would not have been in love with Ristich-Kudzhitsky if there had
been no Slavonic question; but that she loved Karenin for himself, for
his lofty, uncomprehended soul, for the sweet- to her- high notes of
his voice, for his drawling intonation, his weary eyes, his character,
and his soft white hands with their swollen veins. She was not
simply overjoyed at meeting him, but she sought in his face signs of
the impression she was making on him. She tried to please him, not
by her words only, but in her whole person. For his sake it was that
she now lavished more care on her dress than before. She caught
herself in reveries on what might have been, if she had not been
married and he had been free. She blushed with emotion when he came
into the room, she could not repress a smile of rapture when he said
anything amiable to her.
  For several days now Countess Lidia Ivanovna had been in a state
of intense excitement. She had learned that Anna and Vronsky were in
Peterburg. Alexei Alexandrovich must be saved from seeing her, he must
be saved even from the torturing knowledge that that awful woman was
in the same town with him, and that he might meet her any minute.
  Lidia Ivanovna made inquiries through her friends as to what those
shocking people, as she called Anna and Vronsky, intended doing, and
she endeavored so to guide every movement of her friend during those
days that he might not come across them. The young adjutant, a
friend of Vronsky, through whom she obtained her information, and
who hoped through Countess Lidia Ivanovna to obtain a concession, told
her that they had finished their business and were going away next
day. Lidia Ivanovna had already begun to calm down, when the next
morning a note was brought her, the handwriting of which she
recognized with horror. It was the handwriting of Anna Karenina. The
envelope was of paper as thick as bast; on the oblong yellow paper
there was a huge monogram, and the letter smelt of agreeable scent.
  "Who brought it?"
  "A commissionaire from the hotel."
  It was some time before Countess Lidia Ivanovna could sit down to
read the letter. Her excitement brought on an attack of asthma, to
which she was subject. When she had recovered her composure, she
read the following letter in French:

  "Madame la Comtesse- The Christian feelings with which your heart is
filled give me the, I feel, unpardonable boldness to write to you. I
am miserable at being separated from my son. I entreat permission to
see him once before my departure. Forgive me for recalling myself to
your memory. I apply to you and not to Alexei Alexandrovich, simply
because I do not wish to cause that generous man to suffer in
remembering me. Knowing your friendship for him, I know you will
understand me. Could you send Seriozha to me, or should I come to
the house at some fixed hour, or will you let me know when and where I
could see him away from home? I do not anticipate a refusal, knowing
the magnanimity of him with whom it rests. You cannot conceive the
craving I have to see him, and so cannot conceive the gratitude your
help will arouse in me.
                                                           "Anna"

  Everything in this letter exasperated Countess Lidia Ivanovna: its
contents, and the allusion to magnanimity, and especially its free and
easy- as she considered- tone.
  "Say that there is no answer," said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, and
immediately opening her blotting book, she wrote to Alexei
Alexandrovich that she hoped to see him at one o'clock at the levee.
  "I must talk with you of a grave and painful subject. There we
will arrange where to meet. Best of all at my house, where I will
order tea as you like it. Urgent. He lays the cross, but He gives
the strength to bear it," she added, so as to give him some slight
preparation.
  Countess Lidia Ivanovna usually wrote some two or three letters a
day to Alexei Alexandrovich. She enjoyed that form of communication,
which gave opportunity for a refinement and air of mystery not
afforded by their personal interviews.
                             XXIV.

  The levee was drawing to a close. People met as they were going
away, and gossiped of the latest news, of the newly bestowed honors,
and the changes in the positions of the higher functionaries.
  "If only Countess Marya Borissovna were Minister of War, and
Princess Vatkovsky were Commander in Chief," said a gray-headed,
little old man in a gold-embroidered uniform, addressing a tall,
handsome maid of honor who had questioned him about the new
appointments.
  "And if I were one of the adjutants," said the maid of honor,
smiling.
  "You have an appointment already. You're over the Ecclesiastical
Department. And your assistant's Karenin."
  "Good day, Prince!" said the little old man to a man who came up
to him.
  "What were you saying of Karenin?" said the Prince.
  "He and Putiatov have received the order of Alexandre Nevsky."
  "I thought he had it already."
  "No. Just look at him," said the little old man, pointing with his
embroidered hat to Karenin in a Court uniform, with the new red ribbon
across his shoulders, standing in the doorway of the hall with an
influential member of the Imperial Council. "Pleased and happy as
brass," he added, stopping to shake hands with a handsome gentleman of
the bedchamber of colossal proportions.
  "No- he's looking older," said the gentleman of the bedchamber.
  "From overwork. He's always drawing up projects nowadays. He won't
let a poor devil go nowadays till he's explained it all to him under
heads."
  "Looking older, did you say? Il fait des passions. I believe
Countess Lidia Ivanovna's jealous now of his wife."
  "Oh, come now, please don't say any harm of Countess Lidia
Ivanovna."
  "Why, is there any harm in her being in love with Karenin?"
  "But is it true Madame Karenina's here?"
  "Well, not here in the palace, but in Peterburg. I met her yesterday
with Alexei Vronsky, bras dessus, bras dessous, on the Morskaia."
  "C'est un homme qui n'a pas..." the gentleman of the bedchamber
was beginning, but he stopped to make room, bowing, for a member of
the Imperial family to pass.
  Thus people talked incessantly of Alexei Alexandrovich, finding
fault with him and laughing at him, while he, blocking up the way of
the member of the Imperial Council he had captured, was explaining
to him point by point his new financial project, never interrupting
his discourse for an instant for fear he should escape.
  Almost at the same time that his wife left Alexei Alexandrovich
there had come to him that bitterest moment in the life of an
official- the moment when his upward career comes to a full stop. This
full stop had arrived and everyone perceived it, but Alexei
Alexandrovich himself was not yet aware that his career was over.
Whether it was due to his feud with Stremov, or his misfortune with
his wife, or simply that Alexei Alexandrovich had reached his
predestined limits, it had become evident to everyone in the course of
that year that his career was at an end. He still filled a position of
consequence, he sat on many commissions and committees, but he was a
man whose day was over, and from whom nothing was expected. Whatever
he said, whatever he proposed, was heard as though it were something
long familiar, and the very thing that was not needed. But Alexei
Alexandrovich was not aware of this, and, on the contrary, being cut
off from direct participation in governmental activity, he saw more
clearly than ever the errors and defects in the action of others,
and thought it his duty to point out means for their correction.
Shortly after his separation from his wife, he began writing his first
note on the new judicial procedure, the first of the endless series of
notes he was destined to write in the future.
  Alexei Alexandrovich did not merely fail to observe his hopeless
position in the official world, he was not merely free from anxiety on
this head- he was positively more satisfied than ever with his own
activity.
  "He that is married careth for the things of the world, how he may
please his wife; he that is unmarried careth for the things that
belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord," says the Apostle
Paul, and Alexei Alexandrovich, who was now guided in every action
by Scripture, often recalled this text. It seemed to him that ever
since he had been left without a wife, he had, in these very
projects of reform, been serving the Lord more zealously than ever.
  The unmistakable impatience of the member of the Council trying to
get away from him did not trouble Alexei Alexandrovich; he gave up his
exposition only when the member of the Council, seizing his chance
when one of the Imperial family was passing, slipped away from him.
  Left alone, Alexei Alexandrovich looked down, collecting his
thoughts, then looked casually about him and walked toward the door,
where he hoped to meet Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
  "And how strong they all are- how sound physically," thought
Alexei Alexandrovich, looking at the powerfully built gentleman of the
bedchamber with his well-groomed, perfumed whiskers, and at the red
neck of the Prince, pinched by his tight uniform. He had to pass
them on his way. "Truly is it said that all the world is evil," he
thought, with another sidelong glance at the calves of the gentleman
of the bedchamber.
  Moving forward deliberately, Alexei Alexandrovich bowed with his
customary air of weariness and dignity to the gentleman who had been
talking about him, and, looking toward the door, his eyes sought
Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
  "Ah! Alexei Alexandrovich!" said the little old man, with a
malicious light in his eyes, at the moment when Karenin had come up to
them, and was nodding with a frigid gesture. "I haven't
congratulated you yet," said the old man, pointing to his newly
received ribbon.
  "Thank you," answered Alexei Alexandrovich. "What an exquisite day
today," he added, laying emphasis in his peculiar way on the word
exquisite.
  That they laughed at him he was well aware, but he did not expect
anything but hostility from them; he was used to that by now.
  Catching sight of the yellow shoulders of Lidia Ivanovna jutting out
above her corset, and her fine pensive eyes summoning him to her,
Alexei Alexandrovich smiled, revealing untarnished white teeth, and
went toward her.
  Lidia Ivanovna's dress had cost her great pains, as indeed all her
dresses had done of late. Her aim in dress was now quite the reverse
of what she had pursued thirty years before. Then her desire had
been to adorn herself with something, and the more adorned the better.
Now, on the contrary, she was perforce decked out in a way so
inconsistent with her age and her figure, that her one anxiety was
to contrive that the contrast between these adornments and her own
exterior should not be too appalling. And as far as Alexei
Alexandrovich was concerned she succeeded, and was in his eyes
attractive. For him she was the one island not only of good will to
him, but of love in the midst of the sea of hostility and jeering that
surrounded him.
  Passing through rows of ironical eyes, he was drawn as naturally
to her loving glance as a plant to the sun.
  "I congratulate you," she said to him, her eyes on his ribbon.
  Suppressing a smile of pleasure, he shrugged his shoulders,
closing his eyes, as though to say that that could not be a source
of joy to him. Countess Lidia Ivanovna was very well aware that it was
one of his chief sources of satisfaction, though he never admitted it.
  "How is our angel?" said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, meaning Seriozha.
  "I can't say I was quite pleased with him," said Alexei
Alexandrovich, raising his eyebrows and opening his eyes. "And
Sitnikov is not satisfied with him." (Sitnikov was the tutor to whom
Seriozha's secular education had been intrusted.) "As I have mentioned
to you, there's a sort of coldness in him toward the most important
questions which ought to touch the heart of every man and every
child...." Alexei Alexandrovich began expounding his views on the sole
question that interested him outside the service- the education of his
son.
  When Alexei Alexandrovich, with Lidia Ivanovna's help, had been
brought back anew to life and activity, he felt it his duty to
undertake the education of the son left on his hands. Having never
before taken any interest in educational questions, Alexei
Alexandrovich devoted some time to the theoretical study of the
subject. After reading several books on anthropology, education, and
didactics, Alexei Alexandrovich drew up a plan of education, and,
engaging the best tutor in Peterburg to superintend it, he set to
work, and the subject continually absorbed him.
  "Yes- but the heart! I see in him his father's heart, and with
such a heart a child cannot go far wrong," said Lidia Ivanovna with
enthusiasm.
  "Yes, perhaps.... As for me, I do my duty. It's all I can do."
  "You're coming to me," said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, after a
pause; "we have to speak of a subject painful for you. I would give
anything to have spared you certain memories, but others are not of
the same mind. I have received a letter from her. She is here in
Peterburg."
  Alexei Alexandrovich shuddered at the allusion to his wife, but
immediately his face assumed the deathlike rigidity which expressed
utter helplessness in the matter.
  "I was expecting it," he said.
  Countess Lidia Ivanovna looked at him ecstatically, and tears of
rapture at the greatness of his soul came into her eyes.
                             XXV.

  When Alexei Alexandrovich came into the Countess Lidia Ivanovna's
snug little boudoir, decorated with old china and hung with portraits,
the lady herself had not yet made her appearance.
  She was changing her dress.
  A cloth was laid on a round table, and on it stood a china tea
service and a silver teakettle and spirit lamp. Alexei Alexandrovich
looked idly about at the endless familiar portraits which adorned
the room, and, sitting down to the table, he opened a New Testament
lying upon it. The rustle of the Countess's silk skirt drew his
attention off.
  "Well, now, we can sit quietly," said Countess Lidia Ivanovna,
slipping hurriedly with an agitated smile between the table and the
sofa, "and talk over our tea."
  After some words of preparation, Countess Lidia Ivanovna,
breathing hard and flushing crimson, gave into Alexei
Alexandrovich's hands the letter she had received.
  After reading the letter, he sat a long while in silence.
  "I don't think I have the right to refuse her," he said, timidly
lifting his eyes.
  "Dear friend, you never see evil in anyone!"
  "On the contrary, I see that all is evil. But whether it is just..."
  His face showed irresolution, and a seeking for counsel, support,
and guidance, in a matter he did not understand.
  "No," Countess Lidia Ivanovna interrupted him; "there are limits
to everything. I can understand immorality," she said, not quite
truthfully, since she never could understand that which leads women to
immorality; "but I don't understand cruelty- to whom? To you! How
can she stay in the town where you are? No, the longer one lives the
more one learns. And I'm learning to understand your loftiness and her
baseness."
  "Who is to cast a stone?" said Alexei Alexandrovich, unmistakably
pleased with the part he had to play. "I have forgiven all, and so I
cannot deprive her of what is exacted by love in her- by her love
for her son...."
  "But is that love, my friend? Is it sincere? Admitting that you have
forgiven- that you forgive... have we the right to work on the soul of
that angel? He looks on her as dead. He prays for her, and beseeches
God to have mercy on her sins. And it is better so. But now what
will he think?"
  "I had not thought of that," said Alexei Alexandrovich, evidently
agreeing.
  Countess Lidia Ivanovna hid her face in her hands and was silent.
She was praying.
  "If you ask my advice," she said, having finished her prayer and
uncovered her face, "I do not advise you to do this. Do you suppose
I don't see how you are suffering, how this has torn open your wounds?
But supposing that, as always, you don't think of yourself- what can
it lead to?- To fresh suffering for you, to torture for the child.
If there were a trace of humanity left in her, she ought not to wish
it herself. No, I have no hesitation in saying I advise against it,
and if you will intrust it to me, I will write to her."
  And Alexei Alexandrovich consented, and Countess Lidia Ivanovna sent
the following letter in French:

  "Dear Madame- To be reminded of you might result in your son's
asking questions, which could not be answered without implanting in
the child's soul a spirit of censure toward what should be for him
sacred, and therefore I beg you to interpret your husband's refusal in
the spirit of Christian love. I pray to Almighty God to have mercy
on you.

                                                 "Countess Lidia"

  This letter attained the secret object which Countess Lidia Ivanovna
had concealed from herself. It wounded Anna to the quick.
  For his part, Alexei Alexandrovich, on returning home from Lidia
Ivanovna's, could not all that day concentrate himself on his usual
pursuits, and find that spiritual peace of one saved and believing
which he had felt of late.
  The thought of his wife, who had so greatly sinned against him,
and toward whom he had been so saintly, as Countess Lidia Ivanovna had
so justly told him, ought not to have troubled him; but he was not
easy; he could not understand the book he was reading; he could not
drive away harassing recollections of his relations with her, of the
mistake which, as it now seemed, he had made in regard to her. The
memory of how he had received her confession of infidelity on their
way home from the races (especially his having insisted only on the
observance of external decorum, and not having sent a challenge)
tortured him like a remorse. He was tortured, too, by the thought of
the letter he had written her; and, most of all, his forgiveness,
which nobody wanted, and his care of the other man's child, seared his
heart with shame and remorse.
  And just the same feeling of shame and remorse he felt now, as he
reviewed all his past with her, recalling the awkward words in
which, after long wavering, he proposed to her.
  "But how have I been to blame?" he said to himself. And this
question always excited another question in him- whether they felt
differently, did their loving and marrying differently, these Vronskys
and Oblonskys... these gentlemen of the bedchamber, with their fine
calves. And there passed before his mind a whole series of these
succulent, vigorous, self-confident men, who always and everywhere
drew his inquisitive attention in spite of himself. He tried to dispel
these thoughts, he tried to persuade himself that he was not living
for this transient life, but for the life of eternity, and that
there was peace and love in his heart. But the fact that he had in
this transient, trivial life made, as it seemed to him, a few
trivial mistakes, tortured him as though the eternal salvation in
which he believed had no existence. But this temptation did not last
long, and soon there was reestablished once more in Alexei
Alexandrovich's soul the peace and the loftiness by virtue of which he
could forget what he did not want to remember.
                             XXVI.

  "Well, Kapitonich?" said Seriozha, coming back rosy and good-humored
from his walk the day before his birthday, and giving his Russian
plaited overcoat to the tall old hall porter, who smiled down at the
little person from the height of his long figure. "Well, has the
bandaged official been here today? Did papa see him?"
  "He saw him. The minute the head clerk came out, I announced him,"
said the hall porter with a good-humored wink. "Here, I'll take it
off."
  "Seriozha!" said his Slavonic tutor, stopping in the doorway leading
to the inner rooms. "Take it off yourself." But Seriozha, though he
heard the tutor's feeble voice, did not pay attention to it. He
stood keeping hold of the hall porter's shoulder knot and gazing
into his face.
  "Well, and did papa do what he wanted for him?"
  The hall porter nodded his head affirmatively.
  The bandaged official, who had already been seven times to ask
some favor of Alexei Alexandrovich, interested both Seriozha and the
hall porter. Seriozha had come upon him in the hall, and had heard him
plaintively beg the hall porter to announce him, saying that he and
his children had death staring them in the face.
  Since then Seriozha, having met him a second time in the hall,
took great interest in him.
  "Well, was he very glad?" he asked.
  "Glad? I should think so! Almost dancing as he walked away."
  "And has anything been left for me?" asked Seriozha, after a pause.
  "Come, sir," said the hall porter; then with a shake of his head
he whispered: "Something from the Countess."
  Seriozha understood at once that what the hall porter was speaking
of was a present from Countess Lidia Ivanovna for his birthday.
  "You don't say? Where?"
  "Kornei took it to your papa. A fine plaything it must be, too!"
  "How big? Like this?"
  "Rather small, but a fine thing."
  "A book?"
  "No-something else. Run along, run along, Vassilii Lukich is calling
you," said the porter, hearing the tutor's steps approaching, and,
carefully taking away from his shoulder knot the little hand in the
glove half-pulled off, he indicated with his head Lukich, the tutor.
  "Vassilii Lukich, I'm coming in one tiny minute!" answered
Seriozha with gay and loving smile which always won over the careful
Vassilii Lukich.
  Seriozha was too happy; everything was too delightful for him to
be able to help sharing with his friend the porter the family good
fortune, of which he had heard from Lidia Ivanovna's niece during
his walk in the public gardens. This piece of good news seemed to
him particularly important from its coming at the same time with the
joy of the bandaged official, and his own joy at toys having come
for him. It seemed to Seriozha that this was a day on which everyone
ought to be glad and happy.
  "You know papa's received the order of Alexandre Nevsky today?"
  "To be sure I do! People have already been here to congratulate
him."
  "And is he glad?"
  "Glad at the Czar's gracious favor? I should think so! It's a
proof he's deserved it," said the porter sternly and seriously.
  Seriozha fell to musing, gazing up at the face of the porter,
which he had thoroughly studied in every detail, especially at his
chin, which hung down between the gray whiskers- never seen by
anyone but Seriozha, who saw him only from below.
  "Well, and has your daughter been to see you lately?"
  The porter's daughter was a ballet dancer.
  "When is she to come on weekdays? They've their lessons to learn,
too. And you've your lesson, sir; run along."
  On coming into the room Seriozha, instead of sitting down to his
lessons, told his tutor of his supposition that what had been
brought him must be a toy railway. "What do you think?" he inquired.
  But Vassilii Lukich was thinking of nothing but the necessity of
learning the grammar lesson for the teacher, who was coming at two.
  "No, do just tell me, Vassilii Lukich," he asked suddenly, when he
was seated at their worktable with the book in his hands, "what is
greater than the Alexandre Nevsky? You know papa's received the
Alexandre Nevsky?"
  Vassilii Lukich replied that the Vladimir was greater than the
Alexandre Nevsky.
  "And higher still?"
  "Well, highest of all is the Andrei Pervozvanny."
  "And higher than the Andrei?"
  "I don't know."
  "What- you don't know?" And Seriozha, leaning on his elbows, sank
into deep meditation.
  His meditations were of the most complex and diverse character. He
imagined his father's having been suddenly presented with both the
Vladimir and the Andrei today, and in consequence being much better
tempered at his lesson; and dreamed how, when he was grown up, he
would himself receive all the orders, and what might be invented
higher than the Andrei. Directly any higher order were invented, he
would win it. They would make a higher one still, and he would
immediately win that too.
  The time passed in such meditations, and when the teacher came,
the lesson about the adverbs of place and time and manner of action
was not ready, and the teacher was not only displeased, but hurt. This
touched Seriozha. He felt he was not to blame for not having learned
the lesson; however much he tried, he was utterly unable to do it.
As long as the teacher was explaining to him, he believed him and
seemed to comprehend, but as soon as he was left alone, he was
positively unable to recollect and to understand that the short and
familiar word "suddenly" is an adverb of manner of action. Still he
was sorry that he had disappointed the teacher, and he was anxious
to comfort him.
  He chose a moment when the teacher was looking in silence at the
book.
  "Mikhail Ivanich, when is your birthday?" he asked, all of a sudden.
  "You'd much better be thinking about your work. Birthdays are of
no importance to a rational being. It's a day like any other, on which
one has to do one's work."
  Seriozha looked intently at the teacher, at his scanty beard, at his
spectacles, which had slipped down below the ridge on his nose, and
fell into so deep a reverie that he heard nothing of what the
teacher was explaining to him. He knew that the teacher did not
think what he had said- he felt it from the tone in which it was said.
"But why have they all agreed to speak, just in the same manner,
always the dreariest and most useless stuff? Why does he keep me
off; why doesn't he love me?" he asked himself mournfully, and could
not think of an answer.
                             XXVII.

  After the lesson with the teacher of grammar came his father's
lesson. While waiting for his father, Seriozha sat at the table
playing with a penknife, and fell to musing. Among Seriozha's favorite
occupations was searching for his mother during his walks. He did
not believe in death generally, and in her death in particular, in
spite of what Lidia Ivanovna had told him and his father had
confirmed, and it was just because of that, and after he had been told
she was dead, that he had begun looking for her when out for a walk.
Every woman of full, graceful figure with dark hair was his mother. At
the sight of such a woman such a feeling of tenderness stirred
within him that his breath failed him, and tears came into his eyes.
And he was on tiptoe with expectation that she would come up to him,
would lift her veil. All her face would be visible, she would smile,
she would hug him, he would sniff her fragrance, feel the softness
of her arms, and cry with happiness, just as he had one evening lain
on her lap while she tickled him, and he laughed and bit her white,
ring-covered fingers. Later, when he accidentally learned from his old
nurse that his mother was not dead, and his father and Lidia
Ivanovna had explained to him that she was dead to him because she was
wicked (which he could not possibly believe, because he loved her), he
went on seeking her and expecting her in the same way. That day in the
public gardens there had been a lady in a lilac veil, whom he had
watched with a throbbing heart, believing it to be her as she came
toward them along the path. The lady had not come up to them, but
had disappeared somewhere. That day, more intensely than ever,
Seriozha felt a rush of love for her, and now, waiting for his father,
he forgot everything, and cut all round the edge of the table with his
penknife, staring straight before him with sparkling eyes, and
thinking of her.
  "Here is your papa," Vassilii Lukich diverted him.
  Seriozha jumped up and went up to his father, and, kissing his hand,
looked at him intently, trying to discover signs of his joy at
receiving the Alexandre Nevsky.
  "Did you have a good walk?" said Alexei Alexandrovich, sitting
down in his easy chair, pulling the volume of the Old Testament to him
and opening it. Although Alexei Alexandrovich had more than once
told Seriozha that every Christian ought to know Scripture history
thoroughly, he often referred to the Bible himself during the
lesson, and Seriozha observed this.
  "Yes, it was very good indeed, papa," said Seriozha, sitting
sideways on his chair and rocking it, which was forbidden. "I saw
Nadinka" (Nadinka was a niece of Lidia Ivanovna's who was being
brought up in her house). "She told me you'd been given a new star.
Are you glad, papa?"
  "First of all, don't rock your chair, please," said Alexei
Alexandrovich. "And secondly, it's not the reward that's precious, but
the work itself. And I could have wished you had understood that. If
you now are going to work, to study, in order to win a reward, then
the work will seem hard to you; but when you work" (Alexei
Alexandrovich, as he spoke, thought of how he had been sustained by
a sense of duty through the wearisome labor of the morning, consisting
of signing one hundred and eighty papers), "loving your work, you will
find your reward for it."
  Seriozha's eyes hitherto shining with gaiety and tenderness, grew
dull and dropped before his father's gaze. This was the same
long-familiar tone his father always took with him, and Seriozha had
learned by now to fall in with it. His father always talked to him- so
Seriozha felt- as though he were addressing some boy of his own
imagination, one of those boys who exist in books, utterly unlike
himself. And Seriozha always tried, before his father, to pretend
being this storybook boy.
  "You understand that, I hope?" said his father.
  "Yes, papa," answered Seriozha, acting the part of the imaginary
boy.
  The lesson consisted of learning by heart several verses out of
the Evangel and the repetition of the beginning of the Old
Testament. The verses from the Evangel Seriozha knew fairly well,
but at the moment when he was saying them he became so absorbed in
watching the sharply protruding, bony knobbiness of his father's
forehead, that he lost the thread, and he transposed the end of one
verse and the beginning of another. It was evident to Alexei
Alexandrovich that he did not understand what he was saying, and
this irritated him.
  He frowned, and began explaining what Seriozha had heard many
times before and never could remember, because he understood it too
well, just as that "suddenly" is an adverb of manner of action.
Seriozha looked with scared eyes at his father, and could think of
nothing but whether his father would make him repeat what he had said,
as he sometimes did. And this thought so alarmed Seriozha that he
now understood nothing. But his father did not make him repeat it, and
passed on to the lesson out of the Old Testament. Seriozha recounted
the events themselves well enough, but when he had to answer questions
as to what certain events prefigured, he knew nothing, though he had
already been punished over this lesson. The passage at which he was
utterly unable to say anything, and began fidgeting and cutting the
table and swinging his chair, was where he had to tell of the
patriarchs before the Flood. He did not know one of them, except
Enoch, who had been taken up alive to heaven. Last time he had
remembered their names, but now he had forgotten them utterly, chiefly
because Enoch was the personage he liked best in the whole of the
Old Testament, and Enoch's translation to heaven was connected in
his mind with a whole long train of thought, in which he became
absorbed now while he gazed with fascinated eyes at his father's watch
chain and a half-unbuttoned button on his waistcoat.
  In death, of which they talked to him so often, Seriozha disbelieved
entirely. He did not believe that those he loved could die, above
all that he himself would die. That was to him something utterly
inconceivable and impossible. But he had been told all men die; he had
asked people, indeed, whom he trusted, and they, too, had confirmed
it; his old nurse, too, said the same, though reluctantly. But Enoch
had not died, and so it followed that everyone did not die. "And why
cannot anyone else so serve God and be taken alive to heaven?" thought
Seriozha. Bad people- that is, those Seriozha did not like- might die,
but the good might all be like Enoch.
  "Well, what are the names of the patriarchs?"
  "Enoch, Enos-"
  "But you have said that already. This is bad. Seriozha, very bad. If
you don't try to learn what is most necessary of all for a Christian,"
said his father, getting up, "whatever can interest you? I am
displeased with you, and Piotr Ignatich" (this was the chief
pedagogue) "is displeased with you.... I shall have to punish you."
  His father and his teacher were both displeased with Seriozha, and
he certainly did learn his lessons very badly. But still it could
not be said he was a stupid boy. On the contrary, he was far
cleverer than the boys his teacher held up as examples to Seriozha. In
his father's opinion, he did not want to learn what he was taught.
In reality he could not learn that. He could not, because the claims
of his own soul were more binding on him that those claims his
father and his teacher made upon him. Those claims were in opposition,
and he was in direct conflict with his governors.
  He was nine years old; he was a child; but he knew his own soul,
it was precious to him; he guarded it as the eyelid guards the eye,
and without the key of love he let no one into his soul. His
teachers complained that he would not learn, while his soul was
brimming over with thirst for knowledge. And he learned from
Kapitonich, from his nurse, from Nadinka, from Vassilii Lukich- but
not from his teachers. The spring his father and his teachers reckoned
upon to turn their mill wheels had long oozed at another place, and
its waters did their work there.
  His father punished Seriozha by not letting him go to see Nadinka,
Lidia Ivanovna's niece; but this punishment turned out happily for
Seriozha. Vassilii Lukich was in a good humor, and showed him how to
make windmills. The whole evening passed over this work and in
dreaming how to make a windmill on which he could turn himself-
clutching at the wings or tying himself on and whirling round. Of
his mother Seriozha did not think all the evening, but, when he had
gone to bed, he suddenly remembered her, and prayed in his own words
that tomorrow his mother, in time for his birthday, might leave off
hiding herself and come to him.
  "Vassilii Lukich, do you know what I prayed for tonight- extra
beside the regular things?"
  "That you might learn your lessons better?"
  "No."
  "Toys?"
  "No. You'll never guess. A splendid thing- but it's a secret. When
it comes to pass I'll tell you. Can't you guess?"
  "No, I can't guess. You tell me," said Vassilii Lukich with a smile,
which was rare with him. "Come, lie down, I'm putting out the candle."
  "Without the candle I can see better what I see and what I prayed
for. There! I was almost telling the secret!" said Seriozha,
laughing gaily.
  When the candle was taken away, Seriozha heard his mother and felt
her presence. She stood over him, and her loving gaze caressed him.
But then came windmills- a penknife- everything became confused, and
he fell asleep.
                             XXVIII.

  On arriving in Peterburg, Vronsky and Anna stayed at one of the best
hotels; Vronsky apart in a lower story, Anna above with her child, its
nurse, and her maid, in a large suite of four rooms.
  On the day of his arrival Vronsky went to his brother's. There he
found his mother, who had come from Moscow on business. His mother and
sister-in-law greeted him as usual: they asked him about his stay
abroad, and talked of their common acquaintances, but did not let drop
a single word in allusion to his connection with Anna. His brother
came next morning to see Vronsky, and of his own accord asked him
about her, and Alexei Vronsky told him directly that he looked upon
his connection with Madame Karenina as marriage; that he hoped to
arrange a divorce, and then to marry her, and until then he considered
her as much a wife as any other wife, and he begged him to tell
their mother and his wife so.
  "If the world disapproves, I don't care," said Vronsky; "but if my
relations want to be on terms of relationship with me, they will
have to be on the same terms with my wife."
  The elder brother, who had always a respect for his younger
brother's judgment, could not well tell whether he was right or not
till the world had decided the question; for his part he had nothing
against it, and with Alexei he went up to see Anna.
  Before his brother, as before everyone, Vronsky addressed Anna
with a certain formality, treating her as he might a very intimate
friend, but it was understood that his brother knew their real
relations, and they talked about Anna's going to Vronsky's estate.
  In spite of all his social experience Vronsky was, in consequence of
the new position in which he was placed, laboring under a strange
misapprehension. One would have thought he must have understood that
society was closed for him and Anna; but now some vague ideas had
sprung up in his brain that this was only the case in old-fashioned
days, and that now, with the rapidity of modern progress (he had
unconsciously become by now a partisan of every sort of progress), the
views of society had changed, and that the question of their reception
by society was far from decided. "Of course," he thought, "she would
not be received at Court, but intimate friends can, and must, look
at it in the proper light."
  One may sit for several hours at a stretch with one's legs crossed
in the same position, if one knows that there's nothing to prevent
one's changing one's position; but if a man knows that he must
remain sitting so with crossed legs, then cramps come on, the legs
begin to twitch and to strain toward the spot to which one would
like to draw them. This was what Vronsky was experiencing in regard to
the world. Though at the bottom of his heart he knew that the world
was shut on them, he put it to the test whether the world had not
changed by now and would not receive them. But he very quickly
perceived that though the world was open for him personally, it was
closed for Anna. Just as in the game of cat and mouse, the hands
raised for him were dropped to bar the way for Anna.
  One of the first ladies of Peterburg society whom Vronsky saw was
his cousin Betsy.
  "At last!" she greeted him joyfully. "And Anna? How glad I am! Where
are you stopping? I can fancy after your delightful travels you must
find our poor Peterburg horrid. I can fancy your honeymoon in Rome.
How about the divorce? Is that all over?"
  Vronsky noticed that Betsy's enthusiasm waned when she learned
that no divorce had as yet taken place.
  "People will cast a stone at me, I know," she said, "but I shall
come and see Anna; yes, I shall certainly come. You won't be here
long, I suppose?"
  And she did certainly come to see Anna the same day, but her tone
was not at all the same as in former days. She unmistakably prided
herself on her courage, and wished Anna to appreciate the fidelity
of her friendship. She only stayed ten minutes, talking of society
news, and on leaving she said:
  "You've never told me when the divorce is to be? Supposing I'm ready
to fling my cap over the mill, other starchy people will give you
the cold shoulder until you're married. And that's so simple nowadays.
Ca se fait. So you're going on Friday? Sorry we shan't see each
other again."
  From Betsy's tone Vronsky might have grasped what he had to expect
from the world; but he made another effort in his own family. His
mother he did not reckon upon. He knew that his mother, who had been
so enthusiastic over Anna at their first acquaintance, would have no
mercy on her now for having ruined her son's career. But he had more
hope of Varia, his brother's wife. He fancied she would not cast a
stone, and would go simply and directly to see Anna, and would receive
her in her own house.
  The day after his arrival Vronsky went to her, and finding her
alone, expressed his wishes directly.
  "You know, Alexei," she said after hearing him, "how fond I am of
you, and how ready I am to do anything for you; but I have not spoken,
because I knew I could be of no use to you and to Anna Arkadyevna,"
she said, articulating the name "Anna Arkadyevna" with particular
care. "Don't suppose, please, that I judge her. Never! Perhaps in
her place I should have done the same. I don't and can't enter into
that," she said, glancing timidly at his gloomy face. "But one must
call things by their names. You want me to go and see her, to ask
her here, and to rehabilitate her in society; but do understand that I
cannot do so. I have daughters growing up, and I must live in the
world for my husband's sake. Well, I'm ready to come and see Anna
Arkadyevna- she will understand that I can't ask her here, or I should
have to do so in such a way that she would not meet people who look at
things differently; that would offend her. I can't raise her..."
  "Oh, I don't regard her as having fallen more than hundreds of women
you do receive!" Vronsky interrupted her still more gloomily, and he
got up in silence, understanding that his sister-in-law's decision was
not to be shaken.
  "Alexei! Don't be angry with me. Please understand that I'm not to
blame," began Varia, looking at him with a timid smile.
  "I'm not angry with you," he said still as gloomily; "but this is
doubly painful to me. I'm sorry, too, that this means breaking up
our friendship- if not breaking up, at least weakening it. You will
understand that for me, too, it cannot be otherwise."
  And with that he left her.
  Vronsky knew that further efforts were useless, and that he had to
spend these few days in Peterburg as though in a strange town,
avoiding every sort of relation with his own old circle in order not
to be exposed to the annoyances and humiliations which were so
intolerable to him. One of the most unpleasant features of his
position in Peterburg was that Alexei Alexandrovich and his name
seemed to meet him everywhere. He could not begin to talk of
anything without the conversation turning on Alexei Alexandrovich,
he could not go anywhere without risk of meeting him. So at least it
seemed to Vronsky, just as it seems to a man with a sore finger that
he is continually, as though on purpose, grazing his sore finger
against everything.
  Their stay in Peterburg was the more painful to Vronsky because he
perceived all the time a sort of new mood he could not understand in
Anna. At one time she would seem in love with him, and the next she
would become cold, irritable, and impenetrable. She was worrying
over something, and keeping something back from him, and did not
seem to notice the humiliations which poisoned his existence, and
which for her, with her delicate intuition, must have been still
more unbearable.
                             XXIX.

  One of Anna's objects in coming back to Russia had been to see her
son. From the day she left Italy the thought of seeing him had never
ceased to agitate her. And, as she got nearer to Peterburg, the
delight and importance of this meeting grew ever greater in her
imagination. She did not even put to herself the problem of how to
arrange it. It seemed to her natural and simple to see her son when
she should be in the same town with him. But on her arrival in
Peterburg she was suddenly made distinctly aware of her present
position in society, and she grasped the fact that to arrange this
meeting was no easy matter.
  She had now been two days in Peterburg. The thought of her son never
left her for a single instant, but she had not yet seen him. To go
straight to the house, where she might meet Alexei Alexandrovich- that
she felt she had no right to do. She might be refused admittance and
insulted. To write and so enter into relations with her husband- the
thought of doing that made her miserable; she could only be at peace
when she did not think of her husband. To get a glimpse of her son out
walking, finding out where and when he went out, was not enough for
her; she had so looked forward to this meeting, she had so much she
must say to him, she so longed to embrace him, to kiss him. Seriozha's
old nurse might be a help to her and show her what to do. But the
nurse was not now living in Alexei Alexandrovich's house. In this
uncertainty, and in efforts to find the nurse, two days had slipped
by.
  Hearing of the close intimacy between Alexei Alexandrovich and
Countess Lidia Ivanovna, Anna decided on the third day to write her
a letter, which cost her great pains, and in which she intentionally
said that permission to see her son must depend on her husband's
magnanimity. She knew that if the letter were shown to her husband, he
would keep up his role of magnanimity, and would not refuse her
request.
  The commissionaire who took the letter had brought her back the most
cruel and unexpected answer- that there was no answer. She had never
felt so humiliated as at the moment when, sending for
commissionaire, she heard from him the exact account of how he had
waited, and how afterward he had been told there was no answer. Anna
felt humiliated, insulted, but she saw that from her point of view
Countess Lidia Ivanovna was right. Her suffering was the more poignant
since she had to bear it in solitude. She could not and would not
share it with Vronsky. She knew that to him, although he was the
primary cause of her distress, the question of her seeing her son
would seem a matter of very little consequence. She knew that he would
never be capable of understanding all the depth of her suffering, that
for his cool tone at any allusion to it she would begin to hate him.
And she dreaded that more than anything in the world, and so she hid
from him everything that related to her son.
  Spending the whole day at home she considered ways of seeing her
son, and had reached a decision to write to her husband. She was
just composing this letter when she was handed the letter from Lidia
Ivanovna. The Countess's silence had subdued and depressed her, but
the letter, all that she read between the lines in it, so
exasperated her, this malice was so revolting beside her passionate,
legitimate tenderness for her son, that she turned against other
people and left off blaming herself.
  "This coldness is simulation of feeling!" she said to herself. "They
must needs insult me and torture the child, and I am to submit to
it! Not on any consideration! She is worse than I am. I don't lie,
anyway." And she decided on the spot that next day, Seriozha's
birthday, she would go straight to her husband's house, bribe the
servants, deceive the people, but at any cost see her son and overturn
the hideous deception with which they were encompassing the unhappy
child.
  She went to a toyshop, bought toys, and thought over a plan of
action. She would go early in the morning at eight o'clock, when
Alexei Alexandrovich would be certain not to be up. She would have
money in her hand to give the hall porter and the footman, so that
they should let her in, and, without raising her veil, she would say
that she had come from Seriozha's godfather to congratulate him, and
that she had been charged to leave the toys at his bedside. She had
prepared everything but the words she should say to her son. Often she
dreamed of it, she could never think of anything.
  The next day, at eight o'clock in the morning, Anna got out of a
hired coach and rang at the front entrance of her former home.
  "Run and see what's wanted. Some lady," said Kapitonich, who, not
yet dressed, in his overcoat and galoshes, had peeped out of the
window and seen a lady in a veil standing close up to the door. His
assistant, a lad Anna did not know, had no sooner opened the door to
her than she came in, and pulling a three-rouble note out of her
muff put it hurriedly into his hand.
  "Seriozha- Sergei Alexeich," she said, and was going on.
Scrutinizing the note, the porter's assistant stopped her at the
second glass door.
  "Whom do you want?" he asked.
  She did not hear his words and made no answer.
  Noticing the embarrassment of the unknown lady, Kapitonich went
out to her, opened the second door for her, and asked her what she was
pleased to want.
  "From Prince Skorodumov for Sergei Alexeich," she said.
  "He's not up yet," said the porter, looking at her attentively.
  Anna had not anticipated that the absolutely unchanged hall of the
house where she had lived for nine years would so greatly affect
her. Memories sweet and painful rose one after another in her heart,
and for a moment she forgot what she was here for.
  "Would you kindly wait?" said Kapitonich, taking off her fur cloak.
  As he took off the cloak, Kapitonich glanced at her face, recognized
her, and made her a low bow in silence.
  "Please walk in, Your Excellency," he said to her.
  She tried to say something, but her voice refused to utter any
sound; with a guilty and imploring glance at the old man she went with
light, swift steps up the stairs. Bent double, and his galoshes
catching in the steps, Kapitonich ran after her, trying to overtake
her.
  "The tutor's there; maybe he's not dressed. I'll let him know."
  Anna still mounted the familiar staircase, not understanding what
the old man was saying.
  "This way, to the left, if you please. Excuse its not being tidy.
He's in the former smoking room now," the hall porter said, panting.
"Excuse me, wait a little, Your Excellency; I'll just see," he said,
and overtaking her, he opened the high door and disappeared behind it.
Anna stood still waiting. "He's only just awake," said the hall
porter, coming out.
  And at the very instant the porter said this, Anna caught the
sound of a childish yawn. From the sound of this yawn alone she knew
her son and seemed to see him living before her eyes.
  "Let me in; go away!" she said and went in through the high doorway.
On the right of the door stood a bed, and sitting up in the bed was
the boy. His little body bent forward, his nightshirt unbuttoned, he
was stretching and still yawning. The instant his lips came together
they curved into a blissfully sleepy smile, and with that smile he
slowly and deliciously rolled back again.
  "Seriozha!" she whispered, walking noiselessly up to him.
  When she was parted from him, and all this latter time when she
had been feeling a fresh rush of love for him, she had pictured him as
he was at four years old, when she had loved him most of all. Now he
was not even the same as when she had left him; he was farther than
ever from the four-year-old baby, more grown and thinner. How thin his
face was, how short his hair was! What long hands! How he had
changed since she left him! But it was he with his head, his lips, his
soft neck and broad little shoulders.
  "Seriozha!" she repeated, in the child's very ear.
  He raised himself again on his elbow, turned his tousled head from
side to side, as though looking for something, and opened his eyes.
Quietly and inquiringly he looked for several seconds at his mother
standing motionless before him, then all at once he smiled a
blissful smile, and shutting his eyes again, rolled not backward but
toward her, into her arms.
  "Seriozha! My darling boy!" she said, breathing hard and putting her
arms around his plump little body.
  "Mother!" he said, wriggling about in her arms so as to touch her
hands with different parts of him.
  Smiling sleepily still, with closed eyes, he flung his fat little
arms round her shoulders, rolled toward her, with the delicious sleepy
warmth and fragrance that is only found in children, and began rubbing
his face against her neck and shoulders.
  "I knew," he said, opening his eyes. "It's my birthday today. I knew
you'd come. I'll get up directly."
  And saying that he dropped asleep.
  Anna looked at him hungrily; she saw how he had grown and changed in
her absence. She knew, and did not know, the bare legs so long now,
that were thrust out below the quilt; she knew those short-cropped
curls on his neck in which she had so often kissed him. She touched
all this and could say nothing; tears choked her.
  "What are you crying for, mother?" he said, waking up completely.
"Mother, what are you crying for?" he cried in a tearful voice.
  "I?... I won't cry... I'm crying for joy. It's so long since I've
seen you. I won't, I won't," she said, gulping down her tears and
turning away. "Come, it's time for you to dress now," she added, after
a pause, and, never letting go his hands, she sat down by his
bedside on the chair, where his clothes were put ready for him.
  "How do you dress without me? How..." she made an attempt to talk
simply and cheerfully, but she could not, and again she turned away.
  "I don't have a cold bath- papa didn't order it. And you've not seen
Vassilii Lukich? He'll come in soon. Why, you're sitting on my
clothes!"
  And Seriozha went off into a peal of laughter. She looked at him and
smiled.
  "Mother, darling, sweet one!" he shouted, flinging himself on her
again and hugging her. It was as if only now, on seeing her smile,
he fully grasped what had happened. "I don't want that on," he said,
taking off her hat. And, as it were, seeing her afresh without her
hat, he fell to kissing her again.
  "But what did you think about me? You didn't think I was dead?"
  "I never believed it."
  "You didn't believe it, my sweet?"
  "I knew, I knew!" he repeated his favorite phrase, and snatching the
hand that was stroking his hair, he pressed the open palm to his mouth
and kissed it.
                             XXX.

  Meanwhile Vassilii Lukich had not at first understood who this
lady was, and had learned from their conversation that it was no other
person than the mother who had left her husband, and whom he had not
seen, as he had entered the house after her departure. He was in doubt
whether to go in or not, or whether to communicate with Alexei
Alexandrovich. Reflecting finally that his duty was to get Seriozha up
at the hour fixed, and that it was therefore not his business to
consider who was there, the mother or anyone else, but simply to do
his duty, he finished dressing, went to the door and opened it.
  But the embraces of the mother and child, the sound of their voices,
and what they were saying, made him change his mind. He shook his
head, and with a sigh he closed the door. "I'll wait another ten
minutes," he said to himself, clearing his throat and wiping away
tears.
  Among the servants of the household there was intense excitement all
this time. All had heard that their mistress had come, and that
Kapitonich had let her in, and that she was even now in the nursery,
and everyone knew that their master always went in person to the
nursery at nine o'clock, and everyone fully comprehended that it was
impossible for the husband and wife to meet, and that they must
prevent it. Kornei, the valet, going down to the hall porter's room,
asked who had let her in, and how it was he had done so, and
ascertaining that Kapitonich had admitted her and shown her up, he
gave the old man a talking-to. The hall porter was doggedly silent,
but when Kornei told him he ought to be sent packing Kapitonich darted
up to him, and, shaking his hands in Kornei's face, began:
  "Oh yes, to be sure you'd not have let her in! After ten years'
service, and never a word but of kindness, and there you'd up and say,
'Be off, go along, get away with you!' Oh yes, you're a shrewd one
at politics, I dare say! You don't need to be taught how to swindle
the master, and to filch raccoon fur coats!"
  "Soldier!" said Kornei contemptuously, and he turned to the nurse
who was coming in. "Here, what do you think, Maria Efimovna: he let
her in without a word to anyone," Kornei said addressing her.
"Alexei Alexandrovich will be down immediately- and will go into the
nursery!"
  "A pretty business, a pretty business!" said the nurse, "You, Kornei
Vassilyevich- you'd best detain the master some way or other, while
I'll run and get her away somehow. A pretty business!"
  When the nurse went into the nursery, Seriozha was telling his
mother how he and Nadinka had had a fall in tobogganing downhill,
and had turned over three times. She was listening to the sound of his
voice, watching his face and the play of expression on it, touching
his hand, but she did not follow what he was saying. She must go,
she must leave him- this was the only thing she was thinking and
feeling. She heard the steps of Vassilii Lukich coming up to the
door and coughing; she heard, too, the steps of the nurse as she
came near; but she sat like one turned to stone, incapable of speaking
or rising.
  "Mistress, darling!" began the nurse, going up to Anna and kissing
her hands and shoulders. "God has brought joy indeed to our boy on his
birthday. You haven't changed one bit."
  "Oh, nurse dear, I didn't know you were in the house," said Anna,
rousing herself for a moment.
  "I'm not living here- I'm living with my daughter. I came for the
birthday, Anna Arkadyevna, darling!"
  The nurse suddenly burst into tears, and fell to kissing her hand
again.
  Seriozha, with radiant eyes and smiles, holding his mother by one
hand and his nurse by the other, pattered on the rug with his chubby
little bare feet. The tenderness shown by his beloved nurse to his
mother threw him into an ecstasy.
  "Mother! She often comes to see me, and when she comes..." he was
beginning, but he stopped, noticing that the nurse was saying
something in a whisper to his mother, and that in his mother's face
there was a look of dread and something like shame, which was so
strangely unbecoming to her.
  She went up to him.
  "My sweet!" she said.
  She could not say good-by, but the expression on her face said it,
and he understood. "Darling, darling Kootik!" she used the name by
which she had called him when he was little "you won't forget me?
You..." but she could not say more.
  How often afterward she thought of words she might have said. But
now she did not know what to say, and could say nothing. But
Seriozha knew all she wanted to say to him. He understood that she was
unhappy and loved him. He understood even what the nurse had
whispered. He had caught the words "Always at nine o'clock," and he
knew that this was said of his father, and that his father and
mother could not meet. That he understood, but one thing he could
not understand- why there should be a look of dread and shame in her
face?... She was not at fault, but she was afraid of his father and
ashamed of something. He would have liked to put a question that would
have set at rest this doubt, but he did not dare; he saw that she
was miserable, and he pitied her. Silently he pressed close to her and
whispered:
  "Don't go yet. He won't come just yet."
  The mother held him away from her to see whether he was thinking,
what he said to her, and in his frightened face she read not only that
he was speaking of his father, but, as it were, asking her what he
ought to think about his father.
  "Seriozha, my darling," she said, "love him; he's better and
kinder than I am, and I have done him wrong. When you grow up you will
judge."
  "There's no one better than you!..." he cried in despair through his
tears, and, clutching her by the shoulders, he began squeezing her
with all his force to him, his arms trembling with the strain.
  "My sweet, my little one!" said Anna, and she cried as weakly and
childishly as he.
  At that moment the door opened; Vassilii Lukich came in. At the
other door there was the sound of steps, and the nurse in a scared
whisper said, "He's coming," and gave Anna her hat.
  Seriozha sank on the bed and sobbed, hiding his face in his hands.
Anna removed his hands, once more kissed his wet face, and with
rapid steps went to the door. Alexei Alexandrovich walked in,
meeting her. Seeing her, he stopped short and bowed his head.
  Although she had just said he was better and kinder than she, in the
rapid glance she flung at him, taking in his whole figure in all its
details, feelings of repulsion and hatred for him, and jealousy for
her son, took possession of her. With a swift gesture she put down her
veil, and, quickening her pace, almost ran out of the room.
  She had not time to undo, and so carried back with her, the parcel
of toys she had chosen the day before in a toyshop with such love
and sorrow.
                             XXXI.

  Intensely as Anna had longed to see her son, and long as she had
been thinking of it and preparing herself for it, she had not in the
least expected that seeing him would affect her so deeply. On
getting back to her lonely rooms in the hotel she could not for a long
while understand why she was there. "Yes, it's all over, and I am
again alone," she said to herself, and, without taking off her hat she
sat down in a low chair by the hearth. Fixing her eyes on a bronze
clock standing on a table between the windows, she tried to think.
  The French maid brought from abroad came in to suggest she should
dress. She gazed at her wonderingly and said, "Later on." A footman
offered her coffee. "Later on," she said.
  The Italian nurse, after taking the baby out in her best, came in
with her, and brought her to Anna. The plump, well-fed little baby, on
seeing her mother, as she always did, held out her chubby little
hands, and with a smile on her toothless mouth, began, like a fish
with a float, bobbing her fingers up and down the starched folds of
her embroidered pinafore, making them rustle. It was impossible not to
smile, not to kiss the baby, impossible not to hold out a finger for
her to clutch, crowing and prancing all over; impossible not to
offer her a lip which she sucked into her little mouth by way of a
kiss. And all this Anna did, and took her in her arms and made her
dance, and kissed her fresh little cheek and bare little elbows; but
at the sight of this child it was plainer than ever to her that the
feeling she had for her could not be called love in comparison with
what she felt for Seriozha. Everything in this baby was charming,
but for some reason all this did not go deep to her heart. On her
first child, though the child of an unloved father, had been
concentrated all the love that had never found satisfaction. Her
baby girl had been born in the most painful circumstances and had
not had a hundredth part of the care and thought which had been
concentrated on her first child. Besides, in the little girl
everything was still in the future, while Seriozha was by now almost a
personality, and a personality dearly loved. In him there was a
conflict of thoughts, and of feelings; he understood her, he loved
her, he judged her, she thought, recalling his words and his eyes. And
she was forever- not physically only but spiritually- divided from
him, and it was impossible to set this right.
  She gave the baby back to the nurse, let her go, and opened the
locket in which there was Seriozha'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
singular 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, 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 he is!"
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.
  "But where is he? How is it he leaves me alone in my misery?" she
thought all at once with a feeling of reproach, forgetting she had
herself kept from him everything concerning her son. She sent to ask
him to come to her immediately; with a throbbing heart she awaited
him, rehearsing to herself the words in which she would tell him
all, and the expressions of love with which he would console her.
The messenger returned with the answer that he had a visitor with him,
but that he would come immediately, and that he asked whether she
would let him bring with him Prince Iashvin, who had just arrived in
Peterburg. "He's not coming alone, and since dinner yesterday he has
not seen me," she thought; "he's not coming so that I could tell him
everything, but coming with Iashvin." And all at once a strange idea
came to her: What if he had ceased to love her?
  And going over the events of the last few days, it seemed to her
that she saw in everything a confirmation of this terrible idea: the
fact that he had not dined at home yesterday, and the fact that he had
insisted on their taking separate sets of rooms at Peterburg, and that
even now he was not coming to her alone, as though he were trying to
avoid meeting her face to face.
  "But he ought to tell me so. I must know that it is so. If I knew
it, then I'd know what I should do," she said to herself, utterly
unable to picture to herself the position she would be in if she
were convinced of his not caring for her. She thought he had ceased to
love her, she felt close upon despair, and consequently she felt
exceptionally alert. She rang for her maid and went to her dressing
room. As she dressed, she took more care over her appearance than
she had done all these days, as though he might, if he had grown
cold to her, fall in love with her again because she had dressed and
arranged her hair in the way most becoming to her.
  She heard the bell ring before she was ready.
  When she went into the drawing room it was not he, but Iashvin,
who met her eyes. Vronsky was looking through the photographs of her
son, which she had forgotten on the table, and he made no haste to
look round at her.
  "We have met already," she said, putting her little hand into the
huge hand of Iashvin, whose bashfulness was so queerly out of
keeping with his immense frame and coarse face. "We met last year at
the races. Give them to me," she said, with a rapid movement snatching
from Vronsky the photographs of her son, and glancing significantly at
him with flashing eyes. "Were the races good this year? Instead of
them I saw the races in the Corso in Rome. But you don't care for life
abroad," she said with a cordial smile. "I know you and all your
tastes, though I have seen so little of you."
  "I'm awfully sorry for that, for my tastes are mostly bad," said
Iashvin, gnawing at his left mustache.
  Having talked a little while, and noticing that Vronsky glanced at
the clock, Iashvin asked her whether she would be staying much
longer in Peterburg, and unbending his huge figure, reached after
his cap.
  "Not long, I think," she said hesitatingly, glancing at Vronsky.
  "So then we shan't meet again?" said Iashvin getting up and
turning to Vronsky. "Where do you have your dinner?"
  "Come and dine with me," said Anna resolutely, angry it seemed
with herself for her embarrassment, but flushing as she always did
when she defined her position before a fresh person. "The dinner
here is not good, but at least you will see him. There is no one of
his old friends in the regiment Alexei cares for as he does for you."
  "Delighted," said Iashvin with a smile, from which Vronsky could see
that he liked Anna very much.
  Iashvin said good-by, and went away; Vronsky stayed behind.
  "Are you going too?" she said to him.
  "I'm late already," he answered. "Run along! I'll catch up in a
moment," he called to Iashvin.
  She took him by the hand, and without taking her eyes off him, gazed
at him while she ransacked her mind for the words to say that would
keep him.
  "Wait a minute, there's something I want to say to you," and
taking his broad hand she pressed it on her neck. "Oh, was it right my
asking him to dinner?"
  "You did quite right," he said with a serene smile that showed his
close teeth, and he kissed her hand.
  "Alexei, you have not changed to me?" she said, pressing his hand in
both of hers. "Alexei, I am miserable here. When are we going away?"
  "Soon, soon. You wouldn't believe how disagreeable our way of living
here is to me too," he said, and he drew away his hand.
  "Well, go, go!" she said, offended, and she walked quickly away from
him.
                             XXXII.

  When Vronsky returned home, Anna was not yet home. Soon after he had
left, some lady, so they told him, had come to see her, and she had
gone out with her. That she had gone out without leaving word where
she was going, that she had not yet come back, and that all the
morning she had been going about somewhere without a word to him-
all this, together with the strange look of excitement in her face
in the morning, and the recollection of the hostile tone with which
she had before Iashvin almost snatched her son's photographs out of
his hands, made him serious. He decided he absolutely must speak
openly with her. And he waited for her in her drawing room. But Anna
did not return alone, but brought with her her old unmarried aunt,
Princess Oblonskaia. This was the lady who had come in the morning,
and with whom Anna had gone out shopping. Anna appeared not to
notice Vronsky's worried and inquiring expression, and began a
lively account of her morning's shopping. He saw that there was
something working within her; in her flashing eyes, when they rested
for a moment on him, there was an intense concentration, and in her
words and movements there was that nervous rapidity and grace which,
during the early period of their intimacy, had so fascinated him,
but which now so disturbed and alarmed him.
  The dinner was laid for four. All were gathered together and about
to go into the little dining room when Tushkevich made his
appearance with a message from Princess Betsy. Princess Betsy begged
her to excuse her not having come to say good-by; she had been
indisposed, but begged Anna to come to her between half-past six and
half-past eight o'clock. Vronsky glanced at Anna at the precise
limit of time, so suggestive of steps having been taken that she
should meet no one; but Anna appeared not to notice it.
  "Very sorry that I can't come just between half-past six and
nine," she said with a faint smile.
  "The Princess will be very sorry."
  "And so shall I."
  "You're going, no doubt, to hear Patti?" said Tushkevich.
  "Patti? You give me an idea. I would go if it were possible to get a
box."
  "I can get one," Tushkevich offered his services.
  "I should be very, very grateful to you," said Anna. "But won't
you dine with us?"
  Vronsky gave a hardly perceptible shrug. He was at a complete loss
to understand what Anna was about. What had she brought the old
Princess Oblonskaia home for, what had she made Tushkevich stay to
dinner for, and, most amazing of all, why was she sending him for a
box? Could she possibly think in her position of going to Patti's
benefit, where all the circle of her acquaintances would be? He looked
at her with serious eyes, but she responded with that defiant,
half-mirthful, half-desperate look, the meaning of which he could
not comprehend. At dinner Anna was in aggressively high spirits- she
almost flirted both with Tushkevich and with Iashvin. When they got up
from dinner and Tushkevich had gone to get a box at the opera, Iashvin
went to smoke, and Vronsky went down with him to his own rooms.
After sitting there for some time he ran upstairs. Anna was already
dressed in a low-necked gown of light silk and velvet that she had had
made in Paris, and with costly white lace on her head, framing her
face, and particularly becoming, showing up her dazzling beauty.
  "Are you really going to the theater?" he said, trying not to look
at her.
  "Why do you ask with such alarm?" she said, wounded again at his not
looking at her. "Why shouldn't I go?"
  She appeared not to understand the meaning of his words.
  "Oh, of course there's no reason whatever," he said frowning.
  "That's just what I say," she said, willfully refusing to see the
irony of his tone, and quietly turning back her long, perfumed glove.
  "Anna, for God's sake! What is the matter with you?" he said,
watching her exactly as once her husband had done.
  "I don't understand what you are asking."
  "You know that it's out of the question to go."
  "Why so? I'm not going alone. Princess Varvara has gone to dress-
she is going with me."
  He shrugged his shoulders with an air of perplexity and despair.
  "But do you mean to say you don't know?..." he began.
  "But I don't care to know!" she almost shrieked. "I don't care to.
Do I regret what I have done? No, no, no! If it were all to do again
from the beginning, it would be the same. For us, for you and for
me, there is only one thing that matters, whether we love each
other. Other people we need not consider. Why are we living here apart
and not seeing each other? Why can't I go? I love you, and I don't
care for anything," she said in Russian, glancing at him with a
peculiar, obscure for him, gleam in her eyes, "if you have not changed
to me.... Why don't you look at me?"
  He looked at her. He saw all the beauty of her face and full
dress, always so becoming to her. But now her beauty and elegance were
just what irritated him.
  "My feeling cannot change, you know, but I beg you, I entreat
you," he said again in French, with a note of tender supplication in
his voice, but with coldness in his eyes.
  She did not hear his words, but she saw the coldness of his eyes,
and answered with irritation:
  "And I beg you to explain why I should not go."
  "Because it might cause you..." He hesitated.
  "I don't understand. Iashvin n'est compromettant, and Princess
Varvara is no worse than others. Oh, here she is!"
                             XXXIII.

  Vronsky for the first time experienced a feeling of anger against
Anna, almost a hatred for her intentional refusal to understand her
own position. This feeling was aggravated by his being unable to
tell her plainly the cause of his anger. If he had told her directly
what he was thinking, he would have said: "In that dress, with a
Princess only too well known to everyone, to show yourself at the
theater is equivalent not merely to acknowledging your position as a
fallen woman, but is flinging down a challenge to society- that is
to say, cutting yourself off from it forever."
  He could not say that to her. "But how can she fail to see it, and
what is going on within her?" he said to himself He felt at the same
time that his respect for her was diminished while his sense of her
beauty was intensified.
  He went back scowling to his rooms, and, sitting down beside
Iashvin, who, with his long legs stretched out on a chair, was
drinking cognac and Seltzer water, he ordered a glass of the same
for himself.
  "You were talking of Lankovsky's Powerful. That's a fine horse,
and I would advise you to buy him," said Iashvin, glancing at his
comrade's gloomy face. "His hindquarters aren't quite first-rate,
but the legs and head- one couldn't wish for anything better."
  "I think I will take him," answered Vronsky.
  Their conversation about horses interested him, but he did not for
an instant forget Anna, and could not help listening to the sound of
steps in the corridor and looking at the clock on the chimney piece.
  "Anna Arkadyevna gave orders to announce that she has gone to the
theater."
  Iashvin, tipping another glass of cognac into the bubbling water,
drank it and got up, buttoning his coat.
  "Well, let's go," he said, faintly smiling under his mustache, and
showing by this smile that he knew the cause of Vronsky's
gloominess, and did not attach any significance to it.
  "I'm not going," Vronsky answered gloomily.
  "Well, I must- I promised to. Good-by then. If you do, come to the
stalls; you can take Krassinsky's stall," added Iashvin as he went
out.
  "No, I'm busy."
  "A wife is a care, but it's worse when she's not a wife," thought
Iashvin, as he walked out of the hotel.
  Vronsky, left alone, got up from his chair and began pacing up and
down the room.
  "And what's today? The fourth series.... Iegor and his wife are
there, and my mother, most likely. Of course all Peterburg's there.
Now she's gone in, taken off her cloak and come into the glare.
Tushkevich, Iashvin, Princess Varvara," he pictured them to
himself.... "What about me? Either that I'm frightened, or have
given up to Tushkevich the right to protect her? From every point of
view- stupid, stupid!... And why is she putting me in such a
position?" he said with a gesture of despair.
  With that gesture he knocked against the table, on which there was
standing the Seltzer water and the decanter of cognac, and almost
upset it. He tried to catch it, let it slip, and angrily kicked the
table over and rang.
  "If you care to be in my service," he said to the valet who came in,
"you had better remember your duties. This shouldn't be here. You
ought to have cleared away."
  The valet, conscious of his own innocence, would have defended
himself, but, glancing at his master, he saw from his face that the
only thing to do was to be silent, and hurriedly threading his way
in and out, dropped down on the carpet and began gathering up the
whole and broken glasses and bottles.
  "That's not your duty; send the waiter to clear away, and get my
dress coat out."

  Vronsky arrived at the theater at half-past eight The performance
was in full swing. The little old boxkeeper, recognizing Vronsky as he
helped him off with his fur coat, called him "Your Excellency," and
suggested he should not take a check but should simply call Fiodor. In
the brightly lighted corridor there was no one but the box opener
and two footmen with fur cloaks on their arms listening at the
doors. Through the closed doors came the sounds of the discreet
staccato accompaniment of the orchestra, and a single female voice
rendering distinctly a musical phrase. The door opened to let the
box opener slip through, and the phrase drawing to the end reached
Vronsky's hearing clearly. But the doors were closed again at once,
and Vronsky did not hear the end of the phrase and the cadence of
the accompaniment, though he knew from the thunder of applause that it
was over. When he entered the hall, brilliantly lighted with
chandeliers and gas jets, the noise was still going on. On the stage
the singer, bowing and smiling, flashing with bare shoulders and
with diamonds, was, with the help of the tenor who had given her his
arm, gathering up the bouquets that were clumsily flying over the
footlights. Then she went up to a gentleman with glossy pomaded hair
parted down the middle, who was stretching across the footlights
holding out something to her, and all the public in the stalls as well
as in the boxes was in excitement, craning forward, shouting and
clapping. The conductor in his high chair assisted in passing the
offering, and straightened his white tie. Vronsky walked into the
middle of the stalls, and, standing still, began looking about him.
That day less than ever was his attention turned upon the familiar,
habitual surroundings, the stage, the noise, all the familiar,
uninteresting, particolored herd of spectators in the packed theater.
  There were, as always, the same ladies of some sort with officers of
some sort in the back of the boxes; the same gaily dressed women-
God knows who- and uniforms and black coats; the same dirty crowd in
the upper gallery, and among the crowd, in the boxes and in the
front rows, were some forty of the real people, men and women. And
to those oases Vronsky at once directed his attention, and with them
he entered at once into relation.
  The act was over when he went in, and so he did not go straight to
his brother's box, but going up to the first row of stalls stopped
at the footlights with Serpukhovskoy, who, standing with one knee,
raised and his heel on the footlights, caught sight of him in the
distance and beckoned to him, smiling.
  Vronsky had not yet seen Anna. He purposely avoided looking in her
direction. But he knew by the direction of people's eyes where she
was. He looked round discreetly, but he was not seeking her; expecting
the worst, his eyes sought for Alexei Alexandrovich. To his relief
Alexei Alexandrovich was not in the theater that evening.
  "How little of the military man there is left in you!" Serpukhovskoy
was saying to him. "A diplomat, an artist, something of that sort, one
would say."
  "Yes, it was like going back home when I put on a dress coat,"
answered Vronsky, smiling and slowly taking out his opera glasses.
  "Well, I'll own I envy you there. When I come back from abroad and
put on this," he touched his shoulder knot, "I regret my freedom."
  Serpukhovskoy had long given up all hope of Vronsky's career, but he
liked him as before, and was now particularly cordial to him.
  "What a pity you were not in time for the first act!"
  Vronsky, listening with half an ear, moved his opera glasses from
the stalls and scanned the boxes. Near a lady in a turban and a bald
old man, who seemed to blink angrily in the moving opera glasses,
Vronsky suddenly caught sight of Anna's head, proud, strikingly
beautiful, and smiling in its frame of lace. She was in the fifth box,
twenty paces from him. She was sitting in front, and, slightly
turning, was saying something to Iashvin. The setting of her head on
her handsome, broad shoulders, and the restrained excitement and
brilliance of her eyes and her whole face reminded him of her just
as he had seen her at the ball in Moscow. But he felt utterly
different toward her beauty now. In his feeling for her now there
was no element of mystery, and so her beauty, though it attracted
him even more intensely than before, gave him now a sense of injury.
She was not looking in his direction, but Vronsky felt that she had
seen him already.
  When Vronsky turned the opera glasses again in that direction, he
noticed that Princess Varvara was particularly red, and kept
laughing unnaturally and looking round at the next box. Anna,
folding her fan and tapping it on the red velvet, was gazing away
and did not see, and obviously did not wish to see, what was taking
place in the next box. Iashvin's face wore the expression which was
common when he was losing at cards. Scowling, he sucked the left tip
of his mustache further and further into his mouth, and cast
sidelong glances at the next box.
  In that box on the left were the Kartassovs. Vronsky knew them,
and knew that Anna was acquainted with them. Madame Kartassova, a thin
little woman, was standing up in her box, and, her back turned upon
Anna, she was putting on a mantle that her husband was holding for
her. Her face was pale and angry, and she was talking excitedly.
Kartassov, a fat, bald man, was continually looking round at Anna,
while he attempted to soothe his wife. When the wife had gone out, the
husband lingered a long while, and tried to catch Anna's eye,
obviously anxious to bow to her. But Anna, with unmistakable
intention, avoided noticing him, and talked to Iashvin, whose
cropped head was bent down to her. Kartassov went out without making
his salutation, and the box was left empty.
  Vronsky could not understand exactly what had passed between the
Kartassovs and Anna, but he saw that something humiliating for Anna
had happened. He knew this both from what he had seen, and most of all
from the face of Anna, who, he could see, was taxing every nerve to
carry through the part she had taken up. And in maintaining this
attitude of external composure she was completely successful. Anyone
who did not know her and her circle, who had not heard all the
utterances of the women expressive of commiseration, indignation and
amazement, that she should show herself in society, and show herself
so conspicuously with her lace and her beauty, would have admired
the serenity and loveliness of this woman without a suspicion that she
was undergoing the sensations of a man in the stocks.
  Knowing that something had happened, but not knowing precisely what,
Vronsky felt a thrill of agonizing anxiety, and hoping to find out
something, he went toward his brother's box. Purposely choosing the
way round farthest from Anna's box, he jostled as he came out
against the colonel of his old regiment, talking to two acquaintances.
Vronsky heard the name of Karenin, and noticed how the colonel
hastened to address Vronsky loudly by name, with a meaning glance at
his companions.
  "Ah, Vronsky! When are you coming to the regiment? We can't let
you off without a supper. You're our- one of the most thorough,"
said the colonel of his regiment.
  "I can't stop, awfully sorry, another time," said Vronsky, and he
ran upstairs toward his brother's box.
  The old countess, Vronsky's mother, with her steel-gray curls, was
in his brother's box. Varia with the young Princess Sorokina met him
in the corridor.
  Leaving the Princess Sorokina with her mother, Varia held out her
hand to her brother-in-law, and began immediately to speak of what
interested him. She was more excited than he had ever seen her.
  "I think it's mean and hateful, and Madame Kartassova had no right
to do it. Madame Karenina..." she began.
  "But what is it? I don't know."
  "What? You haven't heard?"
  "You know I should be the last person to hear of it."
  "There isn't a more spiteful creature than that Madame Kartassova!"
  "But what did she do?"
  "My husband told me.... She has insulted Madame Karenina. Her
husband began talking to her across the box, and Madame Kartassova
made a scene. She said something aloud, they say, something insulting,
and went away."
  "Count, your maman is asking for you," said the young Princess
Sorokina, peeping out of the door of the box.
  "I've been expecting you all the while," said his mother, smiling
sarcastically. "You were nowhere to be seen."
  Her son saw that she could not suppress a smile of delight.
  "Good evening, maman. I have come to you," he said coldly.
  "Why aren't you going to faire la cour a Madame Karenina?" she
went on, when Princess Sorokina had moved away. "Elle fait
sensation. On oublie la Patti pour elle."
  "Maman, I have asked you not to say anything to me of that," he
answered, scowling.
  "I'm only saying what everyone's saying."
  Vronsky made no reply, and saying a few words to Princess
Sorokina, he went away. At the door he met his brother.
  "Ah, Alexei!" said his brother. "How disgusting! Idiot of a woman,
nothing else.... I wanted to go straight to her. Let's go together."
  Vronsky did not hear him. With rapid steps he went downstairs; he
felt that he must do something, but he did not know what. Anger with
her for having put herself and him in such a false position,
together with pity for her suffering, filled his heart. He went
down, and made straight for Anna's box. At her box stood Stremov,
talking to her.
  "There are no more tenors. Le moule en est brise!"
  Vronsky bowed to her and stopped to greet Stremov.
  "You came in late, I think, and have missed the best song," Anna
said to Vronsky, glancing ironically, he thought, at him.
  "I am a poor judge of music," he said, looking sternly at her.
  "Like Prince Iashvin," she said smiling, "who considers that Patti
sings too loud.- Thank you," she said, her little hand in its long
glove taking the playbill Vronsky picked up, and suddenly at that
instant her lovely face quivered. She got up and went into the
interior of the box.
  Noticing in the next act that her box was empty, Vronsky, rousing
many an indignant "Hush!" in the silent audience, went out in the
middle of a solo and drove home.
  Anna was already at home. When Vronsky went up to her, she was in
the same dress she had worn at the theater. She was sitting in the
first armchair against the wall, looking straight before her. She
looked at him, and at once resumed her former position.
  "Anna," he said.
  "You, you are to blame for everything!" she cried, with tears of
despair and hatred in her voice, getting up.
  "I begged, I implored you not to go; I knew it would be
unpleasant..."
  "Unpleasant?" she cried. "Hideous! As long as I live I shall never
forget it. She said it was a disgrace to sit beside me."
  "A silly woman's chatter," he said, "but why risk it, why
provoke?..."
  "I hate your calm. You ought not to have brought me to this. If
you had loved me..."
  "Anna! How does the question of my love come in?..."
  "Oh, if you loved me, as I love, if you were tortured as I am..."
she said, looking at him with an expression of terror.
  He was sorry for her, and angry notwithstanding. He assured her of
his love because he saw that this was the only means of soothing
her, and he did not reproach her in words, but in his heart he
reproached her.
  And the asseverations of his love, which seemed to him so trivial
that he was ashamed to utter them, she drank in eagerly, and gradually
became calmer. The next day, completely reconciled, they left for
the country.
                         PART SIX

                             I.

  Darya Alexandrovna spent the summer with her children at Pokrovskoe,
at her sister Kitty Levin's. The house on her own estate was quite
in ruins, and Levin and his wife had persuaded her to spend the summer
with them. Stepan Arkadyevich greatly approved of the arrangement.
He said he was very sorry his official duties prevented him from
spending the summer in the country with his family, which would have
been the greatest happiness for him; and remaining in Moscow, he
came down to the country from time to time for a day or two. Besides
the Oblonskys, with all their children and their governess, the old
Princess, too, came to stay that summer with the Levins, as she
considered it her duty to watch over her inexperienced daughter in her
interesting condition. Moreover, Varenka, Kitty's friend abroad,
kept her promise to come to Kitty when she was married, and stayed
with her friend. All of these were friends or relations of Levin's
wife. And though he liked them all, he rather regretted his own
Levin world and ways, which was smothered by this influx of the
"Shcherbatsky element," as he called it to himself. Of his own
relations there stayed with him only Sergei Ivanovich, but he too
was a man of the Koznishev and not the Levin stamp, so that the
Levin spirit was utterly obliterated.
  In the Levins' house, so long deserted, there were now so many
people that almost all the rooms were occupied, and almost every day
it happened that the old Princess, sitting down to table, counted them
all over, and put the thirteenth grandson or granddaughter at a
separate table. And Kitty, with her careful housekeeping, had no
little trouble to get all the chickens, turkeys and geese, of which so
many were needed to satisfy the summer appetites of the visitors and
children.
  The whole family were sitting at dinner. Dolly's children, with
their governess and Varenka, were making plans for going to look for
mushrooms. Sergei Ivanovich, who was looked up to by all the party for
his intellect and learning, with a respect that almost amounted to
awe, surprised everyone by joining in the conversation about
mushrooms.
  "Take me with you. I am very fond of picking mushrooms," he said,
looking at Varenka; "I think it's a very fine occupation."
  "Oh, we shall be delighted," answered Varenka coloring. Kitty
exchanged meaning glances with Dolly. The proposal of the learned
and intellectual Sergei Ivanovich to go looking for mushrooms with
Varenka confirmed certain theories of Kitty's with which her mind
had been very busy of late. She made haste to address some remark to
her mother, so that her look should not be noticed. After dinner
Sergei Ivanovich sat with his cup of coffee at the drawing-room
window, and while he took part in a conversation he had begun with his
brother, he watched the door through which the children would start on
the mushroom-picking expedition. Levin was sitting on the window
sill near his brother.
  Kitty stood beside her husband, evidently awaiting the end of a
conversation that had no interest for her, in order to tell him
something.
  "You have changed in many respects since your marriage, and for
the better," said Sergei Ivanovich, smiling to Kitty, and obviously
little interested in the conversation, "but you have remained true
to your passion for defending the most paradoxical theories."
  "Katia, it's not good for you to stand," her husband said to her,
drawing up a chair for her and looking significantly at her.
  "Oh, and there's no time either," added Sergei Ivanovich, seeing the
children running out.
  At the head of them all Tania galloped sideways, in her tightly
drawn stockings, and waving a basket and Sergei Ivanovich's hat, she
ran straight up to him.
  Boldly running up to Sergei Ivanovich with smiling eyes, so like her
father's fine eyes, she handed him his hat and made as though she
would put it on for him, softening her freedom by a shy and friendly
smile.
  "Varenka's waiting," she said, carefully putting his hat on,
seeing from Sergei Ivanovich's smile that she might do so.
  Varenka was standing at the door, dressed in a yellow print gown,
with a white kerchief on her head.
  "I'm coming, I'm coming, Varvara Andreevna," said Sergei
Ivanovich, finishing his cup of coffee, and putting into their
separate pockets his handkerchief and cigar case.
  "And how sweet my Varenka is! Eh?" said Kitty to her husband, as
soon as Sergei Ivanovich rose. She spoke so that Sergei Ivanovich
could hear, and it was clear that she meant him to do so. "And how
good-looking she is- such a refined beauty! Varenka!" Kitty shouted.
"Shall you be in the mill forest? We'll come out to you."
  "You certainly forget your condition, Kitty," said the old Princess,
hurriedly coming out at the door. "You mustn't shout like that."
  Varenka, hearing Kitty's voice and her mother's reprimand, went with
light, rapid steps up to Kitty. The rapidity of her movement, her
flushed and eager face, everything betrayed that something out of
the common was going on in her. Kitty knew what this thing was and had
been watching her intently. She called Varenka at that moment merely
in order mentally to give her a blessing for the important event
which, as Kitty fancied, was bound to come to pass that day after
dinner in the forest.
  "Varenka, I should be very happy if a certain something were to
happen," she whispered as she kissed her.
  "And are you coming with us?" Varenka said to Levin in confusion,
pretending not to have heard what had been said.
  "I am coming, but only as far as the threshing floor, and there I
shall stop."
  "Why, what do you want there?" said Kitty.
  "I must go to have a look at the new wagons, and to make my
calculations," said Levin; "and where will you be?"
  "On the terrace."
                             II.

  On the terrace were assembled all the ladies of the party. They
always liked sitting there after dinner, and that day they had work to
do there too. Besides the sewing of baby's chemises and knitting of
swaddles, with which all of them were busy, that afternoon jam was
being made on the terrace by a method new to Agathya Mikhailovna,
without the addition of water. Kitty had introduced this new method,
which had been in use in her home. Agathya Mikhailovna, to whom the
task of jam making had always been intrusted, considering that what
had been done in the Levin household could not be amiss, had
nevertheless put water with the strawberries, maintaining that the jam
could not be made without it. She had been caught in the act, and
was now making raspberry jam before everyone, and it was to be
proved to her conclusively that jam could be very well made without
water.
  Agathya Mikhailovna, her face heated and angry, her hair untidy, and
her thin arms bare to the elbows, was swaying the preserving pan in
a circular motion over the charcoal stove, looking darkly at the
raspberries and devoutly hoping they would stick and not cook
properly. The Princess, conscious that Agathya Mikhailovna's wrath
must be chiefly directed against her, as the person responsible for
the raspberry jam making, tried to appear to be absorbed in other
things and not interested in the raspberries, talking of other
matters, but cast stealthy glances in the direction of the stove.
  "I always buy my maids' dresses myself, at the bargain sale," the
Princess said, continuing the previous conversation. "Isn't it time to
skim it, my dear?" she added, addressing Agathya Mikhailovna. "There's
not the slightest need for you to do it, and it's hot for you," she
said, stopping Kitty.
  "I'll do it," said Dolly, and, getting up, she carefully passed
the spoon over the frothing sugar, and from time to time shook off the
clinging jam from the spoon by knocking it on a plate that was covered
with yellow-red scum and blood-colored syrup. "How they'll lick this
at teatime!" she thought of her children, remembering how she
herself as a child had wondered how it was the grown-up people did not
eat what was best of all- the scum of the jam.
  "Stiva says it's much better to give money," Dolly took up meanwhile
the weighty subject under discussion- of what presents should be
made to servants. "But..."
  "Money's out of the question!" the Princess and Kitty exclaimed with
one voice. "They appreciate a present..."
  "Well, last year, for instance, I bought our Matriona Semionovna,
not a poplin, but something of that sort," said the Princess.
  "I remember she was wearing it on your name day."
  "A charming pattern- so simple and refined- I should have liked it
myself, if she hadn't had it. Something like Varenka's. So pretty
and inexpensive."
  "Well, now I think it's done," said Dolly, dropping the syrup from
the spoon.
  "When it sets as it drops, it's ready. Cook it a little longer,
Agathya Mikhailovna."
  "The flies!" said Agathya Mikhailovna angrily. "It'll be just the
same," she added.
  "Ah! How sweet it is! Don't frighten it!" Kitty said suddenly,
looking at a sparrow that had settled on the step and was pecking at
the center of a raspberry.
  "Yes, but you keep a little further from the stove," said her
mother.
  "A propos de Varenka," said Kitty, speaking in French, as they had
been doing all the while, so that Agathya Mikhailovna should not
understand them, "you know, maman, I somehow expect things to be
settled today. You know what I mean. How splendid it would be!"
  "But what a famous matchmaker she is!" said Dolly. "How carefully
and cleverly she throws them together!..."
  "No- tell me, mamma, what do you think?"
  "Why, what is one to think? He" ('he' meant Sergei Ivanovich) "might
at any time have been one of the best matches in Russia; now, of
course, he's not quite a young man, still I know ever so many girls
would be glad to marry him, even now.... She's a very nice girl, but
he might..."
  "Oh, no, mamma, do understand why, for him and for her too,
nothing better could be imagined. In the first place, she's charming!"
said Kitty, crooking one of her fingers.
  "He thinks her very attractive, that's certain," assented Dolly.
  "Then he occupies such a position in society that he has no need
to look for either fortune or position in his wife. All he needs is
a good, sweet wife- a restful one."
  "Well, with her he would certainly be restful," Dolly assented.
  "Thirdly, that she should love him. And so it is... that is, it
would be so splendid!... I look forward to seeing them coming out of
the forest- and everything settled. I shall see at once by their eyes.
I should be so delighted! What do you think, Dolly?"
  "But don't excite yourself. It's not at all the thing for you to
be excited," said her mother.
  "Oh, I'm not excited, mamma. I fancy he will propose to her today."
  "Ah, that's so strange- how and when a man proposes!... There is a
sort of barrier, and all at once it's broken down," said Dolly,
smiling pensively and recalling her past with Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "Mamma, how did papa propose to you?" Kitty asked suddenly.
  "There was nothing out of the way- it was very simple," answered the
Princess, but her face beamed all over at the recollection.
  "Oh, but how was it? You loved him, at any rate, before you were
allowed to speak?"
  Kitty felt a peculiar pleasure in being able now to talk to her
mother on equal terms about those questions of such paramount interest
in a woman's life.
  "Of course I did; he had come to stay with us in the country."
  "But how was it settled between you, mamma?"
  "You imagine, I dare say, that you invented something quite new?
It's always just the same: it was settled by the eyes, by smiles..."
  "How well you said that, mamma! It's just by the eyes, by smiles
that it's done," Dolly assented.
  "But what words did he say?"
  "What did Kostia say to you?"
  "He wrote it in chalk. It was wonderful.... How long ago it
seems!" she said.
  And the three women all fell to musing on the same thing. Kitty
was the first to break the silence. She remembered all that last
winter before her marriage, and her passion for Vronsky.
  "There's one thing... that old love affair of Varenka's," she
said, a natural chain of ideas bringing her to this point. "I should
have liked to say something to Sergei Ivanovich, to prepare him.
They're all- all men, I mean,"- she added, "awfully jealous over our
past."
  "Not all," said Dolly. "You judge by your own husband. It makes
him miserable even now to remember Vronsky. Eh? that's true, isn't
it?"
  "Yes", Kitty answered, a pensive smile in her eyes.
  "But I really don't know," the mother put in in defense of her
motherly care of her daughter, "what there was in your past that could
worry him? That Vronsky paid you attentions- that happens to every
girl."
  "Oh, yes, but we didn't mean that," Kitty said, flushing a little
  "No, let me speak," her mother went on, "why, you yourself would not
let me have a talk with Vronsky. Don't you remember?"
  "Oh, mamma!" said Kitty, with an expression of suffering.
  "There's no keeping you young people in check nowadays.... Your
friendship could not have gone beyond what was suitable. I should
myself have called upon him to explain himself. But, my darling,
it's not right for you to be agitated. Please remember that, and
calm yourself."
  "I'm perfectly calm, maman."
  "How happy it was for Kitty that Anna came then," said Dolly, "and
how unhappy for her. It turned out quite the opposite," she said,
struck by her own ideas. "Then Anna was so happy, and Kitty thought
herself unhappy. Now it is just the opposite. I often think of her."
  "A fine person to think about! Horrid, repulsive woman- no heart,"
said her mother, who could not forget that Kitty had married not
Vronsky, but Levin.
  "What do you want to talk of it for?" Kitty said with annoyance.
"I never think about it, and I don't want to think of it.... And I
don't want to think of it," she said, catching the sound of her
husband's familiar step on the steps of the terrace.
  "What's that you don't want to think about?" inquired Levin,
coming onto the terrace.
  But no one answered him, and he did not repeat the question.
  "I'm sorry I've broken in on your feminine kingdom," he said,
looking round on everyone discontentedly, and perceiving that they had
been talking of something which they would not talk about before him.
  For a second he felt that he was sharing the feeling of Agathya
Mikhailovna, vexation at their making jam without water, and, on the
whole, at the outside, Shcherbatsky authority. He smiled, however, and
went up to Kitty.
  "Well, how are you?" he asked her, looking at her with the
expression with which everyone looked at her now.
  "Oh, very well," said Kitty, smiling, "and how have things gone with
you?"
  "The wagon held three times as much as the telega did. Well, are
we going for the children? I've ordered the horses to be put in."
  "What! You want to take Kitty in the wide droshky?" her mother
said reproachfully.
  "Yes- at walking pace, Princess."
  Levin never called the princess "maman" as men often do call their
mothers-in-law, and the Princess disliked his not doing so. But though
he liked and respected the Princess, Levin could not call her so
without a sense of profaning his feeling for his dead mother.
  "Come with us, maman," said Kitty.
  "I don't like to see such imprudence."
  "Well, I'll walk then, I'm so well." Kitty got up and went to her
husband and took his hand.
  "You may be well, but everything in moderation," said the Princess.
  "Well, Agathya Mikhailovna, is the jam done?" said Levin, smiling to
Agathya Mikhailovna, and trying to cheer her up. "Is it all right in
the new way?"
  "I suppose it's all right. According to our notions it's boiled
too long."
  "It'll be all the better, Agathya Mikhailovna, it won't turn sour,
even though the ice in our icehouse has begun to melt already, so that
we've no cool place to store it," said Kitty, at once divining her
husband's motive, and addressing the old housekeeper with the same
feeling; "but your pickles are so good, that mamma says she never
tasted any like them," she added, smiling, and putting her kerchief
straight.
  Agathya Mikhailovna looked sulkily at Kitty.
  "You needn't try to console me, mistress. I need only to look at you
with him, and I feel happy," she said, and something in the rough
familiarity of that with him touched Kitty.
  "Come along with us to look for mushrooms, you will show us the best
places."
  Agathya Mikhailovna smiled and shook her head, as though to say:
"I would even like to be angry with you, but I can't."
  "Do it, please, according to my recipe," said the Princess; "put
some paper over the jam, and moisten it with a little rum, and, even
without ice, it will never grow moldy."
                             III.

  Kitty was particularly glad of a chance of being alone with her
husband, for she had noticed the shade of mortification that had
passed over his face- always so quick to reflect every feeling- at the
moment when he had come onto the terrace and asked what they were
talking of, and had got no answer.
  When they had set off on foot ahead of the others, and had gotten
out of sight of the house onto the beaten, dusty road, sprinkled
with ears of rye and with separate grains, she clung faster to his arm
and pressed it closer to her. He had quite forgotten the momentary
unpleasant impression, and alone with her he felt, now that the
thought of her approaching motherhood was never for a moment absent
from his mind, a new and delicious bliss, quite pure from all alloy of
sense, in being near to the woman he loved. There was no need of
speech, yet he longed to hear the sound of her voice, which, like
her eyes, had changed since she had become pregnant. In her voice,
as in her eyes, there was that softness and gravity which is found
in people continually concentrated on some cherished pursuit.
  "So you're not tired? Lean more on me," said he.
  "No, I'm so glad of a chance of being alone with you, and I must
own, though I'm happy with them, I sigh for our winter evenings
alone."
  "That was good, but this is even better. Both are better," he
said, squeezing her hand.
  "Do you know what we were talking about when you came in?"
  "About jam?"
  "Oh, yes, about jam too; but, afterward, about how men propose."
  "Ah!" said Levin, listening more to the sound of her voice than to
her words, and all the while paying attention to the road, which
passed now through the forest, and avoiding places where she might
make a false step.
  "And about Sergei Ivanovich and Varenka. You've noticed?... I'm very
anxious for it," she went on. "What do you think about it?" And she
peeped into his face.
  "I don't know what to think," Levin answered, smiling. "Sergei seems
very strange to me in that way. I told you, you know..."
  "Yes, that he was in love with that girl who died...."
  "That was when I was a child; I know about it from hearsay and
tradition. I remember him then. He was wonderfully sweet. But I've
watched him since with women; he is friendly, some of them he likes,
but one feels that to him they're simply people, not women."
  "Yes, but now with Varenka... I fancy there's something..."
  "Perhaps there is.... But one has to know him.... He's a peculiar,
wonderful person. He lives a spiritual life only. He's too pure, too
exalted a nature."
  "Why? Would this lower him, then?"
  "No, but he's so used to a spiritual life that he can't reconcile
himself with actual fact, and Varenka is after all fact."
  Levin had grown used by now to uttering his thought boldly,
without taking the trouble of clothing it in exact language. He knew
that his wife, in such moments of loving tenderness as now, would
understand what he meant to say from a hint, and she did understand
him.
  "Yes, but there's not so much of that actual fact about her as about
me. I can see that he would never have cared for me. She is altogether
spiritual."
  "Oh, no, he is so fond of you, and I am always so glad when my
people like you...."
  "Yes, he's very good to me; but..."
  "It's not as it was with poor Nikolenka.... You really cared for
each other," Levin finished. "Why not speak of him?" he added. "I
sometimes blame myself for not doing so; it ends in one's
forgetting. Ah, how terrible and dear he was!... Yes, what were we
talking about?" Levin said, after a pause.
  "You think he can't fall in love," said Kitty, translating into
her own language.
  "It's not so much that he can't fall in love," Levin said,
smiling, "but he has not the weakness necessary.... I've always envied
him, and even now, when I'm so happy, I still envy him."
  "You envy him for not being able to fall in love?"
  "I envy him for being better than me," said Levin. "He does not live
for himself. His whole life is subordinated to his duty. And that's
why he can be calm and contented."
  "And you?" Kitty asked, with an ironical and loving smile.
  She could never have explained the chain of thought that made her
smile; but the last link in it was that her husband, in exalting his
brother and abasing himself, was not quite sincere. Kitty knew that
this insincerity came from his love for his brother, from his sense of
shame at being too happy, and, above all, from his unflagging
craving to be better- she loved this trait in him, and so she smiled.
  "And you? What are you dissatisfied with?" she asked, with the
same smile.
  Her disbelief in his self-dissatisfaction delighted him, and
unconsciously he tried to draw her into giving utterance to the
grounds of her disbelief.
  "I am happy, but dissatisfied with myself..." he said.
  "Why, how can you be dissatisfied with yourself if you are happy?"
  "Well, how shall I say?... In my heart I really care for nothing
whatever but that you should not stumble- see? Oh, but really you
mustn't skip about like that!" he cried, breaking off to scold her for
too agile a movement in stepping over a branch that lay in the path.
"But when I think about myself, and compare myself with others,
especially with my brother, I feel I'm a poor creature."
  "But in what way?" Kitty pursued with the same smile. "Don't you,
too, work for others? What about your farmsteading, and your
agriculture, and your book?..."
  "Oh, but I feel, and particularly just now- it's your fault," he
said, pressing her hand- "that all that doesn't count. I do it, in a
way, halfheartedly. If I could care for all that as I care for you!...
Instead of that, I do it in these days like a task that is set me."
  "Well, what would you say about papa?" asked Kitty. "Is he a poor
creature then, as he does nothing for the public good?"
  "He? No! But then, one must have the simplicity, the
straight-forwardness, the goodness of your father: and I haven't got
that. I do nothing, and I fret about it. It's all your doing. Before
you- and this too," he added with a glance toward her waist that she
understood- "I put all my energies into work; now I can't, and I'm
ashamed; I do it just as though it were a task set me; I'm
pretending...."
  "Well, but would you like to change this minute with Sergei
Ivanovich?" said Kitty. "Would you like to do this work for the
general good, and to love the task set you, as he does, and nothing
else?"
  "Of course not," said Levin. "But I'm so happy that I don't
understand anything. So you think he'll propose to her today?" he
added after a brief silence.
  "I think so, and I don't think so. Only, I'm awfully anxious for it.
Here, wait a minute." She stooped down and picked a wild daisy at
the edge of the path. "Come, count: he will, he won't," she said,
giving him the flower.
  "He will, he won't," said Levin, tearing off the white petals.
  "No, no!" Kitty, snatching at his hand, stopped him. She had been
watching his fingers with agitation. "You picked off two."
  "Oh, but see, this little one shan't count to make up," said
Levin, tearing off a little half-grown petal. "Here's the droshky
overtaking us."
  "Aren't you tired, Kitty?" called the Princess.
  "Not in the least."
  "If you are you can get in, as the horses are quiet and walking."
  But it was not worth-while to get in; they were quite near the
place, and all walked on together.
                             IV.

  Varenka, with her white kerchief on her black hair, surrounded by
the children, gaily and good-humoredly looking after them, and at
the same time visibly excited at the possibility of receiving a
declaration from the man she cared for, was very attractive. Sergei
Ivanovich walked beside her, and never left off admiring her.
Looking at her, he recalled all the delightful things he had heard
from her lips, all the good he knew about her, and became more and
more conscious that the feeling he had for her was something special
that he had felt long, long ago, and only once, in his early youth.
The feeling of happiness in being near her continually grew, and at
last reached such a point that, as he put a huge, slender-stalked
mushroom with rolled brims, in her basket, he looked straight into her
face, and noticing the flush of glad and alarmed excitement that
overspread her face, he was confused himself, and smiled to her in
silence a smile that said too much.
  "If so," he said to himself, "I ought to think it over and make up
my mind, and not give way like a boy to the impulse of a moment."
  "I'm going to pick by myself apart from all the rest, or else my
efforts will make no show," he said, and he left the edge of the
forest where they were walking on low silky grass between old birch
trees standing far apart, and went more into the heart of the wood,
where between the white birch trunks there were gray trunks of aspen
and dark bushes of hazel. Walking some forty paces away, Sergei
Ivanovich, knowing he was out of sight, stood still behind a bushy
spindle tree in full flower with its rosy-red catkins. It was
perfectly still all round him. Only overhead, in the birches under
which he stood, the flies, like a swarm of bees, buzzed unceasingly,
and from time to time the children's voices floated across to him. All
at once he heard, not far from the edge of the wood, the sound of
Varenka's contralto voice, calling Grisha, and a smile of delight
passed over Sergei Ivanovich's face. Conscious of this smile, he shook
his head disapprovingly at his own state and, taking out a cigar, he
began lighting it. For a long while he could not get a match to
light against the trunk of a birch tree. The soft pellicle of the
white bark stuck around the phosphorus, and the light went out. At
last one of the matches burned, and the fragrant cigar smoke, hovering
uncertainly in flat, wide coils, stretched away forward and upward
over a bush under the overhanging branches of a birch tree. Watching
the streak of smoke, Sergei Ivanovich walked gently on, deliberating
on his position.
  "Why not?" he thought. "If it were only a flash in the pan, or a
passion, if it were only this attraction- this mutual attraction (I
can call it a mutual attraction), yet if I felt that it was in
contradiction with the whole bent of my life; if I felt that in giving
way to this attraction I should be false to my vocation and my duty...
But it's not so. The only thing I can say against it is that, when I
lost Marie, I said to myself that I would remain faithful to her
memory. That's the only thing I can say against my feeling....
That's a great thing," Sergei Ivanovich said to himself, feeling at
the same time that this consideration had not the slightest importance
for him personally, but would only perhaps detract from his romantic
character in the eyes of others. "But apart from that, however much
I searched, I should never find anything to say against my feeling. If
I were choosing by considerations of intellect alone, I could not have
found anything better."
  However many women and girls he thought of whom he knew, he could
not think of a girl who united to such a degree all- positively all-
the qualities he would wish to see in his wife. She had all the
charm and freshness of youth, but she was not a child; and if she
loved him, she loved him consciously, as a woman ought to love; that
was one thing. Another point: she was not only far from being worldly,
but had an unmistakable distaste for worldly society, and at the
same time she knew the world, and had all the ways of a woman of the
best society, which were absolutely essential to Sergei Ivanovich's
conception of the woman who was to share his life. Thirdly: she was
religious, and not like a child, unconsciously religious and good,
as Kitty, for example, was, but her life was founded on religious
principles. Even in trifling matters, Sergei Ivanovich found in her
all that he wanted in his wife: she was poor and alone in the world,
so she would not bring with her a mass of relations and their
influence into her husband's house, as he saw now in Kitty's case. She
would owe everything to her husband, which was what he had always
desired, too, for his future family life. And this girl, who united
all these qualities, loved him. He was a modest man, but he could
not help seeing it. And he loved her. There was one consideration
against it- his age. But he came of a long-lived family, he had not
a single gray hair, no one would have taken him for forty, and he
remembered Varenka's saying that it was only in Russia that men of
fifty thought themselves old, and that in France a man of fifty
considers himself dans la force de l'age, while a man of forty is un
jeune homme. But what did the mere reckoning of years matter when he
felt as young in heart as he had been twenty years ago? Was it not
youth to feel as he felt now, when coming from the other side to the
edge of the wood he saw in the glowing light of the slanting
sunbeams the graceful figure of Varenka in her yellow gown with her
basket, walking lightly by the trunk of an old birch tree, and when
this impression of the sight of Varenka blended so harmoniously with
the beauty of the view, of the yellow oat field lying bathed in the
slanting sunshine, and, beyond it, the distant ancient forest, flecked
with yellow and melting into the blue of the distance? His heart
throbbed joyously. A softened feeling came over him. He felt that he
had made up his mind. Varenka, who had just crouched down to pick a
mushroom, rose with a supple movement and looked round. Flinging
away the cigar, Sergei Ivanovich advanced with resolute steps toward
her.
                             V.

  "Varvara Andreevna, when I was very young, I set before myself the
ideal of the woman I loved and should be happy to call my wife. I have
lived through a long life, and now for the first time I have met
what I sought- in you. I love you, and offer you my hand."
  Sergei Ivanovich was saying this to himself while he was ten paces
from Varenka. Kneeling down, with her hands over the mushrooms to
guard them from Grisha, she was calling little Masha.
  "Come here, little ones! There are so many!" she was saying in her
sweet, deep voice.
  Seeing Sergei Ivanovich approaching, she did not get up and did
not change her position, but everything told him that she felt his
presence and was glad of it.
  "Well, did you find some?" she asked from under the white
kerchief, turning her handsome, gently smiling face to him.
  "Not one," said Sergei Ivanovich. "Did you?"
  She did not answer, busy with the children who thronged about her.
  "That one too, near the twig," she pointed out to little Masha a
little fungus, split in half across its rosy cap by the dry grass from
under which it thrust itself. Varenka got up while Masha picked the
fungus, breaking it into two white halves. "This brings back my
childhood," she added, moving apart from the children, to Sergei
Ivanovich's side.
  They walked on for a few steps in silence. Varenka saw that he
wanted to speak; she guessed of what, and felt faint with joy and
panic. They had walked so far away that no one could hear them now,
but still he did not begin. It would have been better for Varenka to
be silent. After a silence it would have been easier for them to say
what they wanted to say, than after talking about mushrooms. But
against her own will, as it were accidentally, Varenka said:
  "So you found nothing? In the middle of the wood there are always
fewer, though."
  Sergei Ivanovich sighed and made no answer. He was annoyed that
she had spoken about the mushrooms. He wanted to bring her back to the
first words she had uttered about her childhood; but after a pause
of some length, as though against his own will, he made an observation
in response to her last words.
  "I have heard that the white edible fungi are found principally at
the edge of the wood, though I can't tell them apart."
  Some minutes more passed; they moved still farther away from the
children, and were quite alone. Varenka's heart throbbed so that she
heard it beating, and felt that she was turning red, and pale, and red
again.
  To be the wife of a man like Koznishev, after her position with
Madame Stahl, was to her imagination the height of happiness. Besides,
she was almost certain that she was in love with him. And this
moment it would have to be decided. She felt frightened. She dreaded
both his speaking and his not speaking.
  Now or never it must be said- Sergei Ivanovich felt that too.
Everything in the expression, the flushed cheeks and the downcast eyes
of Varenka betrayed a painful suspense. Sergei Ivanovich saw it, and
felt sorry for her. He felt even that to say nothing now would be a
slight to her. Rapidly in his own mind he ran over all the arguments
in support of his decision. He even said over to himself the words
in which he meant to put his proposal, but instead of those words,
some utterly unexpected reflection that occurred to him made him ask:
  "What is the difference between the 'birch' mushroom and the 'white'
mushroom?"
  Varenka's lips quivered with emotion as she answered:
  "In the top part there is scarcely any difference- it's in the
stalk."
  And as soon as these words were uttered, both he and she felt that
it was over, that what was to have been said would not be said; and
their emotion, which up to then had been continually growing more
intense, began to subside.
  "The birch mushroom's stalk suggests a dark man's chin after two
days without shaving," said Sergei Ivanovich, speaking quite calmly
now.
  "Yes, that's true," answered Varenka smiling, and unconsciously
the direction of their walk changed. They began to turn toward the
children. Varenka felt both hurt and ashamed; at the same time she
felt a sense of relief.
  When he had got home again, and went over the whole set of
arguments, Sergei Ivanovich thought his previous decision had been a
mistaken one. He could not be false to the memory of Marie.
  "Gently, children, gently!" Levin shouted quite angrily to the
children, standing before his wife to protect her when the crowd of
children flew with shrieks of delight to meet them.
  Behind the children Sergei Ivanovich and Varenka walked out of the
forest. Kitty had no need to ask Varenka; she saw from the calm and
somewhat crestfallen faces of both that her plans had not come off.
  "Well?" her husband questioned her as they were going home again.
  "No bites," said Kitty, her smile and manner of speaking recalling
her father, a likeness Levin often noticed with pleasure.
  "No bites, how?"
  "I'll show you," she said, taking her husband's hand, lifting it
to her mouth, and just faintly brushing it with closed lips. "Like a
kiss on a priest's hand."
  "Which one didn't bite?" he said, laughing.
  "Both. But it should have been like this..."
  "There are some peasants coming..."
  "Oh, they didn't see."
                             VI.

  During the time of the children's tea the grownups sat on the
balcony and talked as though nothing had happened though they all,
especially Sergei Ivanovich and Varenka, were very well aware that
there had happened an event which, though negative, was of very
great importance. They both had the same feeling, rather like that
of a schoolboy after an unlucky examination, which has left him in the
same class or shut him out of school forever. Everyone present, also
feeling that something had happened, talked eagerly about extraneous
subjects. Levin and Kitty were particularly happy and conscious of
their love that evening. And their happiness in their love seemed to
imply a disagreeable reference to those who would have liked to feel
the same and could not- and they felt a prick of conscience.
  "Mark my words, Alexandre will not come," said the old Princess.
  That evening they were expecting Stepan Arkadyevich to come down
by train, and the old Prince had written that possibly he might come
too.
  "And I know why," the Princess went on; "he says that newly
married couples ought to be left alone for a while at first."
  "But papa has left us alone. We've never seen him," said Kitty.
"Besides, we're not newly married!- we're old married people by now.
  "Only if he doesn't come, I shall say good-by to you, children,"
said the Princess, sighing mournfully.
  "What nonsense, mamma!" both the daughters fell upon her at once.
"How do you suppose he is feeling? Why, now..."
  And suddenly there was an unexpected quiver in the Princess's voice.
Her daughters were silent, and looked at one another. "Maman always
finds something to be miserable about," they said in that glance. They
did not know that happy as the Princess was in her daughter's house,
and useful as she felt herself to be there, she had been extremely
miserable, both on her own account and her husband's, ever since
they had married off their last and favorite daughter, and their
family nest had been left empty.
  "What is it, Agathya Mikhailovna?" Kitty asked suddenly of Agathya
Mikhailovna, who was standing with a mysterious air, and a face full
of meaning.
  "About supper."
  "Well, that's right," said Dolly; "you go and arrange about it,
and I'll go and hear Grisha repeat his lesson, or else he will have
done nothing all day."
  "That's my duty! No, Dolly, I'm going," said Levin, jumping up.
  Grisha, who was by now at a high school, had to go over the
lessons of the term in the summer holidays. Darya Alexandrovna, who
had been studying Latin with her son in Moscow before, had made it a
rule on coming to the Levins' to go over with him, at least once a
day, the most difficult lessons of Latin and arithmetic. Levin had
offered to take her place, but the mother, having once overheard
Levin's lesson, and noticing that it was not given exactly as the
teacher in Moscow had given it, said resolutely, though with much
embarrassment and anxiety not to mortify Levin, that they must keep
strictly to the book as the teacher had done, and that she had
better undertake it again herself. Levin was amazed both at Stepan
Arkadyevich, who, by neglecting his duty, threw upon the mother the
supervision of studies of which she had no comprehension, and at the
teachers for teaching the children so badly. But he promised his
sister-in-law to give the lessons exactly as she wished. And he went
on teaching Grisha, not in his own way, but by the book, and so took
little interest in it, and often forgot the hour of the lesson. So
it had been today.
  "No, I'm going, Dolly, you sit still," he said. "We'll do it all
properly, according to the book. Only when Stiva comes, and we go
out shooting, then we shall have to miss it."
  And Levin went to Grisha.
  Varenka was saying the same thing to Kitty. Even in the happy,
well-ordered household of the Levins, Varenka had succeeded in
making herself useful.
  "I'll see to the supper, you sit still," she said, and got up to
go to Agathya Mikhailovna.
  "Yes, yes, most likely they've not been able to get chickens. If so,
our..."
  "Agathya Mikhailovna and I will see about it," and Varenka
vanished with her.
  "What a fine girl!" said the Princess.
  "Not merely fine, maman; she's an exquisite girl; there's no one
else like her."
  "So you are expecting Stepan Arkadyevich today?" said Sergei
Ivanovich, evidently not disposed to pursue the conversation about
Varenka. "It would be difficult to find two sons-in-law more unlike
than yours," he said with a subtle smile. "One mobility itself, only
living in society, like a fish in water; the other our Kostia, lively,
alert, quick in everything, but, as soon as he is in society, he
either sinks into apathy, or struggles helplessly like a fish on
land."
  "Yes, he's very heedless," said the Princess, addressing Sergei
Ivanovich. "I've intended, indeed, to ask you to tell him that it's
out of the question for her" (she indicated Kitty) "to stay here; that
she positively must come to Moscow. He talks of getting a doctor
down..."
  "Maman, he'll do everything; he has agreed to everything," Kitty
said, angry with her mother for appealing to Sergei Ivanovich to judge
in such a matter.
  In the middle of their conversation they heard the snorting of
horses and the sound of wheels on the gravel.
  Dolly had not time to get up to go and meet her husband, when from
the window of the room below, where Grisha was having his lesson,
Levin leaped out and helped Grisha out after him.
  "It's Stiva!" Levin shouted from under the balcony. "We've finished,
Dolly, don't be afraid!" he added, and started running like a boy to
meet the carriage.
  "Is, ea, id, ejus, ejus, ejus!" shouted Grisha, skipping along the
avenue.
  "And someone else too! Papa, of course!" cried Levin, stopping at
the entrance of the avenue. "Kitty, don't come down the steep
staircase- go around."
  But Levin had been mistaken in taking the person sitting in the
carriage for the old Prince. As he got nearer to the carriage he saw
beside Stepan Arkadyevich not the Prince, but a handsome, stout
young man in a Scotch cap, with long ends of ribbon behind. This was
Vassenka Veslovsky, a distant cousin of the Shcherbatskys, a brilliant
young gentleman in Peterburg and Moscow society- a capital fellow, and
a keen sportsman," as Stepan Arkadyevich said, introducing him.
  Not a whit abashed by the disappointment caused by his having come
in place of the old Prince, Veslovsky greeted Levin gaily, claiming
acquaintance with him in the past, and snatching up Grisha into the
carriage, lifted him over the pointer that Stepan Arkadyevich had
brought with him.
  Levin did not get into the carriage, but walked behind. He was
rather vexed at the nonarrival of the old Prince, whom he liked more
and more the more he saw him, and also the arrival of this Vassenka
Veslovsky, a quite alien and superfluous person. He seemed to him
still more alien and superfluous when, on approaching the steps
where the whole party, children and grownups, were gathered together
in much animation, Levin saw Vassenka Veslovsky, with a particularly
warm and gallant air, kissing Kitty's hand.
  "Your wife and I are cousins and very old friends," said Vassenka
Veslovsky, once more shaking Levin's hand with great warmth.
  "Well, are there plenty of birds?" Stepan Arkadyevich said to Levin,
hardly leaving time for everyone to exchange greetings. "We've come
with the most savage intentions. Why, maman, they've not been in
Moscow since! Look, Tania, here's something for you! Get it, please,
it's in the carriage, behind!" he talked in all directions. "How
pretty you've grown, Dollenka," he said to his wife, once more kissing
her hand, holding it in one of his, and patting it with the other.
  Levin, who a minute before had been in the happiest frame of mind,
now looked darkly at everyone, and everything displeased him.
  "Who was it he kissed yesterday with these lips?" he thought,
looking at Stepan Arkadyevich's tender demonstrations to his wife.
He looked at Dolly, and he did not like her either.
  "She doesn't believe in his love. So what is she pleased about?
Revolting!" thought Levin.
  He looked at the Princess, who had been so dear to him a minute
before, and he did not like the manner in which she welcomed this
Vassenka, with his ribbons, just as though she were in her own house.
  Even Sergei Ivanovich, who had come out too on the steps, seemed
to him unpleasant with the show of cordiality with which he met Stepan
Arkadyevich, though Levin knew that his brother neither liked nor
respected Oblonsky.
  And Varenka- even she seemed hateful, with her air sainte nitouche
making the acquaintance of this gentleman, while all the while she was
thinking of nothing but getting married.
  And more hateful than anyone was Kitty, for falling in with the tone
of gaiety with which this gentleman regarded his visit in the country,
as though it were a holiday for himself and everyone else. And, more
unpleasant than everything else, was that peculiar smile with which
she responded to his smile.
  Noisily talking, they all went into the house; but as soon as they
were all seated, Levin turned and went out.
  Kitty saw something was wrong with her husband. She tried to seize a
moment to speak to him alone, but he made haste to get away from
her, saying he was wanted at the countinghouse. It was long since
his own work on the estate had seemed to him so important as at that
moment. "It's all holiday for them," he thought; "but these are no
holiday matters, they won't wait, and there's no living without them."
                             VII.

  Levin came back to the house only when they sent to summon to
supper. On the stairs were standing Kitty and Agathya Mikhailovna,
consulting about wines for supper.
  "But why are you making all this fuss? Have what we usually do."
  "No, Stiva doesn't drink... Kostia, stop, what's the matter?"
Kitty began, hurrying after him, but he strode ruthlessly away to
the dining room without waiting for her, and at once joined in the
lively general conversation which was being maintained there by
Vassenka Veslovsky and Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "Well, what do you say, are we going shooting tomorrow?" said Stepan
Arkadyevich.
  "Please, do let's go," said Veslovsky, moving to another chair,
where he sat down sideways, with one fat leg crossed under him.
  "I shall be delighted, we will go. And have you had any shooting yet
this year?" said Levin to Veslovsky, looking intently at his leg,
but speaking with that forced amiability that Kitty knew so well in
him, and that was so out of keeping with him. "I can't answer for
our finding double snipe, but there are plenty of jacksnipe. Only we
ought to start early. You're not tired? Aren't you tired, Stiva?"
  "Me tired? I've never been tired yet. Suppose we stay up all
night. Let's go for a walk!"
  "Yes, really, let's not go to bed at all! Capital!" Veslovsky chimed
in.
  "Oh, we all know you can do without sleep, and keep other people
up too," Dolly said to her husband, with that faint note of irony in
her voice which she almost always had now with her husband. "But to my
thinking, it's time for bed now... I'm going, I don't want supper."
  "No, do stay a little, Dollenka," said Stepan Arkadyevich, going
round to her side behind the table where they were having supper.
"I've so much still to tell you."
  "Nothing really, I suppose."
  "Do you know Veslovsky has been at Anna's, and he's going to them
again? You know they're hardly seventy verstas from you, and I too
must certainly go over there. Veslovsky, come here!"
  Vassenka crossed over to the ladies, and sat down beside Kitty.
  "Ah, do tell me, please; you have visited her? How was she?" Darya
Alexandrovna appealed to him.
  Levin was left at the other end of the table, and though never
pausing in his conversation with the Princess and Varenka, he saw that
there was an eager and mysterious conversation going on between Stepan
Arkadyevich, Dolly, Kitty, and Veslovsky. And that was not all. He saw
on his wife's face an expression of real feeling as she gazed with
fixed eyes on the handsome face of Vassenka, who was telling them
something with great animation.
  "It's exceedingly nice at their place," Veslovsky was telling them
about Vronsky and Anna. "I can't, of course, take it upon myself to
judge, but in their house you feel the real feeling of home."
  "What do they intend doing?"
  "I believe they think of going to Moscow for the winter."
  "How jolly it would be for us all to go over to them together!
When are you going there?" Stepan Arkadyevich asked Vassenka.
  "I'm spending July there."
  "Will you go?" Stepan Arkadyevich said to his wife.
  "I've been wanting to a long while; I shall certainly go," said
Dolly. "I am sorry for her, and I know her. She's a splendid woman.
I will go alone, when you go back, and then I shall be in no one's
way. And it will be better indeed without you."
  "To be sure," said Stepan Arkadyevich. "And you, Kitty?"
  "I? Why should I go?" Kitty said, flushing all over, and she glanced
round at her husband.
  "Do you know Anna Arkadyevna, then?" Veslovsky asked her. "She's a
very fascinating woman?"
  "Yes," she answered Veslovsky, crimsoning still more. She got up and
walked across to her husband.
  "Are you going shooting, then, tomorrow?" she said.
  His jealousy had in these few moments, especially at the flush
that had overspread her cheeks while she was talking to Veslovsky,
gone far indeed. Now as he heard her words, he construed them in his
own fashion. Strange as it was to him afterward to recall it, it
seemed to him at the moment clear that in asking whether he was
going shooting, all she cared to know was whether he would give that
pleasure to Vassenka Veslovsky, with whom, as he fancied, she was in
love.
  "Yes, I'm going," he answered her in an unnatural voice,
disagreeable to himself.
  "No, better spend the day here tomorrow, or Dolly won't see anything
of her husband, and set off the day after," said Kitty.
  The motive of Kitty's words was interpreted by Levin thus: "Don't
separate me from him. I don't care about your going, but do let me
enjoy the society of this delightful young man."
  "Oh, if you wish, we'll stay here tomorrow," Levin answered, with
peculiar amiability.
  Vassenka meanwhile, utterly unsuspecting the misery his presence had
occasioned, got up from the table after Kitty, and watching her with
smiling and admiring eyes, he followed her.
  Levin saw that look. He turned white, and for a minute he could
hardly breathe. "How dare he look at my wife like that!" was the
feeling that boiled within him.
  "Tomorrow, then? Do, please, let us go," said Vassenka, sitting down
on a chair, and again crossing his leg as his habit was.
  Levin's jealousy went further still. Already he saw himself a
deceived husband, looked upon by his wife and her lover as simply
necessary to provide them with the conveniences and pleasures of
life.... But in spite of that he made polite and hospitable
inquiries of Vassenka about his shooting, his gun, and his boots,
and agreed to go shooting next day.
  Happily for Levin, the old Princess cut short his agonies by getting
up herself and advising Kitty to go to bed. But even at this point
Levin could not escape another agony. As he said good night to his
hostess, Vassenka would again have kissed her hand, but Kitty,
reddening, drew back her hand and said with a naive bluntness, for
which the old Princess scolded her afterward:
  "We don't like that fashion."
  In Levin's eyes she was to blame for having allowed such relations
to arise, and still more to blame for showing so awkwardly that she
did not like them.
  "Why, how can one want to go to bed!" said Stepan Arkadyevich,
who, after drinking several glasses of wine at supper, was now in
his most charming and lyrical humor. "Look, Kitty," he said,
pointing to the moon, which had just risen behind the linden trees,
"how exquisite! Veslovsky, this is the time for a serenade. You
know, he has a splendid voice; we practised songs together along the
road. He has brought some lovely songs with him- two new ones. Varvara
Andreevna and he must sing some duets."

  When the party had broken up, Stepan Arkadyevich walked a long while
about the avenue with Veslovsky; their voices could be heard singing
one of the new songs.
  Levin, hearing these voices, sat scowling in an easy chair in his
wife's bedroom, and maintained an obstinate silence when she asked him
what was wrong. But when at last with a timid glance she hazarded
the question: "Was there perhaps something you disliked about
Veslovsky?"- it all burst out, and he told her all. He was hurt
himself by what he was saying, and that exasperated him all the more.
  He stood facing her with his eyes glittering menacingly under his
scowling brows, and he squeezed his strong arms across his chest, as
though he were straining every nerve to hold himself in. The
expression of his face would have been grim, and even cruel, if it had
not at the same time had a look of suffering which touched her. His
jaws were twitching, and his voice kept breaking.
  "You must understand that I'm not jealous, that's a nasty word. I
can't be jealous, and believe that... I can't say what I feel, but
this is awful... I'm not jealous, but I'm wounded, humiliated that
anybody dare think, that anybody dare look at you with eyes like
that...."
  "Eyes like what?" said Kitty, trying as conscientiously as
possible to recall every word and gesture of that evening and every
shade implied in them.
  At the very bottom of her heart she did think there had been
something, precisely at the moment when he had crossed over after
her to the other end of the table; but she dared not own it even to
herself, and would have been even more unable to bring herself to
say so to him, and so increase his suffering.
  "And what can there possibly be attractive about me as I am now?..."
  "Ah!" he cried, clutching at his head, "You shouldn't say that!...
If you had been attractive, then..."
  "Oh, no, Kostia, oh, wait a minute, oh, do listen!" she said,
looking at him with an expression of pained commiseration. "Why,
what can you be thinking about! When for me there's no one in the
world, no one, no one!... Would you like me never to see anyone?
  For the first minute she had been offended at his jealousy; she
was angry that the slightest amusement, even the most innocent, should
be forbidden her; but now she would readily have sacrificed, not
merely such trifles, but everything, for his peace of mind, to save
him from the agony he was suffering.
  "You must understand the horror and comedy of my position," he
went on in a desperate whisper; "that he's in my house, that he's done
nothing positively improper- one can take exception only to his free
and easy airs and the way he tucks his legs in under him. He thinks
it's the best possible form, and so I'm obliged to be civil to him."
  "But, Kostia, you're exaggerating," said Kitty, at the bottom of her
heart rejoicing at the depth of his love for her, shown now in his
jealousy.
  "The most awful part of it all is that you're just as you always
are, and especially now when to me you're something sacred, and
we're so happy, so particularly happy- and all of a sudden a little
wretch... He's not a little wretch; why should I abuse him? I have
nothing to do with him. But why should my, and your, happiness..."
  "Do you know, I understand now what it all came from," Kitty was
beginning.
  "Well, what? What?"
  "I saw how you looked while we were talking at supper."
  "Well, well!" Levin said in dismay.
  She told him what they had been talking about. And as she told
him, she was breathless with emotion. Levin was silent for a space,
then he scanned her pale and distressed face, and suddenly he clutched
at his head.
  "Katia, I've been worrying you! Darling, forgive me! It's madness!
Katia, I'm a criminal. And how could you be so distressed at such
idiocy?"
  "Oh, I was sorry for you."
  "For me? For me? How mad I am!... But why make you miserable? It's
awful to think that any outsider can shatter our happiness."
  "It's humiliating too, of course."
  "Oh, then I'll keep him here all the summer, and will overwhelm
him with civility," said Levin, kissing her hands. "You shall see.
Tomorrow... oh, yes, we are going tomorrow."
                             VIII.

  Next day, before the ladies were up, the carriages for the
shooting party, the droshky and a trap, were at the door, and Laska,
aware since early morning that they were going shooting, after much
whining and darting to and fro, had sat herself down in the droshky
beside the coachman, and, disapproving of the delay, was excitedly
watching the door from which the sportsmen still did not issue. The
first to come out was Vassenka Veslovsky, in new high boots that
reached halfway up his thick thighs, in a green blouse, with a new
cartridge belt, redolent of leather, and in his Scotch cap with
ribbons, with a brand-new English gun without a sling. Laska flew up
to him, welcomed him, and, jumping up, asked him in her own way
whether the others were coming soon; but getting no answer from him,
she returned to her post of observation and sank into repose again,
her head on one side, and one ear pricked up to listen. At last the
door opened with a creak, and Stepan Arkadyevich's spot-and-tan
pointer Krak flew out, running round and round and turning over in the
air. Stepan Arkadyevich himself followed with a gun in his hand and
a cigar in his mouth. "Soho, soho, Krak!" he cried encouragingly to
the dog, who put his paws up on his chest, catching at his gamebag.
Stepan Arkadyevich was dressed in brogues and puttees, in torn
trousers and a short coat. On his head there was a wreck of a hat of
indefinite form, but his gun of a new patent was a perfect gem, and
his gamebag and cartridge belt, though worn, were of the very best
quality.
  Vassenka Veslovsky had had no notion before that it was truly chic
for a sportsman to be in tatters, but to have his shooting outfit of
the best quality. He saw it now as he looked at Stepan Arkadyevich,
radiant in his rags, graceful, well-fed, and joyous, a typical Russian
nobleman. And he made up his mind that next time he went shooting he
would certainly adopt the same getup.
  "Well, and what about our host?" he asked.
  "A young wife," said Stepan Arkadyevich, smiling.
  "Yes, and such a charming one!"
  "He came down dressed. No doubt he's run up to her again."
  Stepan Arkadyevich guessed right. Levin had run up again to his wife
to ask her once more if she forgave him for his idiocy yesterday, and,
moreover, to beg her in Christ's name to be more careful. The great
thing was for her to keep away from the children- they might any
minute jostle against her. Then he had once more to hear her declare
that she was not angry with him for going away for two days, and to
beg her to be sure to send a note next morning by a servant on
horseback, to write him, if it were but two words only, to let him
know that all was well with her.
  Kitty was distressed, as she always was, at parting for a couple
of days from her husband, but when she saw his eager figure, looking
big and strong in his shooting boots and his white blouse, and a
sort of sportsman elation and excitement incomprehensible to her,
she forgot her own chagrin for the sake of his pleasure, and said
good-by to him cheerfully.
  "Pardon, gentlemen!" he said, running out on the steps. "Have you
put the lunch in? Why is the chestnut on the right? Well, it doesn't
matter. Laska, down; go and lie down!"
  "Put them with the herd of heifers," he said to the herdsman who was
waiting for him at the steps to ask him what was to be done with the
geld oxen. "Excuse me, here comes another villain."
  Levin jumped out of the droshky, in which he had already taken his
seat, to meet the carpenter, who came toward the steps with a rule
in his hand.
  "You didn't come to the countinghouse yesterday, and now you're
detaining me. Well, what is it?"
  "Would your honor let me make another turning? There's only three
steps to add. And we make it just fit at the same time. It will be
much more convenient."
  "You should have listened to me," Levin answered with annoyance.
"I said: Put the lines and then fit in the steps. Now there's no
setting it right. Do as I told you, and make a new staircase."
  The point was that in the wing that was being built the carpenter
had spoiled the staircase, fitting it together without calculating the
space it was to fill, so that the steps were all sloping when it was
put in place. Now the carpenter wanted to keep the same staircase,
by adding three steps.
  "It will be much better."
  "But where's your staircase coming out with its three steps?"
  "Why, upon my word, sir," the carpenter said with a contemptuous
smile. "It comes out right at the very spot. It starts here," he said,
with a persuasive gesture, "then it'll go up, and go up and come out."
  "But three steps will add to the length too... where is it to come
out?"
  "Why, to be sure, it'll go up, and come out," the carpenter said
obstinately and convincingly.
  "It'll reach the ceiling and the wall."
  "Upon my word! Why, it'll go up, and go up, and come out like this."
  Levin took out a ramrod and began sketching him the staircase in the
dust.
  "There, do you see?"
  "As your honor likes," said the carpenter, with a sudden gleam in
his eyes, obviously understanding the thing at last. "It seems it'll
be best to make a new one."
  "Well, then, do it as you're told," Levin shouted, seating himself
in the droshky. "Down! Hold the dogs, Philip!"
  Levin felt now at leaving behind all his family and household
cares such an eager sense of joy in life and expectation that he was
not disposed to talk. Besides that, he had that feeling of
concentrated excitement that every sportsman experiences as he
approaches the scene of action. If he had anything on his mind at that
moment, it was only the doubt whether they would start anything in the
Kolpensky marsh, whether Laska would show to advantage in comparison
with Krak, and whether he would shoot well that day himself. Not to
disgrace himself before a new spectator- not to be outdone by
Oblonsky- that too was a thought that crossed his brain.
  Oblonsky was feeling the same, and he too was not talkative.
Vassenka Veslovsky alone kept up a ceaseless flow of cheerful chatter.
As he listened to him now, Levin felt ashamed to think how unfair he
had been to him the day before. Vassenka was really a fine fellow,
simple, goodhearted, and very good-humored. If Levin had met him
before he was married, he would have made friends with him. Levin
rather disliked his holiday attitude to life and a sort of free and
easy assumption of elegance. It was as though he assumed a high degree
of importance in himself that could not be disputed, because he had
long nails and a stylish cap, and everything else to correspond; but
this could be forgiven for the sake of his good nature and good
breeding. Levin liked him for his good education, for speaking
French and English with such an excellent accent, and for being a
man of his world.
  Vassenka was extremely delighted with the left outrigger, a horse of
the Don steppes. He kept praising him enthusiastically. "How fine it
must be galloping over the steppes on a steppe horse! Eh? Isn't it?"
he said. He had imagined riding on a steppe horse as something wild
and romantic, and it turned out nothing of the sort. But his
simplicity, particularly in conjunction with his good looks, his
amiable smile, and the grace of his movements, was very attractive.
Either because his nature was sympathetic to Levin, or because Levin
was trying to atone for his sins of the previous evening by seeing
nothing but what was good in him- at any rate, he liked his society.
  After they had driven three verstas from home, Veslovsky all at once
felt for a cigar and his pocketbook, and did not know whether he had
lost them or left them on the table. In the pocketbook there were
three hundred and seventy roubles, and so the matter could not be left
in uncertainty.
  "Do you know what, Levin, I'll gallop home on that outrigger. That
will be splendid. Eh?" he said, preparing to get out.
  "No, why should you?" answered Levin, calculating that Vassenka
could hardly weigh less than six poods. "I'll send the coachman."
  The coachman rode back on the outrigger, and Levin himself drove the
remaining pair.
                             IX.

  "Well, now, what's our plan of campaign? Tell us all about it," said
Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "Our plan is this. Now we're driving to Gvozdiov. In Gvozdiov
there's a double snipe marsh on this side, and beyond Gvozdiov come
some magnificent jacksnipe marshes, where there are double snipe
too. It's hot now, and we'll get there- it's twenty verstas- toward
evening, and have some evening shooting; we'll spend the night there
and go on tomorrow to the bigger moors."
  "And is there nothing on the way?"
  "Yes; but we'll save ourselves; besides, it's hot. There are two
good little places, but I doubt there being anything to shoot."
  Levin would himself have liked to go into these little places, but
they were near home; he could shoot them over any time, and they
were only little places- there would hardly be room for three to
shoot. And so, with some insincerity, he said that he doubted there
being anything to shoot. When they reached a little marsh Levin
would have driven by, but Stepan Arkadyevich, with the experienced eye
of a sportsman, at once detected a soggy spot visible from the road.
  "Shan't we try that?" he said, pointing to the little marsh.
  "Levin, do, please! How delightful!" Vassenka Veslovsky began
begging, and Levin could not but consent.
  Before they had time to stop, the dogs had flown one before the
other into the marsh.
  "Krak! Laska!..."
  The dogs came back.
  "There won't be room for three. I'll stay here," said Levin,
hoping they would find nothing but pewits, which had been startled
by the dogs, and, turning over in their flight, were plaintively
wailing over the marsh.
  "No! Come along, Levin, let's go together!" Veslovsky called.
  "Really, there's no room. Laska, back, Laska! You won't want another
dog, will you?"
  Levin remained with the droshky, and looked enviously at the
sportsmen. They walked across the marsh. Except one moor hen and
pewits, of which Vassenka killed one, there was nothing in the marsh.
  "Come, you see now that it was not that I grudged the marsh," said
Levin, "only it's wasting time."
  "Oh, no, it was jolly all the same. Did you see us?" said Vassenka
Veslovsky, clambering awkwardly into the droshky with his gun and
his pewit in his hands. "How splendidly I shot this bird! Didn't I?
Well, shall we soon be getting to the real place?"
  The horses started off suddenly, Levin knocked his head against
the stock of someone's gun, and there was the report of a shot. The
gun did actually go off first, but that was how it seemed to Levin. It
appeared that Vassenka Veslovsky making the cocks safe had pressed one
trigger, and had held back the other cock. The charge flew into the
ground without doing harm to anyone. Stepan Arkadyevich shook his head
and laughed reprovingly at Veslovsky. But Levin had not the heart to
reprove him. In the first place, any reproach would have seemed to
be called forth by the danger he had incurred and the bump that had
come up on Levin's forehead. And besides, Veslovsky was at first so
naively distressed, and then laughed so good-humoredly and
infectiously at their general dismay, that one could not but laugh
with him.
  When they reached the second marsh, which was fairly large, and
would inevitably take some time to shoot over, Levin tried to persuade
them to pass it by. But Veslovsky again talked him over. Again, as the
marsh was narrow, Levin, like a good host, remained with the
carriages.
  Krak made straight for hummocks; Vassenka Veslovsky was the first to
run after the dog. Before Stepan Arkadyevich had time to come up, a
double snipe flew out. Veslovsky missed it and it flew into an
unmown meadow. This double snipe was left for Veslovsky to follow
up. Krak found it again and pointed, and Veslovsky shot it and went
back to the carriages.
  "Now you go and I'll stay with the horses," he said.
  Levin had begun to feel the pangs of a sportsman's envy. He handed
the reins to Veslovsky and walked into the marsh.
  Laska, who had been plaintively whining and fretting against the
injustice of her treatment, flew straight ahead to an unfailing place,
covered with mossy hummocks, that Levin knew well, and that Krak had
not yet come upon.
  "Why don't you stop her?" shouted Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "She won't scare them," answered Levin, sympathizing with his
bitch's pleasure and hurrying after her.
  As she came nearer and nearer to the familiar hummocks there was
more and more earnestness in Laska's exploration. A little marsh
bird did not divert her attention for more than an instant. She made
one circuit round the hummocks, was beginning a second, and suddenly
quivered with excitement and stood stock-still.
  "Come, come, Stiva!" shouted Levin, feeling his heart beginning to
beat more violently; and all of a sudden, as though some sort of
shutter had been drawn back from his straining ears, all sounds,
confused but loud, began to beat on his hearing, losing all sense of
distance. He heard the steps of Stepan Arkadyevich, mistaking them for
the tramp of the horses in the distance; he heard the brittle sound of
the tussock which came off with its roots when he had trodden on a
hummock, and he took this sound for the flight of a double snipe. He
heard too, not far behind him, a splashing in the water, which he
could not explain to himself.
  Picking his steps, he moved up to the dog.
  "Fetch it!"
  Not a double but a jacksnipe flew up from beside the dog. Levin
had lifted his gun, but at the very instant when he was taking aim,
the sound of splashing grew louder, came closer, and was joined with
the sound of Veslovsky's voice, shouting something with strange
loudness. Levin saw he had his gun pointed behind the snipe, but still
he fired.
  When he had made sure he had missed, Levin looked round and saw
the horses and the droshky not on the road but in the marsh.
  Veslovsky, eager to see the shooting, had driven into the marsh, and
got the horses stuck in the mud.
  "Damn the fellow!" Levin said to himself, as he went back to the
carriage that had sunk in the mire. "What did you drive in for?" he
said to him dryly, and, calling the coachman he began pulling the
horses out.
  Levin was vexed both at being hindered from shooting and at his
horses getting stuck in the mud, and still more at the fact that
neither Stepan Arkadyevich nor Veslovsky helped him and the coachman
to unharness the horses and get them out, since neither of them had
the slightest notion of harnessing. Without answering a syllable to
Vassenka's protestations that it had been quite dry there, Levin
worked in silence with the coachman at extricating the horses. But
then, as he got warm at the work and saw how assiduously Veslovsky was
tugging at the droshky by one of the splashboards, so that he broke it
indeed, Levin blamed himself for having under the influence of
yesterday's feelings been too cold to Veslovsky, and tried to be
particularly genial so as to smooth over his chilliness. When
everything had been put right, and the vehicles had been brought
back to the road, Levin had the lunch served.
  "Bon appetit- bonne conscience! Ce poulet va tomber jusqu'au fond de
mes bottes," Vassenka, who had recovered his spirits, quoted the
French saying as he finished his second chicken. "Well, now our
troubles are over, now everything's going to go well. Only, to atone
for my sins, I'm bound to sit on the box. That's so? Eh? No, no!
I'll be your Automedon. You shall see how I'll get you along," he
answered, without letting go the rein, when Levin begged him to let
the coachman drive. "No, I must atone for my sins, and I'm very
comfortable on the box." And he drove.
  Levin was a little afraid he would exhaust the horses, especially
the left of them, the chestnut, whom he did not know how to hold in;
but unconsciously he fell under the influence of his gaiety and
listened to the songs he sang all the way on the box, or the
descriptions and representations he gave of driving in the English
fashion, four-in-hand; and it was in the very best of spirits that
after lunch they drove to the Gvozdiov marsh.
                             X.

  Vassenka drove the horses so fast that they reached the marsh too
early, while it was still hot.
  As they drew near this more important marsh, the chief aim of
their expedition, Levin could not help considering how he could get
rid of Vassenka and be free in his movements. Stepan Arkadyevich
evidently had the same desire, and on his face Levin saw the look of
anxiety always present in a true sportsman when beginning shooting,
together with a certain good-humored slyness peculiar to him.
  "How shall we go? It's a splendid marsh, I see, and there are
hawks," said Stepan Arkadyevich, pointing to two great birds
hovering over the sedge. "Where there are hawks, there is sure to be
game."
  "Now, gentlemen," said Levin, pulling up his boots and examining the
lock of his gun with a somewhat somber expression, "do you see that
sedge?" He pointed to an oasis of blackish green in the huge half-mown
wet meadow that stretched along the right bank of the river. "The
marsh begins here, straight in front of us, do you see- where it is
greener? From here it runs to the right where the horses are; there
are hummocks there, and double snipe, and all round that sedge as
far as that alder tree, and right up to the mill. Over there, do you
see, where the creek is? That's the best place. There I once shot
seventeen jacksnipe. We'll separate with the dogs and go in
different directions, and then meet over there at the mill."
  "Well, who'll go left, and who to the right?" asked Stepan
Arkadyevich. "It's wider to the right; you two go that way and I'll
take the left," he said with apparent carelessness.
  "Capital! We'll make the bigger bag! Yes, come along, come along!"
Vassenka exclaimed.
  Levin could do nothing but agree, and they divided.
  As soon as they entered the marsh, the two dogs began hunting
about together and made toward the rust-colored spot. Levin knew
Laska's method, wary and indefinite; he knew the place too, and
expected a whole covey of snipe.
  "Veslovsky, walk beside me- beside me!" he said in a faint voice
to his companion splashing in the water behind him. Levin could not
help feeling an interest in the direction his gun was pointed, after
that casual shot near the Kolpensky marsh.
  "Oh, I won't get in your way, don't trouble about me."
  But Levin could not help troubling, and recalled Kitty's words at
parting: "Mind you don't shoot one another." The dogs came nearer
and nearer, passed each other, each pursuing its own scent. The
expectation of snipe was so intense that to Levin the smacking sound
of his own heel, as he drew it up out of the rusty mire, seemed to
be the call of a snipe, and he clutched and pressed the butt of his
gun.
  Bang! bang! sounded almost in his ear. Vassenka had fired at a flock
of ducks which was hovering over the marsh and flying at that moment
toward the sportsmen, far out of range. Before Levin had time to
look round, there was the whir of one snipe, another, a third, and
some eight more rose one after another.
  Stepan Arkadyevich hit one at the very moment when it was
beginning its zigzag movements, and the snipe fell as a clod into
the quagmire. Oblonsky aimed deliberately at another, still flying low
toward the sedge, and together with the report of the shot, that snipe
too fell, and it could be seen fluttering out where the sedge had been
cut, its unhurt wing showing white beneath.
  Levin was not so lucky: he aimed at his first bird too low, and
missed; he aimed at it again, just as it was rising, but at that
instant another snipe flew up at his very feet, distracting him so
that he missed again.
  While they were reloading their guns, another snipe rose, and
Veslovsky, who had had time to reload again, sent two charges of small
shot into the water. Stepan Arkadyevich picked up his snipe, and
with sparkling eyes looked at Levin.
  "Well, now let us separate," said Stepan Arkadyevich, and limping on
his left foot, holding his gun in readiness and whistling to his
dog, he walked off in one direction. Levin and Veslovsky walked off in
the other.
  It always happened with Levin that when his first shots were a
failure he got heated and out of temper, and shot badly the whole day.
So was it that day. The snipe showed themselves in numbers. They
kept flying up from just under the dogs, from under the sportsmen's
legs, and Levin might have retrieved his ill luck. But the more he
shot, the more he felt disgraced in the eyes of Veslovsky, who kept
popping away merrily and indiscriminately, killing nothing, and not in
the slightest abashed by his ill success. Levin, in feverish haste,
could not restrain himself, got more and more out of temper, and ended
by shooting almost without a hope of hitting. Laska, indeed, seemed to
understand this. She began searching more listlessly, and gazed back
at the sportsmen with apparent perplexity or reproach in her eyes.
Shots followed shots in rapid succession. The smoke of the powder hung
about the sportsmen, while in the great roomy net of the gamebag there
were only three light, small snipe. And of these one had been killed
by Veslovsky alone, and one by both of them together. Meanwhile,
from the other side of the marsh, came the sound of Stepan
Arkadyevich's shots, not frequent, but, as Levin fancied, well
directed, for almost after each they heard "Krak, Krak, apporte!"
  This excited Levin still more. The snipe were floating continually
in the air over the sedge. Their whirring wings close to the earth,
and their harsh cries high in the air, could be heard on all sides;
the snipe that had risen first and flown up into the air, settled
again before the sportsmen. Instead of two hawks there were now dozens
of them hovering with shrill cries over the marsh.
  After walking through the larger half of the marsh, Levin and
Veslovsky reached the place where the peasants' mowing grass was
divided into long strips reaching to the sedge, marked off in one
place by the trampled grass, in another by a path mown through it.
Half of these strips had already been mown.
  Though there was not so much hope of finding birds in the uncut part
as the cut part, Levin had promised Stepan Arkadyevich to meet him,
and so he walked on with his companion through the cut and uncut
patches.
  "Hi, hunters!" shouted one of a group of peasants, sitting on an
unharnessed telega: "Come and have some lunch with us! Have a drop
of wine!"
  Levin looked round.
  "Come along, it's all right!" shouted a good-humored-looking bearded
peasant with a red face, showing his white teeth in a grin, and
holding up a greenish bottle that flashed in the sunlight.
  "Qu'est-ce qu'ils disent?" asked Veslovsky.
  "They invite you to have some vodka. Most likely they've been
dividing the meadow into lots. I should have some," said Levin, not
without some guile, hoping Veslovsky would be tempted by the vodka,
and would go off to them.
  "Why do they offer it?"
  "Oh, they're merrymaking. Really, you should join them. You would be
interested."
  "Allons, c'est curieux."
  "You go, you go, you'll find the way to the mill!" cried Levin,
and looking round he perceived with satisfaction that Veslovsky,
bent and stumbling with weariness, holding his gun out at arm's
length, was making his way out of the marsh toward the peasants.
  "You come too!" the peasant shouted to Levin. "Never fear! Taste our
pie!"
  Levin felt a strong inclination for a drink of vodka and a bite of
bread. He was exhausted, and felt it a great effort to drag his
staggering legs out of the mire, and for a minute he hesitated. But
Laska was pointing. And immediately all his weariness vanished, and he
walked lightly through the swamp toward the dog. A snipe flew up at
his feet; he fired and killed it. Laska still pointed.- "Fetch it!"
Another bird flew up close to the dog. Levin fired. But it was an
unlucky day for him; he missed it, and when he went to look for the
one he had shot, he could not find that either. He wandered all
about the sedge, but Laska did not believe he had shot it, and when he
sent her to find it, she pretended to hunt for it, but did not
really do so.
  And in the absence of Vassenka, on whom Levin threw the blame of his
failure, things went no better. There was plenty of snipe still, but
Levin made one miss after another.
  The slanting rays of the sun were still hot; his clothes, soaked
through with perspiration, stuck to his body; his left boot full of
water weighed heavily on his leg and squelched at every step; the
sweat ran in drops down his powder-grimed face, his mouth was full
of a bitter taste, his nose of the smell of powder and stagnant water,
his ears were ringing with the incessant whir of the snipe; he could
not touch the barrel of his gun, it was so hot; his heart beat with
short, rapid throbs; his hands shook with excitement, and his weary
legs stumbled and staggered over the hummocks and in the swamp, but
still he walked on and still he shot. At last, after a disgraceful
miss, he flung his gun and his hat on the ground.
  "No, I must control myself," he said to himself. Picking up his
gun and his hat, he called Laska, and went out of the swamp. When he
got onto dry ground he sat down on a hummock, pulled off his boot
and emptied it, then walked to the marsh, drank some rust-tasting
water, moistened the burning hot barrel of his gun, and washed his
face and hands. Feeling refreshed, he went back to the spot where a
snipe had settled, firmly resolved to keep cool.
  He tried to be calm, but it was the same again. His finger pressed
the trigger before he had taken a good aim at the bird. It got worse
and worse.
  He had only five birds in his gamebag when he walked out of the
marsh toward the alders, where he was to rejoin Stepan Arkadyevich.
  Before he caught sight of Stepan Arkadyevich he saw his dog. Krak,
black all over with the stinking mire of the marsh, darted out from
behind the twisted root of an alder, and, with the air of a conqueror,
sniffed Laska. Behind Krak there came into view in the shade of the
alder tree the shapely figure of Stepan Arkadyevich. He came to meet
him, red and perspiring, with unbuttoned neckband, still limping in
the same way.
  "Well? You have been popping away!" he said, smiling good-humoredly.
  "How have you got on?" queried Levin. But there was no need to
ask, for he had already seen the full gamebag.
  "Oh, pretty fair."
  He had fourteen birds.
  "A splendid marsh! I've no doubt Veslovsky got in your way. It's
awkward too, shooting with one dog," said Stepan Arkadyevich, to
soften his triumph.
                             XI.

  When Levin and Stepan Arkadyevich reached the peasant's hut where
Levin always used to stay, Veslovsky was already there. He was sitting
in the middle of the hut, clinging with both hands to the bench from
which he was being pulled by a soldier, the brother of the peasant's
wife, who was helping him off with his miry boots. Veslovsky was
laughing his infectious, good-humored laugh.
  "I've only just come. Ils ont ete charmants. Just fancy they gave me
drink, and fed me! Such bread- it was exquisite! Dilicieux! And the
vodka- I never tasted any better. And they would not take a penny
for anything. And they kept saying: 'Excuse our homely ways.'"
  "What should they take anything for? They were entertaining you,
to be sure. Do you suppose they keep vodka for sale?" said the
soldier, succeeding at last in pulling the soaked boot off, together
with the blackened stocking.
  In spite of the dirtiness of the hut, which was all muddied by their
boots and the filthy dogs licking themselves clean, and the smells
of the marsh and the powder that filled the room, and the absence of
knives and forks, the party drank their tea and ate their supper
with a relish only known to sportsmen. Washed and clean, they went
into a hay barn swept ready for them, where the coachmen had been
making up beds for the gentlemen.
  Though it was dusk, not one of them wanted to go to sleep.
  After wavering among reminiscences and anecdotes of guns, of dogs,
and of former shooting parties, the conversation rested on a topic
that interested all of them. After Vassenka had several times over
expressed his appreciation of this delightful sleeping place among the
fragrant hay, this delightful broken telega (he supposed it to be
broken because the shafts had been taken out), of the good nature of
the peasants who had treated him to vodka, of the dogs who lay at
the feet of their respective masters, Oblonsky began telling them of a
delightful shooting party at Malthus's where he had stayed the
previous summer. Malthus was a well-known capitalist, who had made his
money by speculation in railway shares. Stepan Arkadyevich described
what snipe moors this Malthus had taken on lease in the Tver province,
and how they were preserved, and of the carriages and dogcarts in
which the shooting party had been driven, and the luncheon pavilion
that had been rigged up at the marsh.
  "I don't understand you," said Levin, sitting up in the hay; "how is
it such people don't disgust you? I can understand a lunch with
Lafitte is all very pleasant, but don't you dislike just that very
sumptuousness? All these people, just like our tax farmers in the
old days, get their money in a way that gains them the contempt of
everyone. They don't care for their contempt, and then they use
their dishonest gains to buy off the contempt they have deserved."
  "Perfectly true!" chimed in Vassenka Veslovsky. "Perfectly!
Oblonsky, of course, goes out of bonhomie, but other people say:
'Well, Oblonsky stays with them.'"
  "Not a bit of it." Levin could hear that Oblonsky was smiling as
he spoke. "I simply don't consider him more dishonest than any other
wealthy merchant or nobleman. They've all made their money alike- by
their work and their intelligence."
  "Oh, by what work? Do you call it work to get hold of concessions
and speculate with them?"
  "Of course it's work. Work in this sense, that if it were not for
him and others like him, there would have been no railways."
  "But that's not work, like the work of a peasant, or in a learned
profession."
  "Granted, but it's work in the sense that his activity produces a
result- the railways. But of course you think the railways useless."
  "No, that's another question; I am disposed to admit that they're
useful. But all profit that is out of proportion to the labor expended
is dishonest."
  "But who is to define what is proportionate?"
  "Making profit by dishonest means, by trickery," said Levin,
conscious that he could not draw a distinct line between honesty and
dishonesty. "Such as banking, for instance," he went on. "It's an
evil- the amassing of huge fortunes without labor, just the same thing
as with the tax farmers- it's only the form that's changed. Le roi est
mort, vive le roi! No sooner were the tax farmers abolished than the
railways came up, and banking companies; that, too, is profit
without work."
  "Yes, that may all be very true and clever.... Lie down, Krak!"
Stepan Arkadyevich called to his dog, who was scratching and turning
over all the hay. He was obviously convinced of the correctness of his
position, and so talked serenely and without haste. "But you have
not drawn the line between honest and dishonest work. That I receive a
bigger salary than my chief clerk, though he knows more about the work
than I do- that's dishonest, I suppose?"
  "I can't say."
  "Well, but I can tell you: your receiving some five thousand,
let's say, for your work on the land, while our host, the peasant
here, however hard he works, can never get more than fifty roubles, is
just as dishonest as my earning more than my chief clerk, and
Malthus getting more than a railway expert. No, quite the contrary;
I see that society takes up a sort of antagonistic attitude to these
people, which is utterly baseless, and I fancy there's envy at the
bottom of it...."
  "No, that's unfair," said Veslovsky; "how could envy come in?
There is something unclean about that sort of business."
  "You say," Levin went on, "that it's unjust for me to receive five
thousand, while the peasant has fifty roubles; that's true. It is
unfair, and I feel it, but..."
  "It really is. Why is it we spend our time riding, drinking,
shooting, doing nothing while they are forever at work?" said Vassenka
Veslovsky, obviously for the first time in his life reflecting on
the question, and consequently considering it with perfect sincerity.
  "Yes, you feel it, but you don't give him your property," said
Stepan Arkadyevich, intentionally, as it seemed, provoking Levin.
  There had arisen of late something like a secret antagonism
between the two brothers-in-law; as though, since they had married
sisters, a kind of rivalry had sprung up between them as to which
was ordering his life best, and now this hostility showed itself in
the conversation, as it began to take a personal note.
  "I don't give it away, because no one demands that from me, and if I
wanted to, I could not give it away," answered Levin, "and have no one
to give it to."
  "Give it to this peasant, he would not refuse it."
  "Yes, but how am I to give it up? Am I to go to him and make a title
deed?"
  "I don't know; but if you are convinced that you have no right..."
  "I'm not at all convinced. On the contrary, I feel have no right
to give it up, that I have duties both to the land and to my family."
  "No, excuse me, but if you consider this inequality is unjust, why
is it you don't act accordingly?..."
  "Well, I do act negatively on that idea, so far as not trying to
increase the difference of position existing between him and me."
  "No, excuse me, that's a paradox."
  "Yes, there's something of a sophistry about that," Veslovsky
agreed. "Ah! Our host!" he said to the peasant who came into the barn,
opening the creaking door. "How is it you're not asleep yet?"
  "No, how's one to sleep! I thought our gentlemen would be asleep,
but I heard them chattering. I want to get a hook from here. She won't
bite?" he added, stepping cautiously with his bare feet.
  "And where are you going to sleep?"
  "We are going out for night watching."
  "Ah, what a night!" said Veslovsky, looking out at the edge of the
hut and the unharnessed droshky that could be seen in the faint
light of the evening glow in the great frame of the open doors. "But
listen, there are women's voices singing, and, on my word, not badly
too! Who's that singing, my friend?"
  "That's the housemaids from hard by here."
  "Let's go- let's take a walk! We shan't go to sleep, you know.
Oblonsky, come along!"
  "If one could only do both, lie here and go," answered Oblonsky,
stretching. "It's capital lying here."
  "Well, I shall go by myself," said Veslovsky, getting up eagerly,
and putting on his boots and stockings. "Good-by, gentlemen. If it's
fun, I'll fetch you. You've treated me to some good sport, and I won't
forget you."
  "He really is a capital fellow, isn't he?" said Stepan Arkadyevich
when Veslovsky had gone out and the peasant had closed the door
after him.
  "Yes, capital," answered Levin, still thinking of the subject of
their conversation just before. It seemed to him that he had clearly
expressed his thoughts and feelings to the best of his capacity, and
yet both of them, straightforward men and not fools, had said with one
voice that he was comforting himself with sophistries. This
disconcerted him.
  "It's just this, my dear boy. One must do one of two things:
either admit that the existing order of society is just, and then
stick up for one's rights in it; or acknowledge that you are
enjoying unjust privileges, as I do, and then enjoy them and be
satisfied."
  "No, if it were unjust, you could not enjoy these advantages and
be satisfied- at least I could not. The great thing for me is to
feel that I'm not to blame."
  "What do you say- why not go after all?" said Stepan Arkadyevich,
evidently weary of the strain of thought. "We shan't go to sleep,
you know. Come, let's go!"
  Levin did not answer. What they had said in the conversation that he
acted justly only in a negative sense absorbed his thoughts. "Can it
be that it's only possible to be just negatively?" he was asking
himself.
  "How strong the smell of the fresh hay is, though," said Stepan
Arkadyevich, getting up. "There's not a chance of sleeping. Vassenka
has been getting up some fun there. Do you hear the laughter and his
voice? Hadn't we better go? Come along!"
  "No, I'm not coming," answered Levin.
  "Surely that's not a matter of principle too," said Stepan
Arkadyevich, smiling, as he felt about in the dark for his cap.
  "It's not a matter of principle, but why should I go?"
  "But do you know you are preparing trouble for yourself," said
Stepan Arkadyevich, finding his cap and getting up.
  "How so?"
  "Do you suppose I don't see the line you've taken up with your wife?
I heard how it's a question of the greatest consequence, whether or
not you're to be away for a couple of days' shooting. That's all
very well as an idyllic episode, but for your whole life that won't
answer. A man must be independent; he has his masculine interests. A
man has to be manly," said Oblonsky, opening the door.
  "In what way? To go running after servant girls?" said Levin.
  "Why not, if it amuses him? Ca ne tire pas a consequence. It won't
do my wife any harm, and it'll amuse me. The great thing is to respect
the sanctity of the home. There should be nothing in the home. But
don't tie your own hands."
  "Perhaps so," said Levin dryly, and he turned on his side.
"Tomorrow, early, I want to go shooting, and I won't wake anyone,
and shall set off at daybreak."
  "Messieurs, venez vite!" they heard the voice of Veslovsky coming
back. "Charmante! I've made such a discovery. Charmante! A perfect
Gretchen, and I've already made friends with her. Really,
exceedingly pretty," he declared in a tone of approval, as though
she had been made pretty entirely on his account, and he were
expressing his satisfaction with the entertainment that had been
provided for him.
  Levin pretended to be asleep, while Oblonsky, putting on his
slippers, and lighting a cigar, walked out of the barn, and soon their
voices were lost.
  For a long while Levin could not get to sleep. He heard his horses
munching hay, then he heard the peasant and his elder boy getting
ready, and then going off for the night watching, then he heard the
soldier arranging his bed on the other side of the barn, with his
nephew, the younger son of their peasant host. He heard the boy in his
shrill little voice telling his uncle what he thought about the
dogs, who seemed to him huge and terrible creatures, and asking what
the dogs were going to hunt next day, and the soldier in a husky,
sleepy voice, telling him the sportsmen were going in the morning to
the marsh, and would shoot with their guns; and then, to check the
boy's questions, he said, "Go to sleep, Vaska; go to sleep or you'll
catch it," and soon after he began snoring himself, and everything was
still. He could only hear the neigh of the horses, and the guttural
cry of a snipe. "Is it really only negative? he repeated to himself.
"Well, what of it? It's not my fault." And he began thinking about the
next day.
  "Tomorrow I'll go out early, and I'll make a point of keeping
cool. There are lots of snipe; and there are double snipe too. When
I come back there'll be the note from Kitty. Yes, Stiva may be
right, I'm not manly with her, I'm tied to her apron strings.... Well,
it can't be helped! Negative again...."
  Half asleep, he heard the laughter and mirthful talk of Veslovsky
and Stepan Arkadyevich. For an instant he opened his eyes: the moon
was up, and in the open doorway, brightly lighted up by the moonlight,
they were standing talking. Stepan Arkadyevich was saying something of
the freshness of one girl, comparing her to a freshly peeled nut,
and Veslovsky with his infectious laugh was repeating some words,
probably said to him by a peasant: "Ah, you'd better get round your
own wife!" Levin, half asleep, said:
  "Gentlemen, tomorrow before daylight!" and fell asleep.
                             XII.

  Waking up at earliest dawn, Levin tried to wake his companions.
Vassenka, lying on his stomach, with one leg in a stocking thrust out,
was sleeping so soundly that he could elicit no response. Oblonsky,
half asleep, declined to get up so early. Even Laska, who was
asleep, curled up in the hay, got up unwillingly, and lazily stretched
out and straightened her hind legs one after the other. Getting on his
boots, taking his gun, and carefully opening the creaking door of
the barn, Levin went out into the road. The coachmen were sleeping
near their carriages; the horses were dozing. Only one was lazily
eating oats, scattering them in the manger when snorting. It was still
gray out-of-doors.
  "Why are you up so early, my dear?" the old woman, their hostess,
said, coming out of the hut and addressing him affectionately as an
old friend.
  "Going shooting, auntie. Do I go this way to the marsh?"
  "Straight out at the back; by our threshing floor, my dear, and hemp
patches; there's a little footpath."
  Stepping carefully with her sunburned, bare feet, the old woman
conducted Levin, and moved back the gate for him by the threshing
floor.
  "Straight ahead, and you'll come to the marsh. Our lads drove the
horses there yesterday evening."
  Laska ran eagerly forward along the little path. Levin followed
her with a light, rapid step, continually looking at the sky. He hoped
the sun would not be up before he reached the marsh. But the sun did
not delay. The moon, which had been bright when he went out, by now
shone only like a crescent of quicksilver. The rosy flush of dawn,
which one could not help seeing before, now had to be sought to be
discerned at all. What before had been undefined, vague blurs in the
distant countryside, could now be distinctly seen. They were sheaves
of rye. The dew, not visible till the sun was up, wetted Levin's
legs and his blouse above his belt in the high-growing, fragrant
hemp patch, from which the male plants had already been gathered in.
In the transparent stillness of morning the smallest sounds were
audible. A bee flew by Levin's ear with the whizzing sound of a
bullet. He looked carefully, and saw a second and a third. They were
all flying from the beehives behind the hedge, and they disappeared
over the hemp patch in the direction of the marsh. The path led
straight to the marsh. The marsh could be recognized by the mist which
rose from it, thicker in one place and thinner in another, so that the
sedge and willow bushes swayed like islands in this mist. At the
edge of the marsh and the road peasant boys and men, who had been
herding for the night, were lying, and in the dawn all were asleep
under their coats. Not far from them were three hobbled horses. One of
them clanked a chain. Laska walked beside her master, pressing a
little forward and looking round. Passing the sleeping peasants and
reaching the first reeds, Levin examined his percussion caps and
unleashed his dog. One of the horses, a sleek, dark-brown
three-year-old, seeing the dog, started away, switched its tail and
snorted. The other horses too were frightened, and splashing through
the water with their hobbled legs, and drawing their hoofs out of
the thick mud with a squelching sound, they bounded out of the
marsh. Laska stopped, looking ironically at the horses and inquiringly
at Levin. Levin patted Laska, and whistled as a sign that she might
begin.
  Laska ran joyfully and anxiously through the quagmire that quaked
under her.
  Running into the marsh among the familiar scents of roots, marsh
plants, and dross, and the extraneous smell of horse manure, Laska
detected at once a smell that pervaded the whole marsh, the scent of
that strong-smelling bird that always excited her more than any other.
Here and there among the moss and marsh plants this scent was very
strong, but it was impossible to determine in which direction it
grew stronger or fainter. To find the direction, she had to get
farther away from the wind. Not feeling the motion of her legs,
Laska bounded with a still gallop, so that at each bound she could
stop short, to the right, away from the wind that blew from the east
before sunrise, and turned facing the wind. Sniffing in the air with
dilated nostrils, she felt at once that not their traces only, but
they themselves, were here before her- not one, but many. Laska
slackened her speed. They were here, but where precisely she could not
yet determine. To find the very spot, she began to make a circle, when
suddenly her master's voice drew her off. "Laska! Here!" he said,
pointing her to a different direction. She stopped, asking him if
she had better not go on doing as she had begun. But he repeated his
command in an angry voice, pointing to a hummock spot covered with
water, where there could not be anything. She obeyed him, pretending
she was searching so as to please him, went round it, and went back to
her former position, and was at once aware of the scent again. Now
when he was not hindering her, she knew what to do, and, without
looking at what was under her feet, and to her vexation stumbling over
a hummock into the water, but righting herself with her strong, supple
legs, she began making the circuit which was to make all clear to her.
The scent of them reached her, stronger and stronger, and more and
more defined, and all at once it became perfectly clear to her that
one of them was here, behind this hummock, five paces in front of her;
she stopped, and her whole body was still and rigid. On her short legs
she could see nothing in front of her, but by the scent she knew it
was sitting not more than five paces off. She stood still, feeling
more and more conscious of it, and enjoying it in anticipation. Her
tail was stretched straight and tense, and only wagged at the
extreme tip. Her mouth was slightly open, her ears raised. One ear had
been turned wrong side out as she ran up, and she breathed heavily but
warily, and still more warily she turned around, but more with her
eyes than her head, to her master. He was coming along with the face
she knew so well, though the eyes were always terrible to her. He
stumbled over the hummocks as he came, and moved, as she thought,
extraordinarily slowly. She thought he came slowly, but he was
running.
  Noticing Laska's special attitude as she crouched on the ground,
as it were, scratching big prints with her hind paws, and with her
mouth slightly open, Levin knew she was pointing at double snipe,
and with an inward prayer for luck, especially with the first bird, he
ran up to her. Coming quite close up to her, he could from his
height look beyond her, and he saw with his eyes what she was seeing
with her nose. In a space between two little hummocks, at a couple
of yards' distance, he could see a double snipe. Turning its head,
it was listening. Then lightly preening and folding its wings, it
disappeared round a corner with a clumsy wag of its tail.
  "Fetch it, fetch it!" shouted Levin, giving Laska a shove from
behind.
  "But I can't go," thought Laska. "Where am I to go? From here I feel
them, but if I move forward I shall know nothing of where they are, or
who they are." But then he shoved her with his knee, and in an excited
whisper said, "Fetch it, Lassochka, fetch it."
  "Well, if that's what he wishes, I'll do it, but I can't answer
for myself now," she thought, and darted forward as fast as her legs
would carry her between the hummocks. She scented nothing now; she
could only see and hear, without understanding anything.
  Ten paces from her former place a double snipe rose with a
guttural cry and the peculiar convex sound of its wings. And
immediately after the shot it splashed heavily with its white breast
on the wet mire. Another bird did not linger, but rose behind Levin,
without the dog's offices.
  When Levin turned toward it, it was already some way off. But his
shot caught it. Flying twenty paces farther, the second double snipe
rose upward, and, whirling round like a ball, dropped heavily on a dry
place.
  "Come, this is going to be some good!" thought Levin, packing the
warm and fat snipe into his gamebag. "Eh, Laska, will it be good?"
  When Levin, after reloading his gun, moved on, the sun had fully
risen, though unseen behind clouds. The moon had lost all of its
luster, and was like a white cloud in the sky. Not a single star could
be seen. The soggy places, silvery with dew before, now shone like
gold. The rusty pools were all like amber. The blue of the grass had
changed to yellow green. The marsh birds twittered and swarmed about
the brook and upon the bushes that glittered with dew and cast long
shadows. A hawk woke up and settled on a haycock, turning its head
from side to side and looking discontentedly at the marsh. Crows
were flying about the field, and a barelegged boy was driving the
horses to an old man, who had got up from under his long coat and
was combing his hair. The smoke from the gun was white as milk over
the green of the grass.
  One of the boys ran up to Levin.
  "Uncle, there were ducks here yesterday!" he shouted to him, and
he walked a little way off behind him.
  And Levin was doubly pleased, in sight of the boy, who expressed his
approval, at killing three jacksnipe, one after another, straight off.
                             XIII.

  The sportsman's saying, that if the first beast or the first bird is
not missed, the shooting will be lucky, turned out correct.
  At ten o'clock Levin, weary, hungry, and happy after a tramp of
thirty verstas, returned to his night's lodging with nineteen head
of fine game and one duck, which he tied to his belt, as it would
not go into the gamebag. His companions had long been awake, and had
had time to get hungry and have breakfast.
  "Wait a bit, wait a bit, I know there are nineteen," said Levin,
counting a second time over the double snipe and jacksnipe, that
looked so much less important now, bent and dry and bloodstained, with
heads crookedly to one side, than they did when they were flying.
  The number was verified, and Stepan Arkadyevich's envy pleased
Levin. He was pleased too on returning to find that the man sent by
Kitty with a note was already here.
  "I am perfectly well and happy. If you were uneasy about me, you can
feel easier than ever. I've a new bodyguard, Marya Vlassyevna."
(This was the midwife, a new and important personage in Levin's
domestic life.) "She has come to have a look at me. She found me
perfectly well, and we are holding her till you are back. All are
happy and well, and please, don't be in a hurry to come back, but,
if the sport is good, stay another day."
  These two pleasures, his lucky shooting and the letter from his
wife, were so great that two slightly disagreeable incidents passed
lightly over Levin. One was that the chestnut trace horse, who had
been unmistakably overworked on the previous day, was off his feed and
out of sorts. The coachman said the horse was overstrained.
  "Overdriven yesterday, Konstantin Dmitrievich!" he said. "Yes,
indeed! Driving ten miles without any sense!"
  The other unpleasant incident, which for the first minute
destroyed his good humor, though later he laughed at it a great
deal, was to find that of all the provisions which Kitty had
provided in such abundance, that one would have thought there was
enough for a week, nothing was left. On his way back, tired and
hungry, from shooting, Levin had so distinct a vision of meat pies
that as he approached the hut he seemed to smell and taste them, as
Laska had smelt the game, and he immediately told Philip to give him
some. It appeared that there were no pies left- nor even any chicken.
  "Well, this fellow's appetite!" said Stepan Arkadyevich, laughing
and pointing at Vassenka Veslovsky. "I never suffer from loss of
appetite, but he's really marvelous!..."
  "Well, it can't be helped," said Levin, looking gloomily at
Veslovsky. "Well, Philip, give me some beef, then."
  "The beef's been eaten, and the bones given to the dogs," answered
Philip.
  Levin was so hurt that he said, in a tone of vexation: "You might
have left me something!" and he felt ready to cry.
  "Then disembowel the game," he said in a shaking voice to Philip,
trying not to look at Vassenka, "and cover them with some nettles. And
you might at least ask for some milk for me."
  But when he had drunk some milk, he felt ashamed immediately at
having shown his annoyance to a stranger, and he began to laugh at his
hungry mortification.
  In the evening they went shooting again, and Veslovsky, too, had
several successful shots, and in the night they drove home.
  Their homeward journey was as lively as their drive out had been.
Veslovsky sang songs and related with enjoyment his adventures with
the peasants, who had regaled him with vodka, and said to him, "Excuse
our homely ways," and his night's adventures with tug of war, and
the servant girl, and the peasant, who had asked him was he married
and on learning that he was not, said to him: "Well, mind you don't
run after other men's wives- you'd better get round your own." These
words had particularly amused Veslovsky.
  "Altogether, I've enjoyed our outing awfully. And you, Levin?"
  "I have, very much," Levin said quite sincerely. It was particularly
delightful to him to have got rid of the hostility he had been feeling
toward Vassenka Veslovsky at home, and to feel instead the most
friendly disposition to him.
                             XIV.

  Next day at ten o'clock Levin, who had already gone his rounds,
knocked at the room where Vassenka had been put for the night.
  "Entrez!" Veslovsky called to him. "Excuse me, I've only just
finished my ablutions," he said, smiling, standing before him in his
underclothes only.
  "Don't mind me, please," Levin sat down in the window. "Have you
slept well?"
  "Like the dead. What sort of day is it for shooting?"
  "What will you take, tea or coffee?"
  "Neither. I'll wait till lunch. I'm really ashamed. I suppose the
ladies are down? A walk now would be capital. You show me your
horses."
  After walking about the garden, visiting the stable, and even
doing some gymnastic exercises together on the parallel bars, Levin
returned to the house with his guest, and went with him into the
drawing room.
  "We had splendid shooting, and so many delightful experiences!" said
Veslovsky, going up to Kitty, who was sitting at the samovar. "What
a pity ladies are cut off from these delights!"
  "Well, I suppose he must say something to the lady of the house,"
Levin said to himself. Again he fancied something in the smile, in the
all-conquering air with which their guest addressed Kitty...
  The Princess, sitting on the other side of the table with Marya
Vlassyevna and Stepan Arkadyevich, called Levin to her side, and began
to talk to him about moving to Moscow for Kitty's confinement, and
getting ready rooms for them. Just as Levin had disliked all the
trivial preparations for his wedding, as derogatory to the grandeur of
the event, now he felt still more offensive the preparations for the
approaching birth, the date of which they reckoned, it seemed, on
their fingers. He tried to turn a deaf ear to these discussions of the
best patterns of long clothes for the coming baby; tried to turn
away and avoid seeing the mysterious, endless strips of knitting,
the triangles of linen, to which Dolly attached special importance,
and so on. The birth of a son (he was certain it would be a son) which
was promised him, but which he still could not believe in- so
marvelous it seemed- presented itself to his mind, on one hand, as a
happiness so immense, and therefore so incredible; on the other, as an
event so mysterious, that this assumption of a definite knowledge of
what would be, and consequent preparation for it, as for something
ordinary that did happen to people, jarred on him as confusing and
humiliating.
  But the Princess did not understand his feelings, and put down his
reluctance to think and talk about it to carelessness and
indifference, and so she gave him no peace. She had commissioned
Stepan Arkadyevich to look at an apartment, and now she called Levin
to her.
  "I know nothing about it, Princess. Do as you think fit," he said.
  "You must decide when you will move."
  "I really don't know. I know millions of children are born away from
Moscow, and doctors... Why..."
  "But if so..."
  "Oh, no, as Kitty wishes."
  "We can't talk to Kitty about it! Do you want me to frighten her?
Why, this spring Natalie Golitzina died from having an ignorant
doctor."
  "I will do just what you say," he said gloomily.
  The Princess began talking to him, but he did not hear her. Though
the conversation with the Princess had indeed jarred upon him, he
was gloomy not on account of that conversation, but from what he saw
at the samovar.
  "No, it's impossible," he thought, glancing now and then at Vassenka
bending over Kitty, telling her something with his charming smile, and
at her, flushed and disturbed.
  There was something unclean in Vassenka's attitude, in his eyes,
in his smile. Levin even saw something unclean in Kitty's attitude and
look. And again the light died away in his eyes. Again, as before, all
of a sudden, without the slightest transition, he felt cast down
from a pinnacle of happiness, peace, and dignity, into an abyss of
despair, rage, and humiliation. Again everything and everyone had
become hateful to him.
  "You do just as you think best, Princess," he said again, looking
round.
  "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown!" Stepan Arkadyevich said
playfully, hinting, evidently, not simply at the Princess's
conversation, but at the cause of Levin's agitation, which he had
noticed. "How late you are today, Dolly!"
  Everyone got up to greet Darya Alexandrovna. Vassenka only rose
for an instant, and, with the lack of courtesy to ladies
characteristic of the modern young man, he scarcely bowed, and resumed
his conversation again, laughing at something.
  "Masha has been almost the end of me. She did not sleep well, and is
dreadfully capricious today," said Dolly.
  The conversation Vassenka had started with Kitty was running on
the same lines as on the previous evening- discussing Anna, and
whether love is to be put higher than worldly considerations. Kitty
disliked the conversation, and she was disturbed both by the subject
and the tone in which it was conducted, and especially by the
knowledge of the effect it would have on her husband. But she was
too simple and unsophisticated to know how to cut short this
conversation, or even to conceal the superficial pleasure afforded her
by the young man's very obvious admiration. She wanted to stop this
conversation, but she did not know what to do. Whatever she did, she
knew it would be observed by her husband, and the worst interpretation
put on it. And, in fact, when she asked Dolly what was wrong with
Masha, and Vassenka, waiting till this uninteresting conversation
was over, began to gaze indifferently at Dolly, the question struck
Levin as an unnatural and disgusting piece of hypocrisy.
  "What do you say, shall we go and look for mushrooms today?" said
Dolly.
  "By all means, please, and I shall come too," said Kitty, and she
blushed. She wanted from politeness to ask Vassenka whether he would
come, and she did not ask him. "Where are you going, Kostia?" she
asked her husband with a guilty face, as he passed by her with a
resolute step. This guilty air confirmed all his suspicions.
  "The mechanician came when I was away; I haven't seen him yet," he
said, not looking at her.
  He went downstairs, but before he had time to leave his study he
heard his wife's familiar footsteps running with reckless speed to
him.
  "What do you want?" he said to her shortly. "We are busy."
  "I beg your pardon," she said to the German mechanician; "I want a
few words with my husband."
  The German would have left the room, but Levin said to him:
  "Don't disturb yourself"
  "The train is at three?" queried the German. "I mustn't be late."
  Levin did not answer him, but walked out himself with his wife.
  "Well, what have you to say to me?" he said to her in French.
  He did not look her in the face, and did not care to see that she in
her condition was trembling all over, and had a piteous, crushed look.
  "I... I want to say that we can't go on like this; that this is
misery..." she said.
  "The servants are here at the buttery," he said angrily; "don't make
a scene."
  "Well, let's go in here!"
  They were standing in the passage room. Kitty would have gone into
the next room, but there the English governess was giving Tania a
lesson.
  "Well, come into the garden."
  In the garden they came upon a peasant weeding the path. And no
longer considering that the peasant could see her tear-stained and his
agitated face, that they looked like people fleeing from some
disaster, they went on with rapid steps, feeling that they must
speak out and clear up misunderstandings, must be alone together,
and so get rid of the misery they were both feeling.
  "We can't go on like this! It's misery! I am wretched; you are
wretched. What for?" she said, when they had at last reached a
solitary garden seat at a turn in the linden tree avenue.
  "But tell me one thing: was there in his tone anything unseemly,
unclean, humiliatingly horrible?" he said, standing before her again
in the same position, with his clenched fists on his chest, as he
had stood before her that night.
  "Yes," she said in a shaking voice; "but, Kostia, surely you see I'm
not to blame? All the morning I've been trying to take a tone... But
such people... Why did he come? How happy we were!" she said,
breathless with the sobs that shook her.
  Although nothing had been pursuing them, and there was nothing to
run away from, and they could not possibly have found anything very
delightful on that garden seat, the gardener saw with astonishment
that they passed him on their way home with comforted and radiant
faces.
                             XV.

  After escorting his wife upstairs, Levin went to Dolly's part of the
house. Darya Alexandrovna, for her part, was also in great distress
that day. She was walking about the room, talking angrily to a
little girl, who stood in the corner bawling.
  "And you shall stand all day in the corner, and have your dinner all
alone, and not see one of your dolls, and I won't make you a new
frock," she said, not knowing how to punish her.
  "Oh, she is a disgusting child!" she turned to Levin. "Where does
she get such wicked propensities?"
  "Why, what has she done?" Levin said without much interest, for he
had wanted to ask her advice, and so was annoyed that he had come at
an unlucky moment.
  "Grisha and she went into the raspberries, and there... I can't tell
you really what she did. It's a thousand pities Miss Elliot's not with
us. This one sees to nothing- she's a machine.... Figurez-vous que
la petite?..."
  And Darya Alexandrovna described Masha's crime.
  "That proves nothing; it's not a question of evil propensities at
all, it's simply mischief," Levin assured her.
  "But you are upset about something? What have you come for?" asked
Dolly. "What's going on there?"
  And in the tone of her question Levin heard that it would be easy
for him to say what he had meant to say.
  "I've not been in there, I've been alone in the garden with Kitty.
We've had a quarrel for the second time since... Stiva came."
  Dolly looked at him with her shrewd, comprehending eyes.
  "Come, tell me, honor bright, has there been... Not in Kitty, but in
that gentleman's behavior, a tone which might be unpleasant- not
unpleasant, but horrible, offensive to a husband?"
  "You mean, how shall I say... Stand there- stand in the corner!" she
said to Masha, who, detecting a faint smile on her mother's face,
had been turning round. "The opinion of the world would be that he
is behaving as young men do behave. Il fait le cour a une jeune et
jolie femme, and a husband who's a man of the world should only be
flattered by it."
  "Yes, yes," said Levin gloomily; "but you noticed it?"
  "Not only I, but Stiva noticed it. Just after breakfast he said to
me: Je crois que Veslovsky fait un petit brin de cour a Kitty."
  "Well, that's all right then; now I'm satisfied. I'll send him
away," said Levin.
  "What do you mean! Are you crazy?" Dolly cried in horror. "Nonsense,
Kostia, only think!" she said, laughing. "You can go now to Fanny,"
she said to Masha. "No, if you wish it, I'll speak to Stiva. He'll
take him away. He can say you're expecting visitors. Altogether he
doesn't fit into the house."
  "No, no, I'll do it myself."
  "But you'll quarrel with him?"
  "Not a bit. I shall so enjoy it," Levin said, his eyes flashing with
real enjoyment. "Come, forgive her, Dolly, she won't do it again,"
he said of the little sinner, who had not gone to Fanny, but was
standing irresolutely before her mother, waiting and looking up from
under her brows to catch her mother's eye.
  The mother glanced at her. The child broke into sobs, hid her face
on her mother's lap, and Dolly laid her thin, tender hand on her head.
  "And what is there in common between us and him?" thought Levin, and
he went off to look for Veslovsky.
  As he passed through the hall he gave orders for the carriage to
be got ready to drive to the station.
  "The spring was broken yesterday," said the footman.
  "Well, the tarantass then, and make haste. Where's the visitor?"
  "The gentleman's gone to his room."
  Levin came upon Vassenka at the moment when the latter, having
unpacked his things from his trunk, and laid out some new songs, was
putting on his leather gaiters to go out riding.
  Whether there was something exceptional in Levin's face, or that
Vassenka was himself conscious that ce petit brin de cour he was
making was out of place in this family; he was somewhat (as much as
a young man in society can be) disconcerted at Levin's entrance.
  "You ride in gaiters?"
  "Yes, it's much cleaner," said Vassenka, putting his fat leg on a
chair, fastening the bottom hook, and smiling with simplehearted
good humor.
  He was undoubtedly a good-natured fellow, and Levin felt sorry for
him and ashamed of himself, as his host, when he saw the shy look on
Vassenka's face.
  On the table lay a piece of stick which they had broken together
that morning at gymnastics, trying to raise up the swollen bars. Levin
took the fragment in his hands and began breaking off the split end of
the stick, not knowing how to begin.
  "I wanted..." He paused, but suddenly, remembering Kitty and
everything that had happened, he said, looking him resolutely in the
face: "I have ordered the horses to be put to for you."
  "How so?" Vassenka began in surprise. "To drive where?"
  "For you to drive to the station," Levin said gloomily pinching
off the end of the stick.
  "Are you going away, or has something happened?"
  "It happens that I expect visitors," said Levin, his strong
fingers more and more rapidly breaking off the ends of the split
stick. "And I'm not expecting visitors, and nothing has happened,
but I beg you to go away. You can explain my rudeness as you like."
  Vassenka drew himself up.
  "I beg you to explain..." he said with dignity, understanding at
last.
  "I can't explain," Levin said softly and deliberately, trying to
control the trembling of his jaw; "and you'd better not ask."
  And as the split ends were all broken off, Levin clutched the
thick ends in his finger, split the stick in two, and carefully caught
the end as it fell.
  Probably the sight of those tense hands, of the same muscles he
had proved that morning at gymnastics, of the glittering eyes, the
soft voice, and quivering jaws, convinced Vassenka better than any
words. He bowed, shrugging his shoulders, and smiling contemptuously.
  "May I not see Oblonsky?"
  The shrug and the smile did not irritate Levin. "What else was there
for him to do?" he thought.
  "I'll send him to you at once."
  "What madness is this?" Stepan Arkadyevich said when, after
hearing from his friend that he was being turned out of the house,
he found Levin in the garden, where he was walking about waiting for
his guest's departure. "Mais c'est ridicule! What flea has bitten you?
Mais c'est du dernier ridicule! What did you think, if a young man..."
  But the place where Levin had been bitten was evidently still
sore, for he turned pale again, when Stepan Arkadyevich would have
enlarged on the reason, and he himself cut him short.
  "Please don't go into it! I can't help it. I feel ashamed of the way
I'm treating you and him. But it won't be, I imagine, a great grief to
him to go, and his presence was distasteful to me and to my wife."
  "But it's insulting to him! Et puis c'est ridicule."
  "And to me it's both insulting and distressing! And I'm not in fault
in any way, and there's no need for me to suffer."
  "Well, this I didn't expect of you! On peut etre jaloux, mais a ce
point c'est du dernier ridicule!"
  Levin turned quickly, and walked away from him into the depths of
the avenue, and he went on walking up and down alone. Soon he heard
the rumble of the tarantass, and saw from behind the trees how
Vassenka, sitting in the hay (unluckily there was no seat in the
tarantass) in his Scotch cap, was driven along the avenue, jolting
up and down over the ruts.
  "What's this?" Levin thought, when a footman ran out of the house
and stopped the tarantass. It was the mechanician, whom Levin had
totally forgotten. The mechanician, bowing low, said something to
Veslovsky, then clambered into the tarantass and they drove off
together.
  Stepan Arkadyevich and the Princess were much upset by Levin's
action. And he himself felt not only in the highest degree ridicule,
but also utterly guilty and disgraced. But remembering what sufferings
he and his wife had been through, when he asked himself how he
should act another time, he answered that he would do precisely the
same.
  In spite of all this, toward the end of that day, everyone, except
the Princess, who could not pardon Levin's action, became
extraordinarily lively and good-humored, like children after a
punishment, or grown-up people after a dreary, ceremonious
reception, so that by the evening Vassenka's dismissal was spoken
of, in the absence of the Princess, as though it were some remote
event. And Dolly, who had inherited her father's gift of humorous
storytelling, made Varenka helpless with laughter as she related for
the third and fourth time, always with fresh humorous additions, how
she had just put on her new ribands for the benefit of the visitor,
and, on going into the drawing room, had suddenly heard the rumble
of the chariot. And who should be in the chariot but Vassenka himself,
with his Scotch cap, and his songs, and his gaiters, and all,
sitting in the hay.
  "If only you'd ordered out the carriage! But no! And then I hear:
'Stop!' Oh, I thought they've relented. I look out- and a fat German
is being sat down by him, and they're driving away... And my new
ribands all for nothing!..."
                             XVI.

  Darya Alexandrovna carried out her intention and went to see Anna.
She was sorry to annoy her sister and to do anything Levin disliked.
She quite understood how right the Levins were in not wishing to
have anything to do with Vronsky. But she felt she must go and see
Anna, and show her that her feelings could not be changed, in spite of
the change in her position.
  That she might be independent of the Levins in this expedition,
Darya Alexandrovna sent to the village to hire horses for the drive;
but Levin learning of it went to her to protest.
  "What makes you suppose that I dislike your going? But, even if
did dislike it, I should still more dislike your not taking my
horses," he said. "You never told me that you were going definitely.
Hiring horses in the village is disagreeable to me, and, what's of
more importance, they'll undertake the job and never get you there.
I have horses. And if you don't want to wound me, you'll take mine."
  Darya Alexandrovna had to consent, and on the day fixed Levin had
ready for his sister-in-law a set of four horses and relays, getting
them together from the farm and saddle horses- not at all a
smart-looking set, but capable of taking Darya Alexandrovna the
whole distance in a single day. At that moment, when horses were
wanted for the Princess, who was going, and for the midwife, it was
a difficult matter for Levin to make up the number, but the duties
of hospitality would not let him allow Darya Alexandrovna to hire
horses when staying in his house. Moreover, he was well aware that the
twenty roubles that would be asked for the journey were a serious
matter for her; Darya Alexandrovna's pecuniary affairs, which were
in a very unsatisfactory state, were taken to heart by the Levins as
if they were their own.
  Darya Alexandrovna, by Levin's advice, started before daybreak.
The road was good, the carriage comfortable, the horses trotted
along merrily, and on the box, beside the coachman, sat the
countinghouse clerk, whom Levin was sending instead of a groom for
greater security. Darya Alexandrovna dozed and waked up only on
reaching the inn where the horses were to be changed.
  After drinking tea at the same well-to-do peasant's with whom
Levin had stayed on the way to Sviiazhsky's, and chatting with the
women about their children, and with the old man about Count
Vronsky, whom the latter praised very highly, Darya Alexandrovna, at
ten o'clock, went on again. At home, looking after her children, she
had no time to think. So now, after this journey of four hours, all
the thoughts she had suppressed before rushed swarming into her brain,
and she thought over all her life as she never had before, and from
the most different points of view. Her thoughts seemed strange even to
herself. At first she thought about the children, about whom she was
uneasy, although the Princess and Kitty (she reckoned more upon her)
had promised to look after them. "If only Masha does not begin her
naughty tricks, if Grisha isn't kicked by a horse, and Lily's
stomach isn't upset again!" But these questions of the present were
succeeded by questions of the immediate future. She began thinking how
she had to get a new flat in Moscow for the coming winter, to renew
the drawing-room furniture, and to make her elder girl a cloak. Then
questions of the more remote future occurred to her: how she was to
place her children in the world. "The girls are all right," she
thought; "but the boys?"
  "It's all very fine for me to be teaching Grisha, but of course
that's only because I am free myself now, I'm not with child. Stiva,
of course, there's no counting on. And with the help of good-natured
friends I can bring them up; but if there's another baby coming?..."
And the thought struck her how unjustly it was said, that the curse
laid on woman was that in sorrow she should bring forth children. "The
birth itself, that's nothing; but the months of carrying the child-
that's what's so intolerable," she thought, picturing to herself her
last pregnancy, and the death of the last baby. And she recalled the
conversation she had just had with the young woman at the inn. On
being asked whether she had any children, the handsome young woman had
answered cheerfully.
  "I had a girl baby, but God set me free; I buried her last Lent."
  "Well, did you grieve very much for her?" asked Darya Alexandrovna.
  "Why grieve? The old man has grandchildren enough as it is. It was
only a trouble. No working, nor nothing. Only a tie."
  This answer had struck Darya Alexandrovna as revolting in spite of
the good-natured and pleasing face of the young woman; but now she
could not help recalling these words. In those cynical words there was
indeed a grain of truth.
  "Yes, in general," thought Darya Alexandrovna, looking back over her
whole existence during those fifteen years of her married life,
"pregnancy, sickness, mental incapacity, indifference to everything-
and, most of all, hideousness. Kitty, young and pretty as she is, even
Kitty has lost her looks; and I, when I'm with child, become
hideous, I know it. The birth, the agony, the hideous agonies, that
last moment... Then the nursing, the sleepless nights, the fearful
pains..."
  Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain
from sore breasts which she had suffered with almost every child.
"Then the children's illnesses, that everlasting apprehension; then
bringing them up; evil propensities" (she thought of little Masha's
crime among the raspberries), "education, Latin- it's all so
incomprehensible and difficult. And, on the top of it all, the death
of these children." And there rose again before her imagination the
cruel memory that always tore her mother's heart, of the death of
her last little baby, who had died of croup; his funeral, the
callous indifference of all at the little pink coffin, and her own
torn heart, and her lonely anguish at the sight of the pale little
brow with the curls falling on temples, and the open, wondering little
mouth seen in the coffin at the moment when it was being covered
with the little pink lid with a gallooned cross on it.
  "And all this- what's it for? What is to come of it all? This: I'm
wasting my life, never having a moment's peace, either with child,
or nursing a child, forever irritable, peevish, wretched myself and
worrying others, repulsive to my husband, while the children are
growing up unhappy, badly educated and penniless. Even now, if it
weren't for spending the summer at the Levins', I don't know how we
should be managing to live. Of course Kostia and Kitty have so much
tact that we don't feel it; but it can't go on. They'll have children,
they won't be able to keep us; it's a drag on them as it is. How is
papa, who has hardly anything left for himself, to help us? So that
I can't even bring the children up by myself, and may find it hard
with the help of other people, at the cost of humiliation. Why, even
if we suppose the greatest good luck, that the children don't die, and
I bring them up somehow. At the very best they'll simply be decent
people. That's all I can hope for. And to gain simply that- what
agonies, what toil!... One's whole life ruined!" Again she recalled
what the young peasant woman had said, and again she was revolted at
the thought; but she could not help admitting that there was a grain
of brutal truth in the words.
  "Is it far now, Mikhaila?" Darya Alexandrovna asked the
countinghouse clerk, to turn her mind from thoughts that were
frightening her.
  "From this village, they say, it's seven verstas."
  The carriage drove along the village street and onto a bridge. On
the bridge was a crowd of peasant women with coils of ties for the
sheaves on their shoulders, cheerfully chattering. They stood still on
the bridge, staring inquisitively at the carriage. All the faces
turned to Darya Alexandrovna looked to her healthy and happy, making
her envious of their enjoyment of life. "They're all living, they're
all enjoying life," Darya Alexandrovna still mused when she had passed
the peasant women and was driving uphill again at a trot, seated
comfortably on the soft springs of the old carriage, "while I, let
out, as it were from prison, from the world of worries that fret me to
death, am only looking about me now for an instant. They all live;
those peasant women, and my sister Natalie, and Varenka, and Anna,
whom I am going to see- all, but not I."
  "And they attack Anna. What for? Am I any better? I have, at any
rate, a husband I love- not as I should like to love him- still, I
do love him; while Anna never loved hers. How is she to blame? She
wants to live. God has put that in our hearts. Very likely I should
have done the same. Even to this day I don't feel sure I did right
in listening to her at that terrible time when she came to me in
Moscow. I ought then to have cast off my husband and have begun my
life anew. I might have loved and have been loved in reality. And is
it any better as it is? I don't respect him. He's necessary to me,"
she thought about her husband, "and I put up with him. Is that any
better? At that time I could still have been admired, I had beauty
left me still," Darya Alexandrovna pursued her thoughts, and she would
have liked to look at herself in the looking glass. She had a
traveling looking glass in her handbag, and she wanted to take it out;
but looking at the backs of the coachman and the swaying countinghouse
clerk, she felt that she would be ashamed if either of them were to
look round, and she did not take out the glass.
  But, without looking in the glass, she thought that even now it
was not too late; and she thought of Sergei Ivanovich, who was
always particularly attentive to her, of Stiva's goodhearted friend,
Turovtsin, who had helped her nurse her children through the
scarlatina, and was in love with her. And there was someone else,
quite a young man, who- her husband had told her it as a joke- thought
her more beautiful than either of her sisters. And the most passionate
and impossible romances rose before Darya Alexandrovna's
imagination. "Anna did quite right, and certainly I shall never
reproach her for it. She is happy, she makes another person happy, and
she's not broken down as I am, but most likely just as she always was,
bright, clever, open to every impression," thought Darya Alexandrovna-
and a sly smile curved her lips, for, as she pondered on Anna's love
affair, Darya Alexandrovna constructed on parallel lines an almost
identical love affair for herself, with an imaginary composite figure,
the ideal man who was in love with her. She, like Anna, confessed
the whole affair to her husband. And the amazement and perplexity of
Stepan Arkadyevich at this avowal made her smile.
  In such daydreams she reached the turning of the highroad that led
to Vozdivzhenskoe.
                             XVII.

  The coachman pulled up his four horses and looked round to the
right, to a field of rye, where some peasants were sitting near a
telega. The countinghouse clerk was just going to jump down, but on
second thought he shouted peremptorily to the peasants instead, and
beckoned to them to come up. The wind, that seemed to blow as they
drove, dropped when the carriage stood still; gadflies settled on
the steaming horses that angrily shook them off. The metallic clank of
a whetstone against a scythe, that came to them from the telega,
ceased. One of the peasants got up and came toward the carriage.
  "Well, you are slow!" the countinghouse clerk shouted angrily to the
peasant who was stepping slowly with his bare feet over the ruts of
the unbeaten, sun-baked road. "Come along, do!"
  A curly-headed old man with a bit of bast tied round his hair, and
his bent back dark with perspiration, came toward the carriage,
quickening his steps, and took hold of the mudguard with his sunburned
hand.
  "Vozdvizhenskoe- the manor house? The Count's?" he repeated. "Go
on to the end of this slope. Then turn to the left. Straight along the
avenue, and you'll come right upon it. But whom do you want? The Count
himself?"
  "Well, are they at home, my good man?" Darya Alexandrovna said
vaguely, not knowing how to ask about Anna, even of this peasant.
  "At home for sure," said the peasant, shifting from one bare foot to
the other, and leaving a distinct print of five toes and a heel in the
dust. "Sure to be at home," he repeated, evidently eager to talk.
"Only yesterday visitors arrived. There's a sight of visitors come.
What do you want?" He turned round and called to a lad, who was
shouting something to him from the telega. "Oh! They all rode by
here not long since, to look at a reaping machine. They'll be home
by now. And who may you belong to?..."
  "We've come a long way," said the coachman, climbing onto the box.
"So it's not far?"
  "I tell you, it's just here. As soon as you get out..." he said,
keeping hold all the while of the mudguard of the carriage.
  A healthy-looking, broad-shouldered young fellow came up too.
  "What, is it laborers they want for the harvest?" he asked.
  "I don't know, my boy."
  "So you keep to the left, and you'll come right on it," said the
peasant, unmistakably loath to let the travelers go, and eager to
converse.
  The coachman started the horses, but they were only just turning off
when the peasant shouted: "Stop! Hi, friend! Stop!" The coachman
stopped.
  "They're coming! They're yonder!" shouted the peasant. "See what a
turnout!" he said, pointing to four persons on horseback, and two in a
charabanc, coming along the road.
  They were Vronsky with a jockey, Veslovsky, and Anna on horseback,
and Princess Varvara and Sviiazhsky in the charabanc. They had gone
out to look at the working of a new reaping machine.
  When the carriage stopped, the party on horseback were coming at a
walking pace. Anna was in front beside Veslovsky. Anna was quietly
walking her horse, a sturdy English cob with cropped mane and short
tail; Anna, with her beautiful head, her black hair straying loose
under her high hat, her full shoulders, her slender waist in her black
riding habit, and all the ease and grace of her deportment,
impressed Dolly.
  For the first minute it seemed to her unsuitable for Anna to be on
horseback. The conception of riding on horseback for a lady was, in
Darva Alexandrovna's mind, associated with ideas of youthful
flirtation and frivolity, which, in her opinion, was unbecoming in
Anna's position. But when she had scrutinized her, seeing her
closer, she was at once reconciled to her riding. In spite of her
elegance, everything was so simple, quiet and dignified in the
attitude, the dress and the movements of Anna, that nothing could have
been more natural.
  By the side of Anna, on a hot-looking gray cavalry horse, was
Vassenka Veslovsky in his Scotch cap with floating ribbons, his
stout legs stretched out in front, obviously pleased with his own
appearance. Darya Alexandrovna could not suppress a good-humored smile
as she recognized him. Behind rode Vronsky on a dark bay mare,
obviously heated from galloping. He was holding her in, pulling at the
reins.
  After him rode a little man in the dress of a jockey. Sviiazhsky and
Princess Varvara in a new charabanc with a big, raven-black trotting
horse, overtook the party on horseback.
  Anna's face suddenly beamed with a joyful smile at the instant when,
in the little figure huddled in a corner of the old carriage, she
recognized Dolly. She uttered a cry, started in the saddle, and set
her horse into a gallop. On reaching the carriage she jumped off
without assistance, and, holding up her riding habit, she ran up to
greet Dolly.
  "I thought it was you and dared not think it. How delightful! You
can't fancy how glad I am!" she said, at one moment pressing her
face against Dolly and kissing her, and at the next holding her off
and examining her with a smile. "Here's a delightful surprise,
Alexei!" she said, looking round at Vronsky, who had dismounted, and
was walking toward them.
  Vronsky, taking off his tall gray hat, went up to Dolly.
  "You wouldn't believe how glad we are to see you," he said, giving
peculiar significance to the words, and showing his strong white teeth
in a smile.
  Vassenka Veslovsky, without getting off his horse, took off his
cap and greeted the visitor by gleefully waving the ribbons over his
head.
  "That's Princess Varvara," Anna said in reply to a glance of inquiry
from Dolly as the charabanc drove up.
  "Ah!" said Darya Alexandrovna, and unconsciously her face betrayed
her dissatisfaction.
  Princess Varvara was her husband's aunt, and she had long known her,
and did not respect her. She knew that Princess Varvara had passed her
whole life toadying to her rich relations, but that she should now
be sponging on Vronsky, a man who was nothing to her, mortified
Dolly on account of her kinship with her husband. Anna noticed Dolly's
expression, and was disconcerted by it. She blushed, dropped her
riding habit, and stumbled over it.
  Darya Alexandrovna went up to the charabanc and coldly greeted
Princess Varvara. Sviiazhsky, too, she knew. He inquired how his queer
friend with the young wife was, and running his eyes over the
ill-matched horses and the carriage with its patched mudguards,
proposed to the ladies that they should get into the charabanc.
  "And I'll get in this vehicle," he said. "The horse is quiet, and
the Princess drives capitally."
  "No, stay as you were," said Anna, coming up, "and we'll go in the
carriage," and, taking Dolly's arm, she drew her away.
  Darya Alexandrovna's eyes were fairly dazzled by the elegant
carriage of a pattern she had never seen before, the splendid
horses, and the elegant and gorgeous people surrounding her. But
what struck her most of all was the change that had taken place in
Anna, whom she knew so well and loved. Any other woman, a less close
observer, not knowing Anna before, and particularly not having thought
as Darya Alexandrovna had been thinking on the road, would not have
noticed anything special in Anna. But now Dolly was struck by that
temporary beauty, which is only found in women during the moments of
love, and which she saw now in Anna's face. Everything in her face,
the clearly marked dimples in her cheeks and chin, the line of her
lips, the smile which, as it were, fluttered about her face, the
brilliance of her eyes, the grace and rapidity of her movements, the
fullness of the notes of her voice, even the manner in which, with a
sort of angry friendliness, she answered Veslovsky when he asked
permission to get on her cob, so as to teach it to gallop with the
right leg foremost- it was all peculiarly fascinating, and it seemed
as if Anna herself were aware of it, and rejoicing in it.
  When both the women were seated in the carriage, a sudden
embarrassment came over both of them. Anna was disconcerted by the
intent look of inquiry Dolly fixed upon her. Dolly was embarrassed
because after Sviiazhsky's phrase about "this vehicle," she could
not help feeling ashamed of the dirty old carriage in which Anna was
sitting with her. The coachman Philip and the countinghouse clerk were
experiencing the same sensation. The countinghouse clerk, to conceal
his confusion, busied himself settling the ladies, but Philip the
coachman became sullen, and was bracing himself not to be overawed
in future by this external superiority. He smiled ironically,
looking at the raven horse, and was already deciding in his own mind
that this smart trotter in the charabanc was only good for
promenade, and wouldn't do forty verstas straight off in the heat.
  The peasants had all got up from the telega and were inquisitively
and mirthfully staring at the meeting of the friends, making their
comments on it.
  "They're pleased, too; haven't seen each other for a long while,"
said the curly-headed old man with the bast round his hair.
  "I say, Uncle Gherasim, if we could take that raven horse now, to
cart the corn, that 'ud be quick work!"
  "Look-ee! Is that a woman in breeches?" said one of them, pointing
to Vassenka Veslovsky sitting in a sidesaddle.
  "Nay, a man! See how smartly he's going it!"
  "Eh, lads! Seems we're not going to sleep, then?"
  "What chance of sleep today!" said the old man, with a sidelong look
at the sun. "Midday's past, look-ee! Get your hooks, and come along!"
                             XVIII.

  Anna looked at Dolly's thin, careworn face, with its wrinkles filled
with dust from the road, and she was on the point of saying what she
was thinking- that is, that Dolly had grown thinner. But, conscious
that she herself had grown handsomer, and that Dolly's eyes were
telling her so, she sighed and began to speak about herself.
  "You are looking at me," she said, "and wondering how I can be happy
in my position? Well! It's shameful to confess, but I... I'm
inexcusably happy. Something magical has happened to me, like a dream,
when you're frightened, panic-stricken, and all of a sudden you wake
up and all the horrors are no more. I have waked up. I have lived
through the misery, the dread, and now for a long while past,
especially since we've been here, I've been so happy!..." she said,
with a timid smile of inquiry looking at Dolly.
  "How glad I am!" said Dolly smiling, involuntarily speaking more
coldly than she wanted to. "I'm very glad for you. Why haven't you
written to me?"
  "Why?... Because I hadn't the courage.... You forget my
position...."
  "To me? Hadn't the courage? If you knew how I... I look at..."
  Darya Alexandrovna wanted to express her thoughts of the morning,
but for some reason it seemed to her now out of place to do so.
  "But of that we'll talk later. What's this- what are all these
buildings?" she asked, wanting to change the conversation and pointing
to the red and green roofs that came into view behind the green hedges
of acacia and lilac. "Quite a little town."
  But Anna did not answer.
  "No, no! How do you look at my position, what do you think of it?"
she asked.
  "I consider..." Darya Alexandrovna was beginning, but at that
instant Vassenka Veslovsky, having brought the cob to gallop with
the right leg foremost, galloped past them, bumping heavily up and
down in his short jacket on the chamois leather of the sidesaddle.
"He's doing it, Anna Arkadyevna!" he shouted. Anna did not even glance
at him; but again it seemed to Darya Alexandrovna out of place to
enter upon such a long conversation in the carriage, and so she cut
short her thought.
  "I don't think anything," she said, "but I always loved you, and
if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as that person
is, and not as one would like her or him to be...."
  Anna, taking her eyes off her friend's face and dropping her eyelids
(this was a new habit Dolly had not seen in her before), pondered,
trying to penetrate the full significance of the words. And
obviously interpreting them as she would have wished, she glanced at
Dolly.
  "If you had any sins," she said, "they would all be forgiven you for
your coming to see me, and these words."
  And Dolly saw that the tears stood in her eyes. She pressed Anna's
hand in silence.
  "Well, what are these buildings? How many there are of them!"
After a moment's silence she repeated her question.
  "These are the servant's houses, stud farm, and stables," answered
Anna. "And there the park begins. It had all gone to ruin, but
Alexei had everything renewed. He is very fond of this place, and,
what I never expected, he has become intensely interested in looking
after it. But his is such a rich nature! Whatever he takes up, he does
splendidly. So far from being bored by it, he works with passionate
interest. He- with his temperament as I know it- he has become careful
and businesslike, a first-rate manager, he positively reckons every
penny in his management of the land. But only in that. When it's a
question of tens of thousands, he doesn't think of money." She spoke
with that gleefully sly smile with which women often talk of the
secret characteristics- only known to them- of those they love. "Do
you see that big building? That's the new hospital. I believe it
will cost over a hundred thousand; that's his dada just now. And do
you know how it all came about? The peasants asked him for some
meadowland, I think it was, at a cheaper rate, and he refused, and I
accused him of being miserly. Of course it was not really because of
that, but because of everything together- he began this hospital to
prove, do you see, that he was not miserly about money. C'est une
petitesse, if you like, but I love him all the more for it. And now
you'll see the house in a moment. It was his grandfather's house,
and he has had nothing changed outside."
  "How beautiful!" said Dolly, looking with involuntary admiration
at the handsome house with columns, standing out among the
different-colored greens of the old trees in the garden.
  "Isn't it fine? And from the house, from the top, the view is
wonderful."
  They drove into a courtyard strewn with gravel and bright with
flowers, in which two laborers were at work putting an edging of
stones round the light mold of a flower bed, and drew up in a
covered entry.
  "Ah, they're here already!" said Anna, looking at the saddle horses,
which were just being led away from the steps. "It is a good horse,
isn't it? It's my cob; my favorite. Lead him here and bring me some
sugar. Where is the Count?" she inquired of two smart footmen who
darted out. "Ah, there he is!" she said, seeing Vronsky coming to meet
her with Veslovsky.
  "Where are you going to put the Princess?" said Vronsky in French,
addressing Anna, and without waiting for a reply, he once more greeted
Darya Alexandrovna, and this time he kissed her hand. "I think the big
balcony room."
  "Oh, no, that's too far off! Better in the corner room, we shall see
each other more. Come, let's go up," said Anna, as she gave her
favorite horse the sugar the footman had brought her.
  "Et vous oubliez votre devoir," she said to Veslovsky, who came
out too on the steps.
  "Pardon, j'en ai tout plein les poches," he answered, smiling,
putting his fingers in his waistcoat pocket.
  "Mais vous venez trop tard," she said, rubbing her handkerchief on
her hand, which the horse had made wet in taking the sugar.
  Anna turned to Dolly, "You can stay some time? For one day only?
That's impossible!"
  "I promised to be back, and the children..." said Dolly, feeling
embarrassed both because she had to get her bag out of the carriage,
and because she knew her face must be covered with dust.
  "No, Dolly, darling!... Well, we'll see. Come along, come along!"
and Anna led Dolly to her room.
  That room was not the smart guestchamber Vronsky had suggested,
but the one which Anna had said Dolly would surely excuse. And this
room, for which excuse was needed, was more full of luxury than any in
which Dolly had ever stayed, a luxury that reminded her of the best
hotels abroad.
  "Well, darling, how happy I am!" Anna said, sitting down in her
riding habit for a moment beside Dolly. "Tell me about all of you.
Stiva I had only a glimpse of, and he cannot tell one about the
children. How is my favorite, Tania? Quite a big girl, I expect?"
  "Yes, she's very tall," Darya Alexandrovna answered shortly,
surprised herself that she should respond so coolly about her
children. "We are having a delightful stay at the Levins'," she added.
  "Oh, if I had known," said Anna, "that you do not despise me!... You
might have all come to us. Stiva's an old friend and a great friend of
Alexei's, you know," she added, and suddenly she blushed.
  "Yes, but we are all..." Dolly answered in confusion.
  "But in my delight I'm talking nonsense. The one thing, darling,
is that I am so glad to have you!" said Anna, kissing her again.
"You haven't told me yet how and what you think about me, and I keep
wanting to know. But I'm glad you will see me as I am. The chief thing
I shouldn't like would be for people to imagine I want to prove
anything. I don't want to prove anything; I merely want to live, to do
no one harm but myself. I have the right to do that, haven't I? But it
is a big subject, and we'll talk over everything properly later. Now
I'll go and dress and send a maid to you."
                             XIX.

  Left alone, Darya Alexandrovna, with a good housewife's eye, scanned
her room. All she had seen in entering the house and walking through
it, and all she saw now in her room, gave her an impression of
wealth and sumptuousness and of that modern European luxury of which
she had only read in English novels, but had never seen in Russia
and in the country. Everything was new, from the new French hangings
on the walls to the carpet which covered the whole floor. The bed
had a spring mattress, and a special sort of bolster and taffeta
pillowcases on the small pillows. The marble washstand, the dressing
table, the little sofa, the tables, the bronze clock on the chimney
piece, the window curtains and the portieres were all new and
expensive.
  The smart maid, who came in to offer her services, with her hair
done up high, and a gown more fashionable that Dolly's, was as new and
expensive as the whole room. Darya Alexandrovna liked her neatness,
her deferential and obliging manners, but she felt ill at ease with
her. She felt ashamed of her seeing the patched dressing jacket that
had unluckily been packed by mistake for her. She was ashamed of the
very patches and darned places of which she had been so proud at home.
At home it had been so clear that for six dressing jackets there would
be needed twenty-four arsheenes of nainsook at sixty-five kopecks
the yard, which was a matter of fifteen roubles, besides the cutting
out and making, and these fifteen roubles had been saved. But before
the maid she felt, if not exactly ashamed, at least uncomfortable.
  Darya Alexandrovna had a great sense of relief when Annushka, whom
she had known for years, walked in. The smart maid was sent for to
go to her mistress, and Annushka remained with Darya Alexandrovna.
  Annushka was obviously much pleased at that lady's arrival, and
began to chatter away without a pause. Dolly observed that she was
longing to express her opinion in regard to her mistress's position,
especially as to the love and devotion of the Count to Anna
Arkadyevna, but Dolly carefully interrupted her whenever she began
to speak about this.
  "I grew up with Anna Arkadyevna; my lady's dearer to me than
anything. Well, it's not for us to judge. And, to be sure, there seems
so much love..."
  "Kindly order these things washed for me, please," Darya
Alexandrovna cut her short.
  "Certainly. We've two women kept specially for washing small things,
but most of the linen's done by machinery. The Count goes into
everything himself. Ah, what a husband he would make!..."
  Dolly was glad when Anna came in, and by her entrance put a stop
to Annushka's gossip.
  Anna had put on a very simple batiste gown. Dolly scrutinized that
simple gown attentively. She knew what it meant, and the price at
which such simplicity was obtained.
  "An old friend," said Anna of Annushka.
  Anna was not embarrassed now. She was perfectly composed and at
ease. Dolly saw that she had now completely recovered from the
impression her arrival had made on her, and had assumed that
superficial, careless tone which, as it were, closed the door on
that compartment in which her deeper feelings and intimate meditations
were kept.
  "Well, Anna, and how is your little girl?" asked Dolly.
  "Annie?" (This was what she called her little daughter Anna.)
"Very well. She has got on wonderfully. Would you like to see her?
Come, I'll show her to you. We had a terrible bother," she began
telling her, "over nurses. We had an Italian wet nurse. A good
creature, but so stupid! We wanted to get rid of her, but the baby
is so used to her that we've gone on keeping her still."
  "But how have you managed?..." Dolly was beginning a question as
to what name the little girl would have; but noticing a sudden frown
on Anna's face, she changed the drift of her question. "How did you
manage? Have you weaned her yet?"
  But Anna had understood.
  "You didn't mean to ask that? You meant to ask about her surname.
Yes? That worries Alexei. She has no name- that is, she's a Karenina,"
said Anna, dropping her eyelids till nothing could be seen but the
eyelashes meeting. "But we'll talk about all that later," her face
suddenly brightening. "Come, I'll show her to you. Elle est tres
gentille. She crawls now."
  In the nursery the luxury which had impressed Dolly in the whole
house struck her still more. There were little gocarts ordered from
England, and appliances for learning to walk, and a sofa after the
fashion of a billiard table, purposely constructed for crawling, and
swings, and baths, all of special pattern, and modern. They were all
English, solid, and of good make, and obviously very expensive. The
room was large, and very light and lofty.
  When they went in, the baby, with nothing on but her little smock,
was sitting in a little elbowchair at the table, having her dinner
of broth, which she was spilling all over her little chest. The baby
was being fed, and the Russian nurserymaid was evidently sharing her
meal. Neither the wet nurse nor the head nurse were there; they were
in the next room, from which came the sound of their conversation in
the queer French which was their only means of communication.
  Hearing Anna's voice, a smart, tall English nurse with a
disagreeable face and a dissolute expression walked in at the door,
hurriedly shaking her fair curls, and immediately began to defend
herself though Anna had not found fault with her. At every word Anna
said the English nurse said hurriedly several times, "Yes, my lady."
  The rosy baby with her black eyebrows and hair, her sturdy red
little body with tight goose-flesh skin, delighted Darya
Alexandrovna in spite of the cross expression with which she stared at
the stranger. She positively envied the baby's healthy appearance. She
was delighted, too, at the baby's crawling. Not one of her own
children had crawled like that. When the baby was put on the carpet
and its little dress tucked up behind, it was wonderfully charming.
Looking round like some little wild animal at the grown-up big
people with her bright black eyes, she smiled, unmistakably pleased at
their admiring her, and, holding her legs sideways, she pressed
vigorously on her arms, and rapidly drew her whole back up after,
and then made another step forward with her little arms.
  But the whole atmosphere of the nursery, and especially the
English nurse, Darya Alexandrovna did not like at all. It was only
on the supposition that no good nurse would have entered so
irregular a household as Anna's that Darya Alexandrovna could
explain to herself how Anna with her insight into people could take
such an unprepossessing, indecorous woman as nurse to her child.
Besides, from a few words that were dropped, Darya Alexandrovna saw at
once that Anna, the two nurses, and the child, had no existence in
common, and that the mother's visit was something exceptional. Anna
wanted to get the baby her plaything, and could not find it.
  Most amazing of all was the fact that on being asked how many
teeth the baby had, Anna answered wrong, and knew nothing about the
two last teeth.
  "I sometimes feel sorry I'm, as it were, superfluous here," said
Anna, going out of the nursery, and holding up her skirt so as to
escape the plaything standing near the doorway. "It was very different
with my first child."
  "I expected it to be the other way," said Darya Alexandrovna shyly.
  "Oh, no! By the way, do you know I saw Seriozha?" said Anna,
screwing up her eyes, as though looking at something far away. "But
we'll talk about that later. You wouldn't believe it, I'm like a
hungry beggar woman when a full dinner is set before her, and she does
not know what to begin on first. The full dinner is you, and the talks
I have before me with you, which I could never have with anyone
else; and I don't know which subject to begin upon first. Mais je ne
vous ferai grace de rien. I must have everything out with you. Oh, I
ought to give you a sketch of the company you will meet with us,"
she began. "I'll begin with the ladies. Princess Varvara- you know
her, and I know your opinion and Stiva's about her. Stiva says the
whole aim of her existence is to prove her superiority over Auntie
Katerina Pavlovna: that's all true; but she's a good-natured woman,
and I am so grateful to her. In Peterburg there was a moment when un
chaperon was absolutely essential for me. Then she turned up. But,
really, she is good-natured. She did a great deal to alleviate my
position. I see you don't understand all the difficulty of my
position... there in Peterburg," she added. "Here I'm perfectly at
ease and happy. Well, of that later on, though. Then Sviiazhsky-
he's the marshal of the district, and he's a very good sort of a
man, but he wants to get something out of Alexei. You understand, with
his property, now that we are settled in the country, Alexei can
exercise great influence. Then there's Tushkevich- you have seen
him, you know- Betsy's admirer. Now he's been thrown over, and he's
come to see us. As Alexei says, he's one of those people who are
very pleasant if one accepts them for what they try to appear to be,
et puis, il est comme il faut, as Princess Varvara says. Then
Veslovsky... you know him. A very charming boy," she said, and a sly
smile curved her lips. "What's this wild story about him and the
Levins? Veslovsky told Alexei about it, and we don't believe it. Il
est tres gentil et naif," she said again with the same smile. "Men
need occupation, and Alexei needs a circle, so I value all these
people. We have to have the house lively and gay, so that Alexei may
not long for any novelty. Then you'll see the steward- a German, a
very good fellow, and he understands his work. Alexei has a very
high opinion of him. Then the doctor, a young man, not quite a
Nihilist perhaps, but, you know, he eats with his knife... But a
very good doctor. Then the architect... Une petite cour."
                             XX.

  "Here's Dolly for you, Princess, you were so anxious to see her,"
said Anna, coming out with Darya Alexandrovna on the stone terrace
where Princess Varvara was sitting in the shade at an embroidery
frame, working at a cover for Count Alexei Kirillovich's easy chair.
"She says she doesn't want anything before dinner, but please order
some lunch for her, and I'll go look for Alexei and bring them all
in."
  Princess Varvara gave Dolly a cordial and rather patronizing
reception, and began at once explaining to her that she was living
with Anna because she had always cared more for her than her sister,
that aunt that had brought Anna up; and that now, when everyone had
abandoned Anna, she thought it her duty to help her in this most
difficult period of transition.
  "Her husband will give her a divorce, and then I shall go back to my
solitude; but now I can be of use, and I am doing my duty, however
difficult it may be for me- not like some other people. And how
sweet it is of you, how right of you to have come! They live like
the best of married couples; it's for God to judge them, not for us.
And didn't Biriuzovsky and Madame Avenieva... and Nikandrov himself,
and Vassiliev with Madame Mamonova, and Liza Neptunova... Did no one
say anything about them? And it has ended by their being received by
everyone. And then, c'est un interieur si joli, si comme il faut.
Tout-a-fait a l'anglaise. On se reunit le matin au breakfast, et
puis on se separe. Everyone does as he pleases till dinnertime. Dinner
at seven o'clock. Stiva did very rightly to send you. He needs their
support. You know that through his mother and brother he can do
everything. And then they do so much good. He didn't tell you about
his hospital? Ce sera admirable- everything from Paris."
  Their conversation was interrupted by Anna, who had found the men of
the party in the billiard room, and returned with them to the terrace.
There was still a long time before the dinner hour, it was exquisite
weather, and so several different methods of spending the next two
hours were proposed. There were very many methods of passing the
time at Vozdvizhenskoe, and these were all unlike those in use at
Pokrovskoe.
  "Une partie de lawn tennis," Veslovsky proposed, with his handsome
smile. "We'll be partners again, Anna Arkadyevna."
  "No, it's too hot; better stroll about the garden and have a row
in the boat- show Darya Alexandrovna the riverbanks," Vronsky
proposed.
  "I agree to anything," said Sviiazhsky.
  "I imagine that what Dolly would like best would be a stroll-
wouldn't you? And then the boat, perhaps," said Anna.
  So it was decided. Veslovsky and Tushkevich went off to the
bathing place, promising to get the boat ready and to wait there for
them.
  They walked along the path in two couples, Anna with Sviiazhsky, and
Dolly with Vronsky. Dolly was a little embarrassed and anxious in
the new surroundings in which she found herself Abstractly,
theoretically, she did not merely justify- she positively approved
of Anna's conduct. As is indeed not infrequent with women of
unimpeachable virtue, weary of the monotony of virtuous existence,
at a distance she not only excused illicit love- she positively envied
it. Besides, she loved Anna with all her heart. But seeing Anna in
actual life among these strangers, with this fashionable tone that was
so new to Darya Alexandrovna, she felt ill at ease. What she
disliked particularly was seeing Princess Varvara ready to overlook
everything for the sake of the comforts she enjoyed.
  As a general principle, abstractly, Dolly approved of Anna's action;
but to see the man for whose sake her action had been taken was
disagreeable to her. Moreover, she had never liked Vronsky. She
thought him very proud, and saw nothing in him of which he could be
proud except his wealth. But against her own will, here in his own
house, he imposed upon her more than ever, and she could not be at
ease with him. She experienced with him the same feeling she had had
the maid about her dressing jacket. Just as with the maid she had felt
not exactly ashamed, but embarrassed at her darns, so she felt with
him not exactly ashamed, but embarrassed at herself.
  Dolly was ill at ease, and tried to find a subject of
conversation. Even though she supposed that, through his pride, praise
of his house and garden would be sure to be disagreeable to him, she
did all the same tell him how much she liked his house.
  "Yes, it's a very fine building, and in the good old-fashioned
style," he said.
  "I like so much the court in front of the steps. Was that always
so?"
  "Oh, no!" he said, and his face beamed with pleasure. "If you
could only have seen the court last spring!"
  And he began, at first rather diffidently, but more and more carried
away by the subject as he went on, to draw her attention to the
various details of the decoration of his house and garden. It was
evident that, having devoted a great deal of trouble to improve and
beautify his home, Vronsky felt a need to show off the improvements to
a new person, and was genuinely delighted at Darya Alexandrovna's
praise.
  "If you would care to look at the hospital, and are not really
tired, it's not far. Shall we go?" he said, glancing into her face
to convince himself that she was not bored. "Are you coming, Anna?" he
turned to her.
  "We will come, won't we?" she said, addressing Sviiazhsky. "Mais
il ne faut pas laisser le pauvre Veslovsky et Tushkevich se
morfondre la dans le bateau. We must send and tell them."
  "Yes, this is a monument he is setting up here," said Anna,
turning to Dolly with that sly smile of comprehension with which she
had previously talked about the hospital.
  "Oh, it's a work of real importance!" said Sviiazhsky. But to show
he was not trying to ingratiate himself with Vronsky, he promptly
added some slightly critical remarks. "I wonder, though, Count," he
said, "that while you do so much for the health of the peasants, you
take so little interest in the schools."
  "C'est devenu tellement commun les ecoles," said Vronsky. "You
understand it's not on that account, but it just happens so, my
interest has been diverted elsewhere. This way, then, to the
hospital," he said to Darya Alexandrovna, pointing to a side path
leading out of the avenue.
  The ladies put up their parasols and turned into the side path.
After going down several turnings, and going through a little gate,
Darya Alexandrovna saw standing on rising ground before her a large
pretentious-looking red building, almost finished. The iron roof,
which was not yet painted, shone with dazzling brightness in the
sunshine. Beside the finished building another had been begun,
surrounded by scaffolding. Workmen in aprons, standing on scaffolds,
were laying bricks, pouring mortar out of vats, and smoothing it
with trowels.
  "How quickly work gets done with you!" said Sviiazhsky. "When I
was here last time the roof was not on."
  "By the autumn it will all be ready. Inside almost everything is
done," said Anna.
  "And what's this new building?"
  "That's the house for the doctor and the dispensary," answered
Vronsky; seeing the architect in a short jacket coming toward him, and
excusing himself to the ladies, he went to meet him.
  Going round a hole where the workmen were slaking lime, he stood
still with the architect and began talking rather warmly.
  "The pediment looks still too low," he said to Anna, who had asked
what was the matter.
  "I said the foundation ought to be raised," said Anna.
  "Yes, of course, it would have been much better, Anna Arkadyevna,"
said the architect, "but now it's too late."
  "Yes, I take a great interest in it," Anna answered Sviiazhsky,
who was expressing his surprise at her knowledge of architecture.
"This new building ought to have been in harmony with the hospital. It
was an afterthought, and was begun without a plan."
  Vronsky, having finished his talk with the architect, joined the
ladies, and led them inside the hospital.
  Although they were still at work on the cornices outside and were
painting on the ground floor, upstairs almost all the rooms were
finished. Going up the broad cast-iron staircase to the landing,
they walked into the first large room. The walls were stuccoed to look
like marble, the huge plate-glass windows were already in, only the
parquet floor was not yet finished, and the carpenters, who were
planing a block of it, left their work, taking off the bands that
fastened their hair, to greet the gentry.
  "This is the reception room," said Vronsky. "Here there will be a
desk, a cupboard, and benches, and nothing more."
  "This way; let us go in here. Don't go near the window," said
Anna, trying the paint to see if it were dry. "Alexei, the paint's dry
already," she added.
  From the reception room they went into the corridor. Here Vronsky
showed them the mechanism for ventilation on a novel system. Then he
showed them marble baths, and beds with extraordinary springs. Then he
showed them the wards one after another, the storeroom, the linen
room, then the heating stove of a new pattern, then the trolleys,
which would make no noise as they carried everything needed along
the corridors, and many other things. Sviiazhsky, as a connoisseur
in the latest mechanical improvements, appreciated everything fully.
Dolly simply wondered at all as something she had not seen before,
and, anxious to understand it all, made minute inquiries about
everything, which gave Vronsky apparent satisfaction.
  "Yes, I imagine that this will be the solitary example of a properly
fitted hospital in Russia," said Sviiazhsky.
  "And won't you have a lying-in ward?" asked Dolly. "That's so much
needed in the country. I have often..."
  In spite of his usual courtesy, Vronsky interrupted her.
  "This is not a lying-in home, but a hospital for the sick, and is
intended for all diseases, except infectious complaints," he said.
"Ah! Look at this," and he rolled up to Darya Alexandrovna an
invalid chair that had just been ordered for convalescents. "Look!" He
sat down in the chair and began moving it. "The patient can't walk-
still too weak, perhaps, or something wrong with his legs, but he must
have air, and he moves, rolls himself along...."
  Darya Alexandrovna was interested by everything. She liked
everything very much, but most of all she liked Vronsky himself,
with his natural, simplehearted enthusiasm. "Yes, he's a very dear,
good man," she thought several times, not hearing what he said, but
looking at him and penetrating into his expression, while she mentally
put herself in Anna's place. She liked him so much just now with his
eager interest that she saw how Anna could be in love with him.
                             XXI.

  "No, I think the Princess is tired, and horses don't interest
her," Vronsky said to Anna, who wanted to go on to the stud farm,
where Sviiazhsky wished to see the new stallion. "You go on, while I
escort the Princess home, and we'll have a little talk," he said.
"If you would like that?" he added, turning to her.
  "I know nothing about horses, and I shall be delighted to go back
with you," answered Darya Alexandrovna, rather astonished.
  She saw by Vronsky's face that he wanted something from her. She was
not mistaken. As soon as they had passed through the little gate
back into the garden, he looked in the direction Anna had taken,
and, having made sure that she could neither hear nor see them, he
began:
  "You guess that I have something I want to say to you," he said,
looking at her with laughing eyes. "I am not wrong in believing you to
be a friend of Anna's." He took off his hat, and taking out his
handkerchief, wiped his head, which was growing bald.
  Darya Alexandrovna made no answer, and merely stared at him with
dismay. When she was left alone with him, she suddenly felt afraid;
his laughing eyes and stern expression scared her.
  The most diverse suppositions as to what he was about to say to
her flashed into her brain. "He is going to beg me to come to stay
with them with the children, and I shall have to refuse; or to
create a set that will receive Anna in Moscow.... Or isn't it Vassenka
Veslovsky and his relations with Anna? Or perhaps about Kitty- that he
feels he was to blame?" All her conjectures were unpleasant, but she
did not guess what he really wanted to talk about to her.
  "You have so much influence with Anna, she is so fond of you," he
said; "do help me."
  Darya Alexandrovna looked with timid inquiry into his energetic
face, which under the linden trees was continually being lighted up in
patches by the sunshine, and then passing into complete shadow
again. She waited for him to say more, but he walked in silence beside
her, scratching with his cane in the gravel.
  "You have come to see us, you, the only woman of Anna's former
friends- I don't count Princess Varvara- but I know that you have done
this not because you regard our position as normal, but because,
understanding all the difficulty of the position, you still love her
and want to be a help to her. Have I understood you rightly?" he
asked, looking round at her.
  "Oh, yes," answered Darya Alexandrovna, putting down her sunshade,
"but..."
  "No," he broke in, and unconsciously, oblivious of the awkward
position in which he was putting his companion, he stopped abruptly,
so that she had to stop short too. "No one feels more deeply and
intensely than I do all the difficulty of Anna's position; and that
you may well understand, if you do me the honor of supposing I have
any heart. I am to blame for that position, and that is why I feel
it."
  "I understand," said Darya Alexandrovna, involuntarily admiring
the sincerity and firmness with which he said this. "But just
because you feel yourself responsible, you exaggerate it, I am
afraid," she said. "Her position in the world is difficult, I can well
understand."
  "In the world it is hell!" he brought out quickly, frowning
darkly. "You can't imagine moral sufferings greater than what she went
through in Peterburg during that fortnight.... And I beg you to
believe it."
  "Yes, but here, so long as neither Anna... nor you want society..."
  "Society!" he said contemptuously. "How could I want society?"
  "So far- and it may be so always- you are happy and at peace. I
see in Anna that she is happy, perfectly happy- she has had time to
tell me so much already," said Darya Alexandrovna, smiling; and
involuntarily, as she said this, at the same moment a doubt entered
her mind whether Anna really were happy.
  But Vronsky, it appeared, had no doubts on that score.
  "Yes, yes," he said, "I know that she has revived after all her
sufferings; she is happy. She is happy in the present. But I?... I
am afraid of what is before us... I beg your pardon- you would like to
walk on?"
  "No, I don't mind."
  "Well, then, let us sit here."
  Darya Alexandrovna sat down on a garden seat in a corner of the
avenue. He stood up, facing her.
  "I see that she is happy," he repeated, and the doubt whether she
were happy sank more deeply into Darya Alexandrovna's mind. "But can
it last? Whether we have acted rightly or wrongly is another question,
but the die is cast," he said, passing from Russian to French, "and we
are bound together for life. We are united by all the ties of love
that we hold most sacred. We have a child, we may have other children.
But the law and all the conditions of our position are such that
thousands of complications arise which she does not see at present,
and does not want to see, setting her heart at rest after all these
sufferings and ordeals. And that one can well understand. But I
can't help seeing them. My daughter is by law not my daughter, but
Karenin's. I cannot bear this falsity!" he said, with a vigorous
gesture of refusal, and he looked with gloomy inquiry toward Darya
Alexandrovna.
  She made no answer, but simply gazed at him. He went on:
  "One day a son may be born, my son, and he will be legally a
Karenin; he will not be the heir of my name nor of my property; and
however happy we may be in our home life, and however many children we
may have, there will be no real tie between us. They will be
Karenin's. You will understand the bitterness and horror of this
position! I have tried to speak of this to Anna. It irritates her. She
does not understand, and to her I cannot speak plainly of all this.
Now look at another side. I am happy, happy in her love, but I must
have occupation. I have found occupation, and am proud of what I am
doing, and consider it nobler than the pursuits of my former
companions at Court and in the army. And most certainly I would not
change the work I am doing for theirs. I am working here, settled in
my own place, and I am happy and contented, and we need nothing more
to make us happy. I love my work here. Ce n'est pas un pis-aller, on
the contrary..."
  Darya Alexandrovna noticed that at this point in his explanation
he grew confused, and she did not quite understand this digression,
but she felt that having once begun to speak of matters near his
heart, of which he could not speak to Anna, he was now making a
clean breast of everything, and that the question of his pursuits in
the country fell into the same compartment of his intimate meditations
as the question of his relations with Anna.
  "Well, I will go on," he said, collecting himself. "The great
thing is that as I work I want to have a conviction that what I am
doing will not die with me, that I shall have heirs to come after
me- and this I have not. Conceive the position of a man who knows that
his children, the children of the woman he loves, will not be his, but
will belong to someone who hates them and cares nothing about them! It
is awful!
  He paused, evidently much moved.
  "Yes, indeed, I see that. But what can Anna do?" queried Darya
Alexandrovna.
  "Yes, that brings me to the object of my conversation," he said,
calming himself with an effort. "Anna can, it depends on her....
Even to petition the Czar for legitimization, a divorce is
essential. And that depends on Anna. Her husband agreed to a
divorce- at that time your husband had arranged it completely. And
now, I know, he would not refuse it. It is only a matter of writing to
him. He said plainly at that time that if she expressed the desire, he
would not refuse. Of course," he said gloomily, "it is one of those
Pharisaical cruelties of which only such heartless men are capable. He
knows what agony any recollection of him must give her, and knowing
her, he must have a letter from her. I can understand that it is agony
to her. But the matter is of such importance, that one must passer
pardessus toutes ces finesses de sentiment. Il y va du bonheur et de
l'existence d'Anne et de ses enfants. I won't speak of myself,
though it's hard for me, very hard," he said, with an expression as
though he were threatening someone for its being hard for him. "And so
it is, Princess, that I am shamelessly clutching at you as an anchor
of salvation. Help me to persuade her to write to him and ask for a
divorce."
  "Yes, of course," Darya Alexandrovna said dreamily, as she vividly
recalled her last interview with Alexei Alexandrovich. "Yes, of
course," she repeated with decision, thinking of Anna.
  "Use your influence with her, make her write. I don't like- I'm
almost unable to speak about this to her."
  "Very well, I will talk to her. But how is it she does not think
of it herself?" said Darya Alexandrovna, and for some reason she
suddenly at that point recalled Anna's strange new habit of
half-closing her eyes. And she remembered that Anna drooped her
eyelids just when the deeper questions of life were touched upon.
"Just as though she half-shut her eyes to her own life, so as not to
see everything," thought Dolly. "Yes, indeed, for my own sake and
for hers, I will talk to her," Dolly said in reply to his expression
of gratitude.
  They got up and walked to the house.
                             XXII.

  When Anna found Dolly at home before her, she looked intently in her
eyes, as though questioning her about the talk she had had with
Vronsky, but she made no inquiry in words.
  "I believe it's dinnertime," she said. "We've not seen each other at
all yet. I am reckoning on the evening. Now I want to go and dress.
I expect you do too; we all got splashed at the buildings."
  Dolly went to her room and she felt amused. To change her dress
was impossible, for she had already put on her best dress. But in
order to signify in some way her preparation for dinner, she asked the
maid to brush her dress, changed her cuffs and rosette, and put some
lace on her head.
  "This is all I can do," she said with a smile to Anna, who came in
to her in a third dress, again of extreme simplicity.
  "Yes, we are too prim here," she said, as it were apologizing for
her finery. "Alexei is delighted at your visit, as he rarely is at
anything. He has completely lost his heart to you," she added. "You're
not tired?"
  There was no time for talking about anything before dinner. Going
into the drawing room they found Princess Varvara already there, and
the gentlemen of the party in black frock coats. The architect wore
a swallow-tailed coat. Vronsky presented the doctor and the steward to
his guest. The architect he had already introduced to her at the
hospital.
  A stout butler, resplendent with a smoothly shaven round chin and
a starched white cravat, announced that dinner was ready, and the
ladies got up. Vronsky asked Sviiazhsky to take in Anna Arkadyevna,
and himself offered his arm to Dolly. Veslovsky was before
Tushkevich in offering his arm to Princess Varvara, so that Tushkevich
with the steward and the doctor walked in alone.
  The dinner, the dining room, the service, the waiting at table,
the wine and the food, were not simply in keeping with the general
tone of modern luxury throughout the house, but seemed even more
sumptuous and modern. Darya Alexandrovna watched this luxury which was
novel to her, and as a good housekeeper used to managing a
household- though she never dreamed of adapting anything she saw to
her own household, as it was all in a style of luxury far above her
own manner of living- she could not help scrutinizing every detail,
and wondering how and by whom it was all done. Vassenka Veslovsky, her
husband, and even Sviiazhsky, and many other people she knew, would
never have considered this question, and would have readily believed
what every well-bred host tries to make his guests feel, that is, that
all that is well-ordered in his house has cost him, the host, no
trouble whatever, but comes of itself. Darya Alexandrovna was well
aware that even porridge for the children's breakfast does not come of
itself, and that therefore, where so complicated and magnificent a
style of luxury was maintained, someone must give earnest attention to
its organization. And from the glance with which Alexei Kirillovich
scanned the table, from the way he nodded to the butler, and offered
Darya Alexandrovna her choice between cold soup and hot soup, she
saw that it was all organized and maintained by the care of the master
of the house himself. It was evident that it all rested no more upon
Anna than upon Veslovsky. She, Sviiazhsky, the Princess, and
Veslovsky, were equally guests, with light hearts enjoying what had
been arranged for them.
  Anna was the hostess only in conducting the conversation. The
conversation was a difficult one for the lady of the house at a
small table with persons present, like the steward and the
architect, belonging to a completely different world, struggling not
to be overawed by an elegance to which they were unaccustomed, and
unable to sustain a large share in the general conversation. But
this difficult conversation Anna directed with her usual tact and
naturalness, and indeed she did so with actual enjoyment, as Darya
Alexandrovna observed.
  The conversation began about the row Tushkevich and Veslovsky had
taken alone together in the boat, and Tushkevich began describing
the last boat races in Peterburg at the Yacht Club. But Anna,
seizing the first pause, at once turned to the architect to draw him
out of his silence.
  "Nikolai Ivanich was struck," she said meaning Sviiazhsky, "at the
progress the new building had made since he was here last; but I am
there every day, and every day I wonder at the rate at which it
grows."
  "It's first-rate working with His Excellency," said the architect
with a smile (he was respectful and composed, though with a sense of
his own dignity). "It's a very different matter to have to do with the
district authorities. Where one would have to write out sheaves of
papers, here I call upon the Count, and in three words we settle the
business."
  "The American way of doing business," said Sviiazhsky, with a smile.
  "Yes, there they build in a rational fashion...."
  The conversation passed to the misuse of political power in the
United States, but Anna quickly brought it round to another topic,
so as to draw the steward into talk.
  "Have you ever seen a reaping machine?" she said, addressing Darya
Alexandrovna. "We had just ridden over to look at one when we met.
It's the first time I ever saw one."
  "How do they work?" asked Dolly.
  "Exactly like scissors. A plank and a lot of little scissors. Like
this."
  Anna took a knife and fork in her beautiful white hands, covered
with rings, and began showing how the machine worked. It was clear
that she saw nothing would be understood from her explanation; but
aware that her talk was pleasant, and her hands beautiful, she went on
explaining.
  "More like little penknives," Veslovsky said playfully, never taking
his eyes off her.
  Anna gave a just perceptible smile, but made no answer. "Isn't it
true, Karl Fedorich, that it's just like scissors?" she said to the
steward.
  "Oh, ja," answered the German. "Es ist ein ganz einfaches Ding," and
he began to explain the construction of the machine.
  "It's a pity it doesn't bind too. I saw one at the Vienna
exhibition, which binds with a wire," said Sviiazhsky. "They would
be more profitable in use."
  "Es kommt drauf an... Der Preis vom Draht muss ausgerechnet werden."
And the German, roused from his taciturnity, turned to Vronsky. "Das
lasst sich ausrechnen, Erlaucht." The German was just feeling in the
pocket where were his pencil and the notebook he always wrote in,
but recollecting that he was at a dinner, and observing Vronsky's
chilly glance, he checked himself. "Zu compliziert, macht zu viel
pains," he concluded.
  "Wunscht man gains, so hat man auch pains," said Vassenka Veslovsky,
bantering the German. "J'adore l'allemand," he addressed Anna again
with the same smile.
  "Cessez," she said with playful severity.
  "We expected to find you in the fields, Vassilii Semionich," she
said to the doctor, a sickly-looking man; "have you been there?"
  "I went there, but I evaporated," the doctor answered with gloomy
jocoseness.
  "Then you've taken a good constitutional?"
  "Splendid!"
  "Well, and how was the old woman? I hope it's not typhus?"
  "Typhus it isn't, but she's not to be found to the best advantage."
  "What a pity!" said Anna, and having thus paid the dues of
civility to her domestic circle, she turned to her own friends.
  "It would be a hard task, though, to construct a machine from your
description, Anna Arkadyevna," Sviiazhsky said jestingly.
  "Oh, no, why so?" said Anna with a smile that betrayed that she knew
there was something charming in her disquisitions upon the machine,
that had been noticed by Sviiazhsky too. This new trait of girlish
coquettishness made an unpleasant impression on Dolly.
  "But Anna Arkadyevna's knowledge of architecture is marvelous," said
Tushkevich.
  "To be sure, I heard Anna Arkadyevna saying yesterday: 'by cramp'
and 'plinths,'" said Veslovsky. "Have I got it right?"
  "There's nothing marvelous about it, when one sees and hears so much
of it," said Anna. "But, I dare say, you don't even know what houses
are made of?"
  Darya Alexandrovna saw that Anna disliked the tone of playfulness
that existed between her and Veslovsky, but fell in with it against
her will.
  Vronsky acted in this matter quite differently from Levin. He
obviously attached no significance to Veslovsky's chattering; on the
contrary, he encouraged his jests.
  "Come now, tell us, Veslovsky, how are the stones held together?"
  "By cement, of course."
  "Bravo! And what is cement?"
  "Oh, some sort of paste.... No, putty," said Veslovsky, raising a
general laugh.
  The company at dinner, with the exception of the doctor, the
architect, and the steward, who remained plunged in gloomy silence,
kept up a conversation that never paused, glancing off one subject,
fastening on another, and at times stinging one or the other of the
company to the quick. Once Darya Alexandrovna felt wounded to the
quick, and got so hot that she positively flushed and wondered
afterward whether she had said anything extreme or unpleasant.
Sviiazhsky began talking of Levin, describing his strange view that
machinery is simply pernicious in its effects on Russian agriculture.
  "I have not the pleasure of knowing this M. Levin," Vronsky said,
smiling, "but most likely he has never seen the machines he
condemns; or if he has seen and tried any, it must have been after a
queer fashion, some Russian imitation, not a machine from abroad. What
sort of views can anyone have on such a subject?"
  "Turkish views, in general," Veslovsky said, turning to Anna with
a smile.
  "I can't defend his opinions," Darya Alexandrovna said, flaring
up; "but I can say that he's a highly cultivated man, and if he were
here he would know very well how to answer you, though I am not
capable of doing so."
  "I like him extremely, and we are great friends," Sviiazhsky said,
smiling good-naturedly. "Mais pardon, il est un petit peu toque; he
maintains, for instance, that zemstvoes and justices of the peace
are all of no use, and he is unwilling to take part in anything."
  "It's our Russian apathy," said Vronsky, pouring water from an
iced decanter into a delicate glass on a high stem; "we've no sense of
the duties our privileges impose upon us, and so we refuse to
recognize these duties."
  "I know no man more strict in the performance of his duties," said
Darya Alexandrovna, irritated by Vronsky's tone of superiority.
  "For my part," pursued Vronsky, who was evidently for some reason or
other keenly affected by this conversation, "such as I am, I am, on
the contrary, extremely grateful for the honor they have done me,
thanks to Nikolai Ivanich" (he indicated Sviiazhsky), "in electing
me an honorary justice of the peace. I consider that for me the duty
of being present at the session, of judging some peasants' quarrel
about a horse, is as important as anything I can do. And I shall
regard it as an honor if they elect me for the district council.
It's only in that way I can pay for the advantages I enjoy as a
landowner. Unluckily they don't understand the importance that the big
landowners ought to have in the state."
  It was strange to Darya Alexandrovna to hear how serenely
confident he was of being right at his own table. She thought how
Levin, who believed the opposite, was just as positive in his opinions
at his own table. But she loved Levin, and so she was on his side.
  "So we can reckon upon you, Count, for the coming elections?" said
Sviiazhsky. "But you must come a little beforehand, so as to be on the
spot by the eighth. If you would do me the honor to stop with me!"
  "I rather agree with your beau-frere", said Anna, "though not
quite on the same ground as he," she added with a smile. "I'm afraid
that we have too many of these public duties in these latter days.
Just as in the old days there were so many government functionaries
that one had to call in a functionary for every single thing, so now
everyone's doing some sort of public duty. Alexei has been here now
six months, and he's a member, I do believe, of five or six
different public bodies, a guardian, a justice of the peace, a
member of the council, a juryman, an equine something. Du train que
cela va, his whole time will be wasted on it. And I'm afraid that with
such a multiplicity of these bodies, they'll end in being a mere form.
How many are you a member of, Nikolai Ivanich?" she turned to
Sviiazhsky. "Over twenty, I fancy."
  Anna spoke lightly, but irritation could be discerned in her tone.
Darya Alexandrovna, watching Anna and Vronsky attentively, detected it
instantly. She noticed, too, that as she spoke Vronsky's face had
immediately taken a serious and obstinate expression. Noticing this,
and that Princess Varvara at once made haste to change the
conversation by talking of Peterburg acquaintances, and remembering
what Vronsky had without apparent connection said in the garden of his
work in the country, Dolly surmised that this question of public
activity was connected with some deep private disagreement between
Anna and Vronsky.
  The dinner, the wine, the dinner set, were all very good; but it was
all like what Darya Alexandrovna had seen at formal dinners and
balls which of late years had become quite unfamiliar to her; it all
had the same impersonal and constrained character, and so on an
ordinary day and in a little circle of friends it made a
disagreeable impression on her.
  After dinner they sat on the terrace; then they proceeded to play
lawn tennis. The players, divided into two parties, stood on
opposite sides of a tightly drawn net with gilt poles, on the
carefully leveled and rolled croquet ground. Darya Alexandrovna made
an attempt to play, but it was a long time before she could understand
the game, and by the time she did understand it she was so tired
that she sat down with Princess Varvara and simply looked on at the
players. Her partner, Tushkevich, gave up playing too, but the
others kept the game up for a long time. Sviiazhsky and Vronsky both
played very well and seriously. They kept a sharp lookout on the balls
served to them, and without loitering, they ran adroitly up to them,
waited for the rebound, and neatly and accurately returned them over
the net. Veslovsky played worse than the others. He was too eager, but
he kept the players lively with his high spirits. His laughter and
outcries never paused. Like the other men of the party, with the
ladies' permission, he took off his coat, and his solid, comely figure
in his white shirt sleeves, with his red perspiring face and his
impulsive movements, made a picture that imprinted itself vividly on
the memory.
  When Darya Alexandrovna lay in bed that night, as soon as she closed
her eyes, she saw Vassenka Veslovsky flying about the croquet ground.
  During the game Darya Alexandrovna was not enjoying herself. She did
not like the light tone of playfulness that was kept up all the time
between Vassenka Veslovsky and Anna, and the unnaturalness,
altogether, of grown-up people, all alone without children, playing at
a child's game. But to avoid breaking up the party and to get
through the time somehow, after a rest she joined the game again,
and pretended to be enjoying it. All that day it seemed to her as
though she were acting in a theater with actors cleverer than she, and
that her bad acting was spoiling the whole performance.
  She had come with the intention of staying two days, if all went
well. But in the evening, during the game, she made up her mind that
she would go home next day. The maternal cares and worries, which
she had so hated on the way, now, after a day spent without them
struck her in quite another light, and tempted her back to them.
  When, after evening tea and a row by night in the boat, Darya
Alexandrovna went alone to her room, took off her dress, and began
arranging her thin hair for the night, she had a great sense of
relief.
  It was positively disagreeable to her to think that Anna would be
coming to see her immediately. She longed to be alone with her own
thoughts.
                             XXIII.

  Dolly was just about to go to bed when Anna came in to see her,
attired for the night.
  In the course of the day Anna had several times begun to speak of
matters near her heart, and every time after a few words she had
stopped: "Afterward, by ourselves, we'll talk about everything. I've
got so much I want to tell you," she had said.
  Now they were by themselves, and Anna did not know what to talk
about. She sat in the window looking at Dolly, and going over in her
own mind all the stores of intimate talk which had seemed so
inexhaustible beforehand, and she found nothing. At that moment it
seemed to her that everything had been said already.
  "Well, what of Kitty?" she said with a heavy sigh, looking
penitently at Dolly. "Tell me the truth, Dolly: isn't she angry with
me?"
  "Angry? Oh, no!" said Darya Alexandrovna, smiling.
  "But she hates me, despises me?"
  "Oh, no! But you know that sort of thing isn't forgiven."
  "Yes, yes," said Anna, turning away and looking out of the open
window. "But I was not to blame. And who is to blame? What's the
meaning of being to blame? Could it have been otherwise? What do you
think? Could it possibly have happened otherwise than that you
should become the wife of Stiva?"
  "Really, I don't know. But this is what I want you to tell me..."
  "Yes, yes, but we've not finished about Kitty. Is she happy? He's
a very fine man, they say."
  "He's much more than very fine. I don't know a better man."
  "Ah, how glad I am! I'm so glad! Much more than very fine," she
repeated.
  Dolly smiled.
  "But tell me about yourself. We've a great deal to talk about. And
I've had a talk with..." Dolly did not know what to call him. She felt
it awkward to call him either the Count or Alexei Kirillovich.
  "With Alexei," said Anna, "I know what you talked about. But I
wanted to ask you directly what you think of me, of my life?"
  "How am I to say anything so suddenly? I really don't know."
  "No, tell me all the same.... You see my life. But you mustn't
forget that you're seeing us in the summer, when you have come to us
and we are not alone.... But we came here early in the spring, lived
quite alone, and shall be alone again, and I desire nothing better.
But imagine me living alone without him, alone, and that will be...
I see by everything that it will often be repeated, that he will be
half the time away from home," she said, getting up and sitting down
close by Dolly. "Of course," she interrupted Dolly, who would have
answered, "of course I won't try to keep him by force. I don't keep
him indeed. The races are just coming, his horses are running, he will
go. I'm very glad. But think of me, fancy my position.... But what's
the use of talking about it!" She smiled. "Well, what did he talk
about with you?"
  "He spoke of what I want to speak about myself, and it's easy for me
to be his advocate; of whether there is not a possibility... whether
you could not..." (Darya Alexandrovna hesitated) "correct, or
improve your position.... You know how I look at it... But all the
same, if possible, you should get married...."
  "Divorce, you mean?" said Anna. "Do you know, the only woman who
came to see me in Peterburg was Betsy Tverskaia? You know her, of
course? Au fond, c'est la femme la plus dipravee qui existe. She had
an intrigue with Tushkevich, deceiving her husband in the basest
way. And she told me that she did not care to know me so long as my
position was irregular. Don't imagine I would compare... I know you,
darling. But I could not help remembering... Well, so what did he
say to you?" she repeated.
  "He said that he was unhappy on your account and his own. Perhaps
you will say that it's egoism, but what a legitimate and noble egoism.
He wants first of all to legitimize his daughter, and to be your
husband, to have a legal right to you."
  "What wife, what slave can be so utterly a slave as I, in my
position?" she put in gloomily.
  "The chief thing he desires... he desires that you should not
suffer."
  "That's impossible. Well?"
  "Well, and the most legitimate desire- he wishes that your
children should have a name."
  "What children?" Anna said, not looking at Dolly, and half closing
her eyes.
  "Annie and those to come..."
  "He need not trouble on that score; I shall have no more children."
  "How can you tell that you won't?"
  "I shall not, because I don't wish it." And, in spite of all her
emotion, Anna smiled, as she caught the naive expression of curiosity,
wonder, and horror on Dolly's face.
  "The doctor told me after my illness..."
  "Impossible!" said Dolly, opening her eyes wide. For here this was
one of those discoveries the consequences and deductions from which
are so immense that all that one feels for the first instant is that
it is impossible to take it all in, and that one will have to
reflect a great, great deal upon it.
  This discovery, suddenly throwing light on all those families of one
or two children, which had hitherto been so incomprehensible to her,
aroused so many ideas, reflections, and contradictory emotions, that
she had nothing to say, and simply gazed with wide-open eyes of wonder
at Anna. This was the very thing she had been dreaming of, but now
learning that it was possible, she was horrified. She felt that it was
too simple a solution of too complicated a problem.
  "N'est-ce pas immoral?" was all she said, after a brief pause.
  "Why so? Think- I have a choice between two alternatives: either
to be with child, that is an invalid, or to be the friend and
companion of my husband- practically my husband," Anna said in a
tone intentionally superficial and frivolous.
  "Yes, yes," said Darya Alexandrovna, hearing the very arguments
she had used to herself, and not finding the same force in them as
before.
  "For you, for other people," said Anna, as though divining her
thoughts, "there may be reason to hesitate; but for me... You must
consider- I am not his wife; he loves me as long as he loves me. And
how am I to keep his love? Not like this!"
  She moved her white hands in a curve before her waist.
  With extraordinary rapidity, as happens during moments of
excitement, ideas and memories rushed into Darya Alexandrovna's
head. "I," she thought, "did not keep my attraction for Stiva; he left
me for others, and the first woman for whom he betrayed me did not
keep him by being always pretty and lively. He deserted her and took
another. And can Anna attract and keep Count Vronsky in that way? If
that is what he looks for, he will find dresses and manners still more
attractive and charming. And, however white and beautiful her bare
arms are, however beautiful her full figure and her eager face under
her black curls, he will find something better still, just as my
disgusting, pitiful, and charming husband does."
  Dolly made no answer, she merely sighed. Anna noticed this sigh,
indicating dissent, and she went on. In her armory she had other
arguments so strong that no answer could be made to them.
  "Do you say that it's not right? But you must consider," she went
on; "you forget my position. How can I desire children? I'm not
speaking of the suffering- I'm not afraid of that. Think, only- what
are my children to be? Ill-fated children, who will have to bear a
stranger's name. For the very fact of their birth they will be
forced to be ashamed of their mother, their father, their birth."
  "But that is just why a divorce is necessary."
  But Anna did not hear her. She longed to give utterance to all the
arguments with which she had so many times convinced herself.
  "What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid
bringing unhappy beings into the world!"
  She looked at Dolly, but without waiting for a reply she went on:
  "I should always feel I had wronged these unhappy children," she
said. "If there are none, at any rate they are not unhappy; while if
they are unhappy, I alone should be to blame for it."
  These were the very arguments Darya Alexandrovna had used in her own
reflections; but she heard them now without understanding them. "How
can one wrong creatures that don't exist?" she thought. And all at
once the idea struck her. Could it possibly, under any
circumstances, have been better for her favorite Grisha if he had
never existed? And this seemed to her so wild, so strange, that she
shook her head to drive away this tangle of whirling, mad ideas.
  "No, I don't know; it's not right," was all she said, with an
expression of disgust on her face.
  "Yes, but you mustn't forget what you are and what I am.... And
besides that," added Anna, in spite of the wealth of her arguments and
the poverty of Dolly's objections, seeming still to admit that it
was not right, "don't forget the chief point, that I am not now in the
same position as you. For you the question is: Do you desire not to
have any more children? While for me it is: Do I desire to have
them? And that's a great difference. You must see that I can't
desire them in my position."
  Darya Alexandrovna made no reply. She suddenly felt that she had got
away from Anna so far, that there lay between them a barrier of
questions on which they could never agree, and about which it was
better not to speak.
                             XXIV.

  "Then there is all the more reason for you to legalize your
position, if possible," said Dolly.
  "Yes, if possible," said Anna, speaking all at once in an utterly
different tone, subdued and mournful.
  "Surely you don't mean a divorce is impossible? I was told your
husband had consented to it."
  "Dolly, I don't want to talk about that."
  "Oh, we won't then," Darya Alexandrovna hastened to say, noticing
the expression of suffering on Anna's face. "All I see is that you
take too gloomy a view of things."
  "I? Not at all! I'm very satisfied and happy. You see, je fais
passions. Veslovsky..."
  "Yes, to tell the truth, I don't like Veslovsky's tone," said
Darya Alexandrovna, anxious to change the subject.
  "Oh, that's nonsense! It amuses Alexei, and that's all; but he's a
boy, and quite under control. You know, I turn him as I please. It's
just as it might be with your Grisha.... Dolly!" she suddenly
changed the subject. "You say I take too gloomy a view of things.
You can't understand. It's too awful! I try not to take any view of it
at all."
  "But I think you ought to. You ought to do all you can."
  "But what can I do? Nothing. You tell me to marry Alexei, and say
I don't think about it. I don't think about it!" she repeated, and a
flush rose into her face. She got up, straightening her chest, and
sighed heavily. With her light step she began pacing up and down the
room, stopping now and then. "I don't think of it? Not a day, not an
hour passes that I don't think of it, and blame myself for what I
think... because thinking of that may drive me mad. Drive me mad!" she
repeated. "When I think of it, I can't sleep without morphine. But
never mind. Let us talk quietly. They tell me- divorce. In the first
place, he won't give me a divorce. He's under the influence of
Countess Lidia Ivanovna now."
  Darya Alexandrovna, sitting erect on a chair, turned her head
following Anna with a face of sympathetic suffering.
  "You ought to make the attempt," she said softly.
  "Suppose I make the attempt. What does it mean?" she said, evidently
giving utterance to a thought, a thousand times thought over and
learned by heart. "It means that I, hating him, but still
recognizing that I have wronged him- and I consider him magnanimous-
that I humiliate myself to write to him.... Well, suppose I make the
effort; I do it. Either I receive a humiliating refusal, or consent.
Well, I have received his consent, say..." Anna was at that moment
at the farthest end of the room, and she stopped there, doing
something to the curtain at the window. "I receive his consent, but
my... my son? They won't give him up to me. He will grow up
despising me, with his father, whom I've abandoned. Do you see, I love
equally, I think, but both more than myself, two beings- Seriozha
and Alexei."
  She came out into the middle of the room and stood facing Dolly,
with her arms pressed tightly across her chest. In her white
dressing gown her figure seemed more than usually grand and broad. She
bent her head, and with shining, wet eyes looked from under her
brows at Dolly, a thin little pitiful figure in her patched dressing
jacket and nightcap, shaking all over with emotion.
  "It is only those two beings whom I love, and one excludes the
other. I can't have them together, and that's the only thing I want.
And since I can't have that, I don't care about the rest. I don't care
about anything- anything. And it will end one way or another, and so I
can't, I don't like to talk of it. So don't blame me, don't judge me
for anything. You can't with your pure heart understand all that I'm
suffering."
  She went up, sat down beside Dolly, and, with a guilty look,
peeped into her face and took her hand.
  "What are you thinking? What are you thinking about me? Don't
despise me. I don't deserve contempt. I'm simply unhappy. If anyone is
unhappy, I am," she uttered, and turning away, she burst into tears.
  Left alone, Dolly said her prayers and went to bed. She had felt for
Anna with all her heart while she was speaking to her, but now she
could not force herself to think of her. The memories of home and of
her children rose up in her imagination with a peculiar charm quite
new to her, with a sort of new brilliance. That world of her own
seemed to her now so sweet and precious that she would not on any
account spend an extra day outside it, and she made up her mind that
she would certainly go back the next day.
  Anna meantime went back to her boudoir, took a wineglass, and
dropped into it several drops of a medicine, of which the principal
ingredient was morphine. After drinking it off and sitting still a
little while, she went into her bedroom in a soothed and more cheerful
frame of mind.
  When she went into the bedroom, Vronsky looked intently at her. He
was looking for traces of the conversation which he knew, staying so
long in Dolly's room, she must have had with her. But in her
expression of restrained excitement, and of a sort of reserve, he
could find nothing but the beauty that always bewitched him afresh
though he was used to it, the consciousness of it, and the desire that
it should affect him. He did not want to ask her what they had been
talking of, but he hoped that she would tell him something of her
own accord. But she only said:
  "I am so glad you like Dolly. You do, don't you?"
  "Oh, I've known her a long while. She's very goodhearted, I suppose,
mais excessivement terre-a-terre. Still, I'm very glad to see her."
  He took Anna's hand and looked inquiringly into her eyes.
  Misinterpreting the look, she smiled to him.

  Next morning, in spite of the protests of her hosts, Darya
Alexandrovna prepared for her homeward journey. Levin's coachman, in
his by no means new coat and shabby hat, with his ill-matched horses
and his carriage with the patched mudguards, drove with gloomy
determination into the covered gravel approach.
  Darya Alexandrovna disliked taking leave of Princess Varvara and the
gentlemen of the party. After a day spent together, both she and her
hosts were distinctly aware that they did not get on together, and
that it was better for them not to meet. Only Anna was sad. She knew
that now, after Dolly's departure, no one again would stir up within
her soul the feelings that had been roused by their conversation. It
hurt her to stir up these feelings, but yet she knew that that was the
best part of her soul, and that that part of her soul would quickly
grow weedy in the life she was leading.
  As she drove out into the open country, Darya Alexandrovna had a
delightful sense of relief, and she felt tempted to ask the two men
how they had liked being at Vronsky's, when suddenly the coachman,
Philip, expressed himself unasked:
  "Rolling in wealth they may be, but three pots of oats was all
they gave us. Everything cleared up till there wasn't a grain left
by cock-crow. What are three pots? A mere mouthful! And oats now you
could get from innkeepers for forty-five kopecks. At our place, no
fear, all comers may have as much as they can eat."
  "The master's a screw," put in the countinghouse clerk.
  "Well, did you like their horses?" asked Dolly.
  "The horses! There's no two opinions about them. And the food was
good. But it seemed to me sort of dreary there, Darya Alexandrovna.
I don't know what you thought," he said, turning his handsome,
good-natured face to her.
  "I thought so too. Well, shall we get home by evening?"
  "Eh, we must!"
  On reaching home and finding everyone entirely safe and particularly
charming, Darya Alexandrovna began with great liveliness telling
them about her arrival, her warm reception, about the luxury and
good taste in which the Vronskys lived, and about their recreations,
and she would not allow a word to be said against them.
  "One has to know Anna and Vronsky- I have got to know him better
now- to see how fine they are, and how touching," she said, speaking
now with perfect sincerity, and forgetting the vague feeling of
dissatisfaction and awkwardness she had experienced there.
                             XXV.

  Vronsky and Anna spent the whole summer and part of the autumn in
the country, living in just the same condition, and still taking no
steps to obtain a divorce. It was a decided thing between them that
they should not go away anywhere; but both felt, the longer they lived
alone, especially in the autumn, and without guests in the house, that
they could not stand this existence, and that they would have to
change it.
  Their life was apparently such that nothing better could be desired.
They had the fullest abundance of everything; they had a child, and
both had occupation. Anna devoted just as much care to her
appearance when they had no visitors, and she did a great deal of
reading, both of novels and of what serious literature was in fashion.
She ordered all the books that were praised in the foreign papers
and journals she received, and read them with that concentrated
attention which is only given to what is read in seclusion.
Moreover, every subject that was of interest to Vronsky, she studied
in books and special journals, so that he often went straight to her
with questions relating to agriculture or architecture, sometimes even
with questions relating to horse breeding or sport. He was amazed at
her knowledge, her memory, and at first was disposed to doubt it, to
ask for confirmation of her facts; and she would find what he asked
for in some book, and show it to him.
  The building of the hospital, too, interested her. She did not
merely assist, but planned and suggested a great deal herself. But her
chief thought was still of herself- how far she was dear to Vronsky,
how far she could make up to him for all he had given up. Vronsky
appreciated this desire not only to please, but to serve him, which
had become the sole aim of her existence, but at the same time he
wearied of the loving snares in which she tried to hold him fast. As
time went on, and he saw himself more and more often held fast in
these snares, he had an ever-growing desire, not so much to escape
from them, as to try whether they hindered his freedom. Had it not
been for this growing desire to be free, not to have scenes every time
he wanted to go to the town to a session or a race, Vronsky would have
been perfectly satisfied with his life. The role he had taken up,
the role of a wealthy landowner, one of that class which ought to be
the very heart of the Russian aristocracy, was entirely to his
taste; and now, after spending six months in that role, he derived
even greater satisfaction from it. And his management of his estate,
which occupied and absorbed him more and more, was most successful. In
spite of the immense sums which the hospital, the machinery, the
cows ordered from Switzerland, and many other things, cost him, he was
convinced that he was not wasting but increasing his substance. In all
matters affecting income, the sales of timber, wheat, and wool, the
letting of lands, Vronsky was hard as a rock, and knew well how to
keep up prices. In all operations on a large scale on this and his
other estates, he kept to the simplest methods involving no risk,
and in trifling details he was careful and exacting to an extreme
degree. In spite of all the cunning and ingenuity of the German
steward, who would try to tempt him into purchases by making his
original estimate always far larger than really required, and then
representing to Vronsky that he might get the thing cheaper, and so
make a profit, Vronsky did not give in. He listened to his steward,
cross-examined him, and only agreed to his suggestions when the
implement to be ordered or constructed was the very newest, not yet
known in Russia, and likely to excite wonder. Apart from such
exceptions, he resolved upon an increased outlay only where there
was a surplus, and in making such an outlay he went into the
minutest details, and insisted on getting the very best for his money;
so that by the method on which he managed his affairs, it was clear
that he was not wasting, but increasing his substance.
  In October there were the provincial nobility elections in the
Kashinsky province, where were the estates of Vronsky, Sviiazhsky,
Koznishev, Oblonsky, and a small part of Levin's land.
  These elections were attracting public attention from several
circumstances connected with them, and also from the people taking
part in them. There had been a great deal of talk about these
elections, and great preparations were being made for them. Persons
who never attended the elections were coming from Moscow, from
Peterburg, and from abroad to attend these.
  Vronsky had long before promised Sviiazhsky to go to them.
  Before the elections Sviiazhsky, who often visited Vozdvizhenskoe,
drove over to fetch Vronsky.
  On the day before there had been almost a quarrel between Vronsky
and Anna over this proposed expedition. It was the very dullest autumn
weather, which is so dreary in the country, and so, preparing
himself for a struggle, Vronsky, with a hard and cold expression,
informed Anna of his departure as he had never spoken to her before.
But, to his surprise, Anna accepted the information with great
composure, and merely asked when he would be back. He looked
intently at her, at a loss to explain this composure. She smiled at
his look. He knew that way she had of withdrawing into herself, and
knew that it only happened when she had determined upon something
without letting him know her plans. He was afraid of this; but he
was so anxious to avoid a scene that he kept up appearances, and
half sincerely believed in what he longed to believe in- her
reasonableness.
  "I hope you won't be dull?"
  "I hope not," said Anna. "I got a box of books yesterday from
Gautier's. No, I shan't be dull."
  "She's trying to take that tone, and so much the better," he
thought, "or else it would be the same thing over and over again."
  And he set off for the elections without appealing to her for a
candid explanation. It was the first time since the beginning of their
intimacy that he had parted from her without a full explanation.
From one point of view this troubled him, but on the other side he
felt that it was better so. "At first there will be, as this time,
something undefined, kept back, and then she will get used to it. In
any case I can give up anything for her, but not my masculine
independence," he thought.
                             XXVI.

  In September Levin moved to Moscow for Kitty's confinement. He had
spent a whole month in Moscow with nothing to do, when Sergei
Ivanovich, who had property in the Kashinsky province, and took
great interest in the question of the approaching elections, made
ready to set off to the elections. He invited his brother, who had a
vote in the Selezniovsky district, to come with him. Levin had,
moreover, to transact in Kashin some extremely important business
relating to the wardship, and to the receiving of certain redemption
money for his sister, who was abroad.
  Levin still hesitated, but Kitty, who saw that he was bored in
Moscow, and urged him to go, on her own authority ordered him the
proper nobleman's uniform, costing eighty roubles. And this eighty
roubles paid for the uniform was the chief reason that finally decided
Levin to go. He went to Kashin.
  Levin had been five days in Kashin, visiting the assembly each
day, and busily engaged about his sister's business, which still
dragged on. The district marshals of nobility were all occupied with
the elections, and it was impossible to get the simplest thing done
that depended upon the court of wardship. The other matter, the
receipt of the sums due, was also met by difficulties. After long
negotiations over the lifting of the prohibition, the money was at
last ready to be paid; but the notary, a most obliging person, could
not hand over the order, because it must have the signature of the
president, and the president, though he had not given over his
duties to a deputy, was at the elections. All these worrying
negotiations, this endless going from place to place, and talking with
pleasant and excellent people, who quite saw the unpleasantness of the
petitioner's position, but were powerless to assist him- all these
efforts that yielded no result, led to a feeling of misery in Levin
akin to the mortifying helplessness one experiences in dreams, when
one tries to use physical force. He felt this frequently as he
talked to his exceedingly good-natured solicitor. This solicitor
did, it seemed, everything possible, and strained every nerve to get
him out of his difficulties. "I tell you what you might try," he
said more than once; "go to so-and-so and so-and-so," and the
solicitor drew up a regular plan for getting round the fatal point
that hindered everything. But he would add immediately, "It'll mean
some delay, anyway, but you might try it." And Levin did try, and
did go. Everyone was kind and civil, but the point evaded seemed to
crop up again in the end, and again to bar the way. What was
particularly trying, was that Levin could not make out with whom he
was struggling, to whose interest it was that his business should
not be done. That no one seemed to know; the solicitor certainly did
not know. If Levin could have understood why, just as he saw why one
can only approach the booking office of a railway station in single
file, it would not have been so vexatious and tiresome to him. But
in the case of the hindrances that confronted him in his business,
no one could explain why they existed.
  But Levin had changed a good deal since his marriage; he was
patient, and if he could not see why it was all arranged like this, he
told himself that he could not judge without knowing all about it, and
that most likely it must be so, and he tried not to resent it.
  In attending the elections, too, and taking part in them, he tried
now not to judge, not to fall foul of them, but to comprehend as fully
as he could the question which was so earnestly and ardently absorbing
honest and excellent men whom he respected. Since his marriage there
had been revealed to Levin so many new and serious aspects of life
which had previously, through his frivolous attitude to them, seemed
of no importance, that in the question of the elections, too, he
assumed and tried to find some serious significance.
  Sergei Ivanovich explained to him the meaning and object of the
proposed radical change at the elections. The marshal of the
province in whose hands the law had placed the control of so many
important public functions- the guardianship of wards (the very
department which was giving Levin so much trouble just now), the
disposal of large sums subscribed by the nobility of the province, the
high schools, for girls, for boys, and military, and primary
instruction on the new statute and finally, the Zemstvo- the marshal
of the province, Snetkov, was a nobleman of the old school,
dissipating an immense fortune, a goodhearted man, honest after his
own fashion, but utterly without any comprehension of the needs of
modern days. He always took, in every question, the side of the
nobility; he was positively antagonistic to the spread of primary
education, and he succeeded in giving a purely party character to
the Zemstvo which ought by rights to be of such an immense importance.
What was needed was to put in his place a fresh, capable, perfectly
modern man, of contemporary ideas, and to frame their policy so as
to derive, from the rights conferred upon the nobles (not as the
nobility, but as an element of the Zemstvo), all the benefits of
self-government that could possibly be derived from them. In the
wealthy Kashinsky province, which always took the lead of other
provinces in everything, there was now such a preponderance of
forces that this policy, once carried through properly there, might
serve as a model for other provinces- for all Russia. And hence the
whole question was of the greatest importance. It was proposed to
elect as marshal in place of Snetkov either Sviiazhsky, or, better
still, Neviedovsky, a former university professor, a man of remarkable
intelligence, and a great friend of Sergei Ivanovich.
  The meeting was opened by the governor, who made a speech to the
nobles, urging them to elect the public functionaries, not from regard
for persons, but for the service and welfare of the native country,
and hoping that the honorable nobility of the Kashinsky province
would, as at all former elections, hold their duty as sacred, and
vindicate the exalted confidence of the Monarch.
  When he had finished his speech, the governor walked out of the
hall, and the noblemen noisily and eagerly- some even
enthusiastically- followed him and thronged round him while he put
on his fur coat and conversed amicably with the marshal of the
province. Levin, anxious to see into everything and not miss anything,
also stood there in the crowd, and heard the governor say: "Please,
tell Marya Ivanovna my wife is very sorry she could not visit the
charity school." And thereupon the nobles in high good humor sorted
out their fur coats and all drove off to the cathedral.
  In the cathedral Levin, lifting his hand like the rest, and
repeating the words of the dean, vowed with the most awesome oaths
to do all the governor had hoped they would do. Church services always
affected Levin, and as he uttered the words: "I kiss the cross," and
glanced round at the crowd of young and old men repeating the same, he
felt touched.
  On the second and third days there was business relating to the
finances of the nobility, and the high school for girls, of no
importance whatever, as Sergei Ivanovich explained, and Levin, busy
seeing after his own affairs, did not attend the meetings. On the
fourth day the auditing of the marshal's accounts took place at the
high table of the marshal of the province. And then there occurred the
first skirmish between the new party and the old. The committee
which had been deputed to verify the accounts reported to the
meeting that all was in order. The marshal of the province got up,
thanked the nobility for their confidence, and shed tears. The
nobles gave him a loud welcome and shook hands with him. But at that
instant a nobleman of Sergei Ivanovich's party said that he had
heard that the committee had not verified the accounts, considering
such a verification an insult to the marshal of the province. One of
the members of the committee incautiously admitted this. Then a
small gentleman, very young-looking but very venomous, began to say
that it would probably be agreeable to the marshal of the province
to give an account of his expenditures of the public moneys, and
that the misplaced delicacy of the members of the committee was
depriving him of this moral satisfaction. Then the members of the
committee tried to withdraw their admission, and Sergei Ivanovich
began to prove that they must logically admit either that they had
verified the accounts or that they had not, and he developed this
dilemma in detail. Sergei Ivanovich was answered by the talker of
the opposite party. Then Sviiazhsky spoke, and then the venomous
gentleman again. The discussion lasted a long time and ended in
nothing. Levin was surprised that they should dispute upon this
subject so long, especially as, when he asked Sergei Ivanovich whether
he supposed that money had been misappropriated, Sergei Ivanovich
answered:
  "Oh, no! He's an honest man. But those old-fashioned methods of
paternal family arrangements in the management of nobility affairs
must be broken down."
  On the fifth day came the elections of the district marshals. It was
rather a stormy day in several districts. In the Selezniovsky district
Sviiazhsky was elected unanimously without a ballot, and he gave a
dinner that evening.
                             XXVII.

  The sixth day was fixed for the election of the marshal of the
province. The rooms, large and small, were full of nobleman in all
sorts of uniforms. Many had come only for that day. Men who had not
seen each other for years, some from the Crimea, some from
Peterburg, some from abroad, met in the rooms of the Hall of Nobility.
There was much discussion around the province table under the portrait
of the Czar.
  The nobles, both in the larger and in the smaller rooms, grouped
themselves in camps, and from their hostile and suspicious glances,
from the silence that fell upon them when outsiders approached a
group, and from the way that some, whispering together, retreated to
the farther corridor, it was evident that each side had secrets from
the other. In appearance the noblemen were sharply divided into two
classes: the old and the new. The old were for the most part either in
the old uniform of the nobility, buttoned up closely, with spurs and
hats, or in their own special naval, cavalry, infantry uniforms,
earned by their former service. The uniforms of the older men were
embroidered in the old-fashioned way with small puffs on their
shoulders; they were unmistakably tight and short in the waists, as
though their wearers had grown out of them. The younger men wore the
uniform of the nobility with long waists and broad shoulders,
unbuttoned over white waistcoats, or uniforms with black collars and
with the embroidered laurel leaves of justices of the peace. To the
younger men belonged the Court uniforms that here and there brightened
up the crowd.
  But the division into young and old did not correspond with the
division of parties. Some of the young men, as Levin observed,
belonged to the old party; and some of the very oldest noblemen, on
the contrary, were whispering with Sviiazhsky, and were evidently
ardent partisans of the new party.
  Levin stood in the smaller room, where they were smoking and
taking light refreshments, close to his own friends, and, listening to
what they were saying, he vainly exerted all his intelligence trying
to understand what was said. Sergei Ivanovich was the center round
which the others grouped themselves. He was listening at that moment
to Sviiazhsky and Khliustov, the marshal of another district, who
belonged to their party. Khliustov would not agree to go with his
district to ask Snetkov to be a candidate, while Sviiazhsky was
persuading him to do so, and Sergei Ivanovich was approving of the
plan. Levin could not make out why the opposition had to ask the
marshal to be a candidate when they wanted to supersede him.
  Stepan Arkadyevich, who had just been drinking and taking some snack
lunch, came up to them in his uniform of a gentleman of the
bedchamber, wiping his lips with a perfumed handkerchief of bordered
batiste.
  "We are placing our forces," he said, pulling out his side whiskers,
"Sergei Ivanovich!"
  And listening to the conversation, he supported Sviiazhsky's
contention.
  "One district's enough, and Sviiazhsky's obviously of the
opposition," he said, words evidently intelligible to all except
Levin.
  "Why, Kostia, you, it seems, get the taste for these affairs too!"
he added, turning to Levin and drawing his arm through his. Levin
would have been glad indeed to get the taste for these affairs, but
could not make out what the point was, and retreating a few steps from
the speakers, he explained to Stepan Arkadyevich his inability to
understand why the marshal of the province should be asked to be a
candidate.
  "O sancta simplicitas!" said Stepan Arkadyevich, and briefly and
clearly he explained it to Levin.
  If, as at previous elections, all the districts asked the marshal of
the province to be a candidate, then he would be elected without a
ballot. That must not be. Now eight districts had agreed to call
upon him: if two refused to do so, Snetkov might decline the candidacy
entirely; and then the old party might choose another of their
party, which would throw them completely out in their reckoning. But
if only one district, Sviiazhsky's, did not call upon him to be a
candidate, Snetkov would let himself be balloted for. They were
even, some of them, going to vote for him, and purposely to let him
get a good many votes, so that the enemy might be thrown off the
scent, and when a candidate of the other side was put up, they too
might give him some votes. Levin understood to some extent, but not
fully, and would have put a few more questions, when suddenly everyone
began talking and making a noise, and they moved toward the big room.
  "What is it? Eh? Whom?... Proxy? Whose? What?... They won't pass
him?... No proxy?... They won't let Fliorov in?... Eh, because of
the charge against him?... Why, at this rate, they won't admit anyone.
It's a swindle!... The law!" Levin heard exclamations on all sides,
and he moved into the big room together with the others, all
hurrying somewhere and afraid of missing something. Squeezed by the
crowding noblemen, he drew near the high table where the marshal of
the province, Sviiazhsky, and the other leaders, were hotly
disputing about something.
                             XXVIII.

  Levin was standing rather far off. A nobleman breathing heavily
and hoarsely at his side, and another whose thick boots were creaking,
prevented him from hearing distinctly. He could only hear the soft
voice of the marshal faintly, then the shrill voice of the venomous
gentleman, and then the voice of Sviiazhsky. They were disputing, as
far as he could make out, as to the interpretation to be put on the
act and the exact meaning of the words: "liable to be called up for
trial."
  The crowd parted to make way for Sergei Ivanovich approaching the
table. Sergei Ivanovich, waiting till the venomous gentleman had
finished speaking, said that he thought the best solution would be
to refer to the act itself, and asked the secretary to find the act.
The act said that in case of difference of opinion, there must be a
ballot.
  Sergei Ivanovich read the act and began to explain its meaning,
but at that point a tall, stout, stoop-shouldered landowner, with dyed
mustache, in a tight uniform that made the back of his neck bulge
up, interrupted him. He went up to the table, and striking it with his
finger ring, he shouted loudly:
  "A ballot! Put it to the vote! No need for more talking!"
  Then several voices began to talk all at once, and the tall nobleman
with the ring, getting more and more exasperated, shouted more and
more loudly. But it was impossible to make out what he said.
  He was shouting for the very course Sergei Ivanovich had proposed;
but it was evident that he hated him and all his party, and this
feeling of hatred spread through the whole party and roused in
opposition to it the same vindictiveness, though in a more seemly
form, on the other side. Shouts were raised, and for a moment all
was confusion, so that the marshal of the province had to call for
order.
  "A ballot! A ballot! Whoever is a nobleman understands! We shed
our blood for our country!... The confidence of the Monarch.... No
checking of the accounts of the marshal- he's not a cashier!... But
that's not the point.... Votes, please! What vileness!..." shouted
furious and violent voices on all sides. Looks and faces were even
more violent and furious than their words. They expressed the most
implacable hatred. Levin did not in the least understand what it was
all about, and he marveled at the passion with which it was disputed
whether or not the decision about Fliorov should be put to the vote.
He forgot, as Sergei Ivanovich explained to him afterward, this
syllogism: that it was necessary for the public good to get rid of the
marshal of the province; that to get rid of the marshal it was
necessary to have a majority of votes; that to get a majority of votes
it was necessary to secure Fliorov's right to vote; that to secure the
recognition of Fliorov's right to vote they must decide on the
interpretation to be put on the act.
  "And one vote may decide the whole question, and one must be serious
and consecutive, if one wants to be of use in public life,"
concluded Sergei Ivanovich. But Levin forgot all that, and it was
painful to him to see all these excellent persons, for whom he had
respect, in such an unpleasant and vicious state of excitement. To
escape from this painful feeling he went away into the other room
where there was nobody except the waiters at the refreshment bar.
Seeing the waiters busy washing up the crockery and setting in order
their plates and wineglasses, seeing their alert and vivacious
faces, Levin felt an unexpected sense of relief, as though he had come
out of a stuffy room into the fresh air. He began walking up and down,
looking with pleasure at the waiters. He particularly liked the way
one gray-whiskered waiter, who showed his scorn for the other
younger ones, and was jeered at by them, was teaching them how to fold
napkins properly. Levin was just about to enter into conversation with
the old waiter, when the secretary of the court of wardship, a
little old man whose speciality it was to know all the noblemen of the
province by name and patronymic, drew him away.
  "Please come, Konstantin Dmitrievich," he said, "your brother's
looking for you. They are voting on the legal point."
  Levin walked into the room, received a white ball, and followed
his brother, Sergei Ivanovich, to the table where Sviiazhsky was
standing with a significant and ironical face, holding his beard in
his fist and sniffing at it. Sergei Ivanovich put his hand into the
box, put the ball somewhere, and, making room for Levin, stopped.
Levin advanced, but utterly forgetting what he was to do, and much
embarrassed, he turned to Sergei Ivanovich with the question, "Where
am I to put it?" He asked this softly, at a moment when there was
talking going on near, so that he had hoped his question would not
be overheard. But the persons speaking paused, and his improper
question was overheard. Sergei Ivanovich frowned.
  "That is a matter for each man's own decision," he said severely.
  Several people smiled. Levin crimsoned, hurriedly thrust his hand
under the cloth, and put the ball to the right as it was in his
right hand. Having put it in, he recollected that he ought to have
thrust his left hand in too, and so he thrust it in though too late,
and, still more overcome with confusion, he beat a hasty retreat
into the background.
  "A hund'ed and twenty-six fo' admission! Ninety-eight against!" sang
out the voice of the secretary, who could not pronounce the letter
r. Then there was a laugh; a button and two hazelnuts were found in
the box. The nobleman was allowed the right to vote, and the new party
had conquered.
  But the old party did not consider themselves conquered. Levin heard
that they were asking Snetkov to be candidate, and he saw that a crowd
of noblemen was surrounding the marshal, who was saying something.
Levin went nearer. In reply Snetkov spoke of the trust the noblemen of
the province had placed in him, the affection they had shown him,
which he did not deserve, as his only merit had been his attachment to
the nobility, to whom he had devoted twelve years of service.
Several times he repeated the words: "I have served to the best of
my powers with truth and good faith; I value your goodness and thank
you," and suddenly he stopped short from the tears that choked him,
and went out of the room. Whether these tears came from a sense of the
injustice being done him, from his love for the nobility, or from
the strain of the position he was placed in, feeling himself
surrounded by enemies, his emotion infected the assembly, the majority
were touched, and Levin felt a tenderness for Snetkov.
  In the doorway the marshal of the province jostled against Levin.
  "Beg pardon- excuse me, please," he said as to a stranger, but,
recognizing Levin, he smiled timidly. It seemed to Levin that he would
have liked to say something, but could not speak for emotion. His face
and his whole figure in his uniform with the crosses, and white
trousers striped with galloons, as he moved hurriedly along,
reminded Levin of some hunted beast who sees that he is in evil
plight. This expression on the marshal's face was particularly
touching to Levin, because, only the day before, he had been at his
house about his guardianship business and had seen him in all his
grandeur, a kindhearted, fatherly man. The big house with the old
family furniture; the rather slovenly, far from stylish, but
respectful footmen- unmistakably old house serfs who had stuck to
their master; the stout, good-natured wife in a cap with lace and a
Turkish shawl, petting her pretty grandchild, her daughter's daughter;
the young son, a sixth-form high school boy, coming home from
school, and greeting his father by kissing his big hand; the
genuine, cordial words and gestures of the old man- all this had the
day before roused an instinctive feeling of respect and sympathy in
Levin. This old man was a touching and pathetic figure to Levin now,
and he longed to say something pleasant to him.
  "So you're our marshal again," he said.
  "It's not likely," said the marshal, looking round with a scared
expression. "I'm worn-out, I'm old. If there are men younger and
more deserving than I, let them serve."
  And the marshal disappeared through a side door.
  The most solemn moment was at hand. They were to proceed immediately
to the election. The leaders of both parties were reckoning white
and black on their fingers.
  The discussion upon Fliorov had given the new party not only
Fliorov's vote, but had also gained time for them, so that they
could send to fetch three noblemen who had been rendered unable to
take part in the elections by the wiles of the other party. Two
noble gentlemen, who had a weakness for strong drink, had been made
drunk by the partisans of Snetkov, and a third had been relieved of
his uniform.
  On learning this, the new party had made haste, during the dispute
about Fliorov, to send some of their men in a cab to clothe the
stripped gentleman, and to bring along one of the intoxicated to the
meeting.
  "I've brought one after bringing him to by throwing water- over
him," said the landowner who had gone on this errand, to Sviiazhsky.
"Never mind- he'll do."
  "Not too drunk- he won't fall down?" said Sviiazhsky, shaking his
head.
  "No, he's first-rate. If only they don't give him any more
here.... I've told the barman not to give him anything, on any
account."
                             XXIX.

  The narrow room, in which they were smoking and taking
refreshment, was full of noblemen. The excitement grew more intense,
and every face betrayed some uneasiness. The excitement was
specially keen for the leaders of each party, who knew every detail,
and had reckoned up every vote. They were the generals organizing
the approaching battle. The rest, like the rank and file before an
engagement, though they were getting ready for the fight, sought for
other distractions in the interval. Some were lunching, standing at
the bar, or sitting at the table; others were walking up and down
the long room, smoking cigarettes, and talking with friends whom
they had not seen for a long while.
  Levin did not care to eat, and he was not a smoker; he did not
want to join his own friends- that is Sergei Ivanovich, Stepan
Arkadyevich, Sviiazhsky, and the rest, because Vronsky in his
equerry's uniform was standing with them in eager conversation.
Levin had seen him already at the meeting on the previous day, and
he had studiously avoided him, not caring to greet him. He went to the
window and sat down, scanning the groups, and listening to what was
being said around him. He felt depressed, especially because
everyone else was, as he saw, eager, anxious, and interested, and he
alone, with an old, toothless little man with mumbling lips, wearing a
naval uniform who sat beside him, had no interest in it, and nothing
to do.
  "He's such a blackguard! I have told him so, but it makes no
difference. Only think of it! He couldn't collect it in three
years!" he heard vigorously uttered by a stoop-shouldered, short
country gentleman, who had pomaded hair hanging over his embroidered
collar, and new boots obviously put on for the occasion, with heels
that tapped energetically as he spoke. Casting a displeased glance
at Levin, this gentleman sharply turned his back.
  "Yes, it's a dirty business, there's no denying," another puny
landowner assented in a high voice.
  Next, a whole crowd of country gentlemen, surrounding a stout
general, hurriedly came near Levin. These persons were unmistakably
seeking a place where they could talk without being overheard.
  "How dare he say I had his breeches stolen! Pawned them for drink, I
expect. Damn the fellow- Prince indeed! He'd better not say it- that's
swinish!"
  "But excuse me! They take their stand on the act," was being said in
another group; "the wife must be registered as a noble."
  "Oh, damn your acts! I speak from my heart. We're all gentlemen,
aren't we? Have trust in us."
  "Shall we go on, Your Excellency- fine champagne?"
  Another group was following a nobleman who was shouting something in
a loud voice; it was one of the three intoxicated gentlemen.
  "I always advised Marya Semionovna to let for a fair rent, for she
can never save a profit," he heard a pleasant voice say. The speaker
was a country gentleman with white mustache, wearing the regimental
uniform of an old general staff officer. It was the very landowner
Levin had met at Sviiazhsky's. He knew him at once. The landowner
too stared at Levin, and they exchanged greetings.
  "Very glad to see you! To be sure! I remember you very well. Last
year at our district marshal's, Nikolai Ivanovich's."
  "Well, and how is your land doing?" asked Levin.
  "Oh, still just the same, always at a loss," the landowner
answered with a resigned smile, but with an expression of serenity and
conviction that it must be thus. "And how do you come to be in our
province?" he asked. "Come to take part in our coup d'etat?" he
said, confidently pronouncing the French words with a bad accent.
  "All Russia's here- gentlemen of the bedchamber, and everything
short of the ministry." He pointed to the imposing figure of Stepan
Arkadyevich in white trousers and his court uniform, walking by with a
general.
  "I ought to own that I don't very well understand the drift of the
provincial elections," said Levin.
  The landowner looked at him.
  "Why, what is there to understand? There's no meaning in it at
all. It's a decaying institution that goes on running only by the
force of inertia. Just look, the very uniforms tell you that it's an
assembly of justices of the peace, permanent members of the boards,
and so on, but not of noblemen."
  "Then why do you come?" asked Levin.
  "From habit, nothing else. Then, too, one must keep up
connections. It's a moral obligation of a sort. And then, to tell
the truth, there are one's own interests. My son-in-law wants to run
as a permanent member; they're not rich people, and he must be brought
forward. These gentlemen, now- what do they come for?" he said,
pointing to the venomous gentleman, who was talking at the high table.

  "That's the new generation of nobility."
  "New it may be, but nobility it isn't. They're landed proprietors-
but we're the landowners. As noblemen, they're cutting their own
throats."
  "But you say it's an institution that's served its time."
  "That it may be, but still, it ought to be treated a little more
respectfully. Snetkov, now... We may be of use, or we may not, but
we're the growth of a thousand years. If we're laying out a garden,
planning one before the house, you know, and there you've a tree
that's stood for centuries in the very spot... Old and gnarled it
may be, and yet you don't cut down the old fellow to make room for the
flowerbeds, but lay out your beds so as to take advantage of the tree.
You won't grow him again in a year," he said cautiously, and he
immediately changed the conversation. "Well, and how is your estate
doing?"
  "Oh, not very well. I make about five per cent."
  "Yes, but you don't reckon your own work. Aren't you worth something
too? I'll tell you my own case. Before I took to seeing after the
land, I had a salary of three thousand roubles from the service. Now I
do more work than I did in the service, and, like you, I get five
per cent on the land, and thank God for that. But one's work is thrown
in for nothing."
  "Then why do you do it, if it's a clear loss?"
  "Oh, well, one does it! What would you have? It's habit, and one
knows it's as it should be. And what's more," the landowner went on,
leaning on the window and chatting on, "my son, I must tell you, has
no taste for it. There's no doubt he'll be a savant. So there'll be no
one to keep it up. And yet one does it. Here this year I've planted an
orchard."
  "Yes, yes," said Levin, "that's perfectly true. I always feel
there's no real balance of gain in my work on the land, and yet one
does it.... It's a sort of duty one feels to the land."
  "But I tell you what," the landowner pursued; "a neighbor of mine, a
merchant, was at my place. We walked about the fields and the park.
'No,' said he, 'Stepan Vassilyevich- everything's well looked after
but your garden's neglected.' But, as a fact, it's well kept up. 'To
my thinking, I'd cut down the linden trees. Only do it when they're
running sap. Here's a thousand lindens, and each would make two good
bundles of bast. And nowadays that bast's worth something. And you'd
cut down the lot of the linden shells.'"
  "And with what he made he'd buy up livestock, or buy some land for a
trifle, and let it out to the peasants," Levin added, smiling. He
had evidently more than once come across those commercial
calculations. "And he'd make his fortune. But you and I must thank God
if we keep what we've got and leave it to our children."
  "You're married, I've heard?" said the landowner.
  "Yes," Levin answered, with proud satisfaction. "Yes, all this is
rather strange," he went on. "So we live on without any reckoning,
as though we were the vestals of antiquity, set to guard a sacred fire
or something."
  The landowner chuckled under his white mustaches.
  "There are some among us, too, like our friend Nikolai Ivanovich, or
Count Vronsky, who's settled here lately- they try to set up an
agronomic industry; but so far it leads to nothing but making away
with capital."
  "But why is it we don't do like the merchants? Why don't we cut down
our parks for bast?" said Levin, returning to a thought that had
struck him.
  "Why, as you said, to guard the fire. Besides, that's not work for a
nobleman. And our work as noblemen isn't done here at the elections,
but yonder, each in his own nook. There's a class instinct, too, of
what one ought and oughtn't to do. There are the peasants, too- I
wonder at them sometimes; any good peasant tries to take all the
land he can. However bad the land is, he'll work it. Without a
reckoning too. At a simple loss."
  "Just as we do," said Levin. "Very, very glad to have met you," he
added, seeing Sviiazhsky approaching him.
  "And here we've met for the first time since we met at your
place," said the landowner to Sviiazhsky, "and we've had a good
talk, too."
  "Well, have you been attacking the new order of things?" said
Sviiazhsky with a smile.
  "That we're bound to do."
  "You've been relieving your feelings."
                             XXX.

  Sviiazhsky took Levin's arm, and went with him to his own friends.
This time there was no avoiding Vronsky. He was standing with Stepan
Arkadyevich and Sergei Ivanovich, and looking straight at Levin as
he drew near.
  "Delighted! I believe I've had the pleasure of meeting you... at
Princess Shcherbatskaia's," he said, giving Levin his hand.
  "Yes, I quite remember our meeting," said Levin, and, blushing
crimson, he turned away immediately, and began talking to his brother.
  With a slight smile Vronsky went on talking to Sviiazhsky, obviously
without the slightest inclination to enter into conversation with
Levin. But Levin, as he talked to his brother, was continually looking
round at Vronsky, trying to think of something to say to him to smooth
over his rudeness.
  "What are we waiting for now?" asked Levin, looking at Sviiazhsky
and Vronsky.
  "For Snetkov. He has to refuse or accept the candidacy," answered
Sviiazhsky.
  "Well, and what has he done- consented or not?"
  "That's the point: he's done neither," said Vronsky.
  "And if he refuses, who will run then?" asked Levin, looking at
Vronsky.
  "Whoever chooses to," said Sviiazhsky.
  "Shall you?" asked Levin.
  "Certainly not I," said Sviiazhsky, looking confused, and turning an
alarmed glance at the venomous gentleman, who was standing beside
Sergei Ivanovich.
  "Who then? Neviedovsky?" said Levin, feeling he was putting his foot
into it.
  But this was worse still. Neviedovsky and Sviiazhsky were the two
candidates.
  "I certainly shall not, under any circumstances," answered the
venomous gentleman.
  This was Neviedovsky himself. Sviiazhsky introduced him to Levin.
  "Well, do you find it exciting too?" said Stepan Arkadyevich,
winking at Vronsky. "It's something like a race. One might bet on it."
  "Yes, it is keenly exciting," said Vronsky. "And once taking the
thing up, one's eager to see it through. It's a fight!" he said,
scowling and setting his powerful jaws.
  "What a businessman Sviiazhsky is! Sees it all so clearly."
  "Oh, yes!" Vronsky assented indifferently.
  A silence followed, during which Vronsky- since he had to look at
something- looked at Levin, at his feet, at his frock coat, then at
his face, and noticing his gloomy eyes fixed upon him, he said, in
order to say something:
  "How is it that you, living constantly in the country, are not a
justice of the peace? You are not in the uniform of one."
  "It's because I consider the justice of the peace a silly
institution," morosely answered Levin, who had been all the time
looking for an opportunity to enter into conversation with Vronsky, so
as to smooth over his rudeness at their first meeting.
  "I don't think so- quite the contrary," Vronsky said, with calm
surprise.
  "It's a plaything," Levin cut him short. "We don't want justices
of the peace. I've never had a single thing to do with them during
eight years. And what I have had, was decided wrongly by them. The
justice of the peace is over thirty miles from me. For a matter of two
roubles or so, I should have to send a lawyer, who costs me fifteen."
  And he related how a peasant had stolen some flour from the
miller, and when the miller told him of it, had lodged a complaint for
slander. All this was utterly uncalled-for and stupid, and Levin
felt it himself as he said it.
  "Oh, this is such an original fellow!" said Stepan Arkadyevich
with his most soothing, almond-oil smile. "But come along; I think
they're voting...."
  And they separated.
  "I can't understand," said Sergei Ivanovich, who had observed his
brother's gaucherie, "I can't understand how anyone can be so
absolutely devoid of political tact. That's where we Russians are so
deficient. The marshal of the province is our opponent, and with him
you're ami cochon, and you beg him to be candidate. Count Vronsky,
now... I'm not making a friend of him- he's asked me to dinner, and
I'm not going; but he's one of our side- why make an enemy of him?
Then you ask Neviedovsky if he's going to run. That's not done."
  "Oh, I don't understand it at all! And it's all such nonsense,"
Levin answered somberly.
  "You say it's all such nonsense- yet as soon as you have anything to
do with it, you make a muddle."
  Levin did not answer, and they walked together into the big room.
  The marshal of the province, though he was vaguely conscious in
the air of some trap being prepared for him, and though he had not
been called upon by all to run, had nevertheless made up his mind to
run for office. All was silence in the room. The secretary announced
in a loud voice that Mikhail Stepanovich Snetkov, captain of the
guards, would now be balloted for as marshal of the province.
  The district marshals walked carrying plates, on which were balls,
from their tables to the province table, and the election began.
  "Put it in the right side," whispered Stepan Arkadyevich, as Levin
with his brother followed the marshal of his district to the table.
But Levin had forgotten by now the machination that had been explained
to him, and was afraid Stepan Arkadyevich might be mistaken in
saying "the right side." Surely Snetkov was the enemy. As he went
up, he held the ball in his right hand, but thinking he was wrong,
just at the box he changed to the left hand, and undoubtedly put the
ball to the left. An adept in the business, standing at the box and
seeing by the mere action of the elbow where each put his ball,
scowled with annoyance. It was no good for him to use his insight.
  Everything was still, and the counting of the balls was heard.
Then a single voice rose and proclaimed the numbers for and against.
  The marshal had been voted for by a considerable majority. All was
noise and eager movement toward the doors. Snetkov came in, and the
nobles thronged round him, congratulating him.
  "Well, now, is it over?" Levin asked Sergei Ivanovich.
  "It's only just beginning," Sviiazhsky said, replying for Sergei
Ivanovich with a smile. "Some other candidate may receive more votes
than the marshal."
  Levin had quite forgotten about that again. Now he could only
remember that there was some sort of trickery in it, but he was too
bored to think what it was exactly. He felt depressed, and longed to
get out of the crowd.
  As no one was paying any attention to him, and no one apparently
needed him, he quietly slipped away into the little room where the
refreshments were, and again had a great sense of comfort when he
saw the waiters. The little old waiter pressed him to have
something, and Levin agreed. After eating a cutlet with beans and
talking to the waiters of their former masters, Levin, not wishing
to go back to the hall, where it was all so distasteful to him,
proceeded to walk through the galleries.
  The galleries were full of fashionably dressed ladies, leaning
over the balustrade and trying not to lose a single word of what was
being said below. With the ladies were sitting and standing smart
lawyers, high school teachers in spectacles, and officers.
Everywhere they were talking of the election, and of how worried the
marshal was, and how splendid the discussions had been. In one group
Levin heard his brother's praises. One lady was telling a lawyer:
  "How glad I am I heard Koznishev! It's worth missing one's lunch.
He's exquisite! So clear and distinct- all of it! There's not one of
you in the law courts that speaks like that. The only one is Meidel,
and he's very far from being so eloquent."
  Finding a free place, Levin leaned over the balustrade and began
looking and listening.
  All the noblemen were sitting railed off behind barriers,
according to their districts. In the middle of the room stood a man in
a uniform, who shouted in a loud high voice:
  "As a candidate for the marshalship of the nobility of the
province we call upon staff captain Eugenii Ivanovich Apukhtin!" A
dead silence followed, and then a weak old voice was heard:
  "Declined!"
  "We call upon the privy councilor Piotr Petrovich Bol," the voice
began again.
  "Declined!" a high boyish voice replied.
  Again it began, and again came the "Declined." And so it went on for
about an hour. Levin, with his elbows on the balustrade, looked and
listened. At first he wondered and wanted to know what it meant;
then feeling sure that he could not make it out he began to be
bored. Then, recalling all the excitement and vindictiveness he had
seen on all the faces, he felt sad; he made up his mind to go, and
went downstairs. As he passed through the entry to the galleries he
met a dejected high school boy walking up and down with
tired-looking eyes. On the stairs he met a couple- a lady running
quickly on her high heels and the jaunty deputy prosecutor.
  "I told you you weren't late," the deputy prosecutor was saying at
the moment when Levin moved aside to let the lady pass.
  Levin was on the stairs to the way out, and was just feeling in
his waistcoat pocket for his overcoat check, when the secretary
overtook him. "This way, please, Konstantin Dmitrievich; they are
voting."
  The candidate who was being voted on was Neviedovsky, who had so
stoutly denied all idea of candidacy.
  Levin went up to the door of the room; it was locked. The
secretary knocked, the door opened, and Levin was met by two red-faced
gentlemen, who darted out.
  "I can't stand any more of it," said one red-faced gentleman.
  After them the face of the marshal of the province was poked out.
His face was dreadful-looking from exhaustion and dismay.
  "I told you not to let anyone out!" he cried to the doorkeeper.
  "I let someone in, Your Excellency!"
  "Mercy on us!" And with a heavy sigh the marshal of the province
walked with downcast head to the high table in the middle of the room,
his white-trousered legs wavering from fatigue.
  Neviedovsky had scored a higher majority, as they had planned, and
he was the new marshal of the province. Many people were amused,
many were pleased and happy, many were in ecstasies, many were
disgusted and unhappy. The former marshal of the province was in a
state of despair which he could not conceal. When Neviedovsky went out
of the room, the crowd thronged round him and followed him
enthusiastically, just as they had followed the governor on the
first day, when he had opened the meetings, and just as they had
followed Snetkov when he had been elected.
                             XXXI.

  The newly elected marshal and many of the successful party dined
that day with Vronsky.
  Vronsky had come to the elections partly because he was bored in the
country and wanted to show Anna his right to independence, and also to
repay Sviiazhsky by his support at the election for all the trouble he
had taken for Vronsky at the Zemstvo election, but chiefly for the
strict performance of all those duties of a nobleman and landowner
which he had taken upon himself. But he had not in the least
expected that the election would interest him so, so keenly excite
him, and that he would be so good at this kind of thing. He was
quite a new man in the circle of the nobility of the province, but his
success was unmistakable, and he was not wrong in supposing that he
had already obtained a certain influence. This influence was due to
his wealth and aristocracy; the capital house in the town lent him
by his old friend Shirkov, who had a post in the department of
finances and was director of a flourishing bank in Kashin; the
excellent cook Vronsky had brought from the country; and his
friendship with the governor, who was a schoolfellow of Vronsky- a
schoolfellow he had patronized and protected indeed. But what
contributed more than all to his success was his direct, equable
manner with everyone, which very quickly made the majority of the
noblemen reverse the current opinion of his supposed haughtiness. He
was himself conscious that, except for that mad gentleman married to
Kitty Shcherbatskaia, who had a propos de bottes poured out a stream
of irrelevant absurdities with such spiteful fury, every nobleman with
whom he had made acquaintance had become his adherent. He saw clearly,
and other people recognized it, too, that he had done a great deal
to secure the success of Neviedovsky. And now at his own table,
celebrating Neviedovsky's election, he was experiencing an agreeable
sense of triumph over the success of his candidate. The election
itself had so fascinated him that, if he could succeed in getting
married during the next three years, he began to think of running
for office himself- much as, after winning a race ridden by a
jockey, he had longed to ride a race himself.
  Today he was celebrating the success of his jockey. Vronsky sat at
the head of the table, on his right hand sat the young governor, a
general of high rank. To all the rest he was the master of the
province, who had solemnly opened the elections with his speech, and
aroused a feeling of respect and even of awe in many people, as
Vronsky saw; to Vronsky he was Katka Maslov- that had been his
nickname in the Pages' Corps- whom he felt to be shy and tried to
put at ease. On the left hand sat Neviedovsky with his youthful,
stubborn, and venomous countenance. With him Vronsky was simple and
deferential.
  Sviiazhsky took his failure very lightheartedly. It was indeed no
failure in his eyes, as he said himself, turning, glass in hand, to
Neviedovsky: they could not have found a better representative of
the new movement, which the nobility ought to follow. And so every
honest person, as he said, was on the side of today's success and
was celebrating over it.
  Stepan Arkadyevich was glad, too, because he was having a good time,
and because everyone was pleased. The episodes of the elections served
as a good occasion for a capital dinner. Sviiazhsky comically imitated
the tearful discourse of marshal, and observed, addressing
Neviedovsky, that His Excellency would have to select another, more
complicated method of auditing accounts than tears. Another nobleman
jocosely described how footmen in stockings had been imported for
the marshal's ball, and how now they would have to be sent back unless
the new marshal would give a ball with footmen in stockings.
  Continually during dinner they said of Neviedovsky: "Our Marshal"
and "Your Excellency."
  This was said with the same pleasure with which a young wife is
called "Madame" and by her husband's name. Neviedovsky affected to
be not merely indifferent but scornful of this appellation, but it was
obvious that he was highly delighted, and had to keep a curb on
himself not to betray the triumph which was unsuitable to their new,
liberal party.
  In the course of dinner several telegrams were sent to people
interested in the result of the election. And Stepan Arkadyevich,
who was in high spirits, sent Darya Alexandrovna a telegram:
"Neviedovsky elected by twenty votes. Congratulations. Tell people."
He dictated it aloud, saying: "We must let them share our
rejoicing." Darya Alexandrovna, getting the message, simply sighed
over the rouble wasted on it, and understood that it was an
afterdinner affair. She knew Stiva had a weakness after dining for
faire jouer le telegraphe.
  Everything, together with the excellent dinner and the wine, not
from Russian merchants, but imported direct from abroad, was extremely
dignified, simple, and enjoyable. The party- some twenty- had been
selected by Sviiazhsky from among the more active new liberals, all of
the same way of thinking, who were at the same time clever and
well-bred. They drank, also half in jest, to the health of the new
marshal of the province, of the governor, of the bank director, and of
"our amiable host."
  Vronsky was satisfied. He had never expected to find so pleasant a
tone in the provinces.
  Toward the end of dinner it was still more lively. The governor
asked Vronsky to come to a concert for the benefit of the brethren
which his wife, who was anxious to make his acquaintance, had been
getting up:
  "There'll be a ball, and you'll see the belle of the province. Worth
seeing, really."
  "Not in my line," Vronsky answered. He liked that English phrase.
But he smiled, and promised to come.
  Before they rose from the table, when all of them were smoking,
Vronsky's valet went up to him with a letter on a tray.
  "From Vozdvizhenskoe by special messenger," he said with a
significant expression.
  "Astonishing! How like he is to the deputy prosecutor Sventitsky,"
said one of the guests in French of the valet, while Vronsky,
frowning, read the letter.
  The letter was from Anna. Before he read the letter, he knew its
contents. Expecting the elections to be over in five days, he had
promised to be back on Friday. Today was Saturday, and he knew that
the letter contained reproaches for not being back at the time
fixed. The letter he had sent the previous evening had probably not
reached her yet.
  The letter was what he had expected, but the form of it was
unexpected, and particularly disagreeable to him. "Annie is very
ill, the doctor says it may be inflammation of the lungs. I am
losing my head all alone. Princess Varvara is no help, but a
hindrance. I expected you the day before yesterday, and yesterday, and
now I am sending to find out where you are and what you are doing. I
wanted to come myself, but thought better of it, knowing you would
dislike it. Send some answer, that I may know what to do."
  The child ill, yet she had thought of coming herself. Their daughter
ill- and this hostile tone.
  The innocent festivities over the election, and this gloomy,
burdensome love to which he had to return, struck Vronsky by their
contrast. But he had to go, and by the first train that night he set
off home.
                             XXXII.

  Before Vronsky's departure for the elections, Anna had reflected
that the scenes constantly repeated between them each time he left
home might only make him cold to her instead of attaching him to
her, and resolved to do all she could to control herself so as to bear
the parting with composure. But the cold, severe glance with which
he had looked at her when he came to tell her he was going had wounded
her, and before he had started her peace of mind was destroyed.
  In solitude, later, thinking over that glance which had expressed
his right to freedom, she came, as she always did, to the same
point- the sense of her own humiliation. "He has the right to go
away when and where he chooses. Not simply to go away, but to leave
me. He has every right, and I have none. But knowing that, he ought
not to do it. What has he done, though?... He looked at me with a
cold, severe expression. Of course that is something indefinable,
impalpable, but it has never been so before, and that glance means a
great deal," she thought. "That glance shows the beginning of
coolness."
  And though she felt sure that a coolness was beginning, there was
nothing she could do; she could not in any way alter her relations
to him. Just as before, only by love and by charm could she keep
him. And so, just as before, only by occupation in the day, by
morphine at night, could she stifle the fearful thought of what
would come if he ceased to love her. It is true there was still one
means; not to keep him- for that she wanted nothing more than his
love- but to be nearer to him, to be in such a position that he
would not leave her. That means was divorce and marriage. And she
began to long for that, and made up her mind to agree to it the
first time he or Stiva approached her on the subject.
  Absorbed in such thoughts, she passed five days without him, the
five days that he was to be absent.
  Walks, conversation with Princess Varvara, visits to the hospital,
and, most of all, reading- reading of one book after another- filled
up her time. But on the sixth day, when the coachman came back without
him, and she felt that now she was utterly incapable of stifling the
thought of him and of what he was doing there- just at that time her
little girl was taken ill. Anna began to look after her, but even that
did not distract her mind, especially as the illness was not
serious. However hard she tried, she could not love this little child,
and to feign love was beyond her powers. Toward the evening of that
day, still alone, Anna was in such a panic about him that she
decided to start for the town, but on second thought wrote him the
contradictory letter that Vronsky received, and, without reading it
through, sent it off by a special messenger. The next morning she
received his letter and regretted her own. She dreaded a repetition of
the severe look he had flung at her at parting, especially when he
would learn that the baby was not dangerously ill. But still, she
was glad she had written to him. By now Anna was admitting to
herself that she was a burden to him, that he would relinquish his
freedom regretfully to return to her, and in spite of that she was
glad he was coming. Let him weary of her, but he would be here with
her, so that she would see him, would know of every action he took.
  She was sitting in the drawing room near a lamp, with a new volume
of Taine, and, as she read, listening to the sound of the wind
outside, and every minute expecting the carriage to arrive. Several
times she had fancied she heard the sound of wheels, but she had
been mistaken. At last she heard not the sound of wheels, but the
coachman's shout and the dull rumble in the covered entry. Even
Princess Varvara, playing solitaire, confirmed this, and Anna,
flushing hotly, got up; but, instead of going down, as she had done
twice before, she stood still. She suddenly felt ashamed of her
duplicity, but even more she dreaded how he might meet her. All
feeling of wounded pride had passed now; she was only afraid of the
expression of his displeasure. She remembered that her child had
been perfectly well again for the last day. She felt positively
vexed with her for getting better from the very moment her letter
was sent off. Then she thought of him, that he was here- all of him,
with his hands, his eyes. She heard his voice. And forgetting
everything, she ran joyfully to meet him.
  "Well, how is Annie?" he said apprehensively from below, looking
up to Anna as she ran down to him.
  He was sitting on a chair, and a footman was pulling off his warm
overboots.
  "Oh, she is better."
  "And you?" he said, shaking himself.
  She took his hand in both of hers, and drew it to her waist, never
taking her eyes off him.
  "Well, I'm glad," he said, coldly scanning her, her hair, her dress,
which he knew she had put on for him. All was charming, but how many
times it had charmed him! And the stern, stony expression that she
so dreaded settled upon his face.
  "Well, I'm glad. And are you well?" he said, wiping his damp beard
with his handkerchief and kissing her hand.
  "Never mind," she thought, "only let him be here, and so long as
he's here he cannot, he dare not, cease to love me."
  The evening was spent happily and gaily in the presence of
Princess Varvara, who complained to him that Anna had been taking
morphine in his absence.
  "What am I to do? I couldn't sleep.... My thoughts prevented me.
When he's here I never take it- hardly ever."
  He told her about the election, and Anna knew how by adroit
questions to bring him to what gave him most pleasure- his own
success. She told him of everything that interested him at home; and
all that she told him was of the most cheerful description.
  But late in the evening, when they were alone, Anna, seeing that she
had regained complete possession of him, wanted to erase the painful
impression of the glance he had given her for her letter. She said:
  "Tell me frankly, you were vexed at getting my letter, and you
didn't believe me?"
  As soon as she had said it, she felt that however warm his
feelings were to her, he had not forgiven her for that.
  "Yes," he said, "the letter was so strange. First, Annie ill, and
then you thought of coming yourself."
  "It was all the truth."
  "Oh, I don't doubt it."
  "Yes, you do doubt it. You are vexed, I see."
  "Not for one moment. I'm only vexed, that's true, that you seem
somehow unwilling to admit that there are duties..."
  "The duty of going to a concert...."
  "But we won't talk about it," he said.
  "Why not talk about it?" she said.
  "I only meant to say that matters of real importance may turn up.
Now, for instance, I shall have to go to Moscow to arrange about the
house.... Oh, Anna, why are you so irritable? Don't you know that I
can't live without you?"
  "If so," said Anna, her voice suddenly changing, "it means that
you are sick of this life.... Yes, you will come for a day and go
away, as men do...."
  "Anna, that's cruel. I am ready to give up my whole life."
  But she did not hear him.
  "If you go to Moscow, I will go too. I will not stay here. Either we
must separate or else live together."
  "Why, you know, that's my one desire. But to do that..."
  "We must get a divorce. I will write to him. I see I cannot go on
like this.... But I will come with you to Moscow."
  "You talk as if you were threatening me. But I desire nothing so
much as never to be parted from you," said Vronsky, smiling.
  But as he said these words there gleamed in his eyes not merely a
cold look, but the vindictive look of a man persecuted and made cruel.
  She saw the look and correctly divined its meaning.
  "And, if things have come to such a pass, it's a calamity!" that
glance told her. It was a moment's impression, but she never forgot
it.
  Anna wrote to her husband asking him about a divorce, and toward the
end of November, taking leave of Princess Varvara, who wanted to go to
Peterburg, she went with Vronsky to Moscow. Expecting every day an
answer from Alexei Alexandrovich, and after that the divorce, they now
established themselves together, like married people.
                        PART SEVEN

                             I.

  The Levins had been two months in Moscow. The date had long passed
on which, according to the most trustworthy calculations of people
learned in such matters, Kitty should have been confined. But she
was still about, and there was nothing to show that her time was any
nearer than two months ago. The doctor, the midwife, and Dolly and her
mother, and most of all Levin, who could not think of the
approaching event without terror, began to be impatient and uneasy.
Kitty was the only person who felt perfectly calm and happy.
  She was distinctly conscious now of the birth of a new feeling of
love for the future child, for her to some extent actually existing
already, and she brooded blissfully over this feeling. He was not by
now altogether a part of herself, but sometimes lived his own life
independently of her. Often this separate being gave her pain, but
at the same time she wanted to laugh with a strange new joy.
  All the people she loved were with her, and all were so good to her,
so attentively looking out for her, so entirely pleasant was
everything presented to her, that if she had not known and felt that
it must all soon be over, she could not have wished for a better and
pleasanter life. The only thing that spoiled the charm of this mode of
life was that here her husband was not as she loved him to be, and
as he was in the country.
  She liked his serene, friendly, and hospitable manner in the
country. In the town he seemed continually uneasy and on his guard, as
though he were afraid someone would be rude to him, and, still more,
to her. At home in the country, definitely knowing himself to be in
his right place, he was never in haste to be off elsewhere, was
occupied all the time. Here in town he was in a continual hurry, as
though afraid of missing something, and yet he had nothing to do.
And she felt pity for him. To others, she knew, he did not appear an
object of pity; on the contrary, when Kitty looked at him in
society, as one sometimes looks at those one loves, trying to see
him as if he were a stranger, so as to catch the impression he must
make on others, she saw with a panic even of jealous fear that he
was far indeed from being a pitiable figure, that he was very
attractive with his honesty, his rather old-fashioned, reserved
courtesy to women, his powerful figure, and striking, as she
thought, and expressive face. But she saw him not from without, but
from within; she saw that here he was not himself; that was the only
way she could define his condition to herself. Sometimes she
inwardly reproached him for his inability to live in the town;
sometimes she recognized that it was really hard for him to order
his life here so that he could be satisfied with it.
  What had he to do, indeed? He did not care for cards; he did not
go to a club. Spending the time with jovial gentlemen of Oblonsky's
type- she knew now what that meant... it meant drinking, and going
somewhere after drinking. She could not think without horror of
where men went on such occasions. Was he to go into society? But she
knew he could only find satisfaction in that if he took pleasure in
the society of young women, and that she could not wish for. Should he
stay at home with her, her mother, and her sisters? But much as she
liked and enjoyed their conversations forever on the same subjects-
"Alines-Nadines," as the old Prince called the sisters' talks- she
knew it must bore him. What was there left for him to do? To go on
writing his book? He had indeed attempted to do it; and at first he
used to go to the library and make extracts and look up references for
his book, but, as he told her, the more he did nothing, the less
time he had to do anything. And besides, he complained that he had
talked too much about his book here, and that consequently all his
ideas about it were muddled and had lost their interest for him.
  One advantage in this town life was that quarrels hardly ever
happened between them here in town. Whether it was that their
conditions, in town, were different, or that they had both become more
careful and sensible in that respect, they had no quarrels in Moscow
from jealousy, which they had so dreaded when they moved from the
country.
  One event, an event of great importance to both from that point of
view, did indeed happen- which was Kitty's meeting with Vronsky.
  The old Princess Marya Borissovna, Kitty's godmother, who had always
been very fond of her, had insisted on seeing her. Kitty, though she
did not go into society at all on account of her condition, went
with her father to see the venerable old lady, and there met Vronsky.
  The only thing Kitty could reproach herself for at this meeting
was that at the instant when she recognized in his civilian dress
the features once so familiar to her, her breath failed her, the blood
rushed to her heart, and a vivid blush- she felt it- overspread her
face. But this lasted only a few seconds. Before her father, who
purposely began talking in a loud voice to Vronsky, had finished,
she was perfectly ready to look at Vronsky, to speak to him, if
necessary, exactly as she spoke to Princess Marya Borissovna, and,
more than that, to do so in such a way that everything, to the
faintest intonation and smile would have been approved by her husband,
whose unseen presence she seemed to feel about her at that instant.
  She said a few words to him, even smiled serenely at his joke
about the elections, which he called "our parliament." (She had to
smile to show she saw the joke.) But she turned away immediately to
Princess Marya Borissovna, and did not once glance at him till he
got up to go; then she looked at him, but evidently only because it
would be uncivil not to look at a man when he is saying good-by.
  She was grateful to her father for saying nothing to her about their
meeting Vronsky, but she saw by his special warmth to her after the
visit, during their usual walk, that he was pleased with her. She
was pleased with herself. She had not expected she would have had
the power, while keeping somewhere in the bottom of her heart all
the memories of her old feeling for Vronsky, not only to seem, but
to be, perfectly indifferent and composed with him.
  Levin flushed a great deal more than she when she told him she had
met Vronsky at Princess Marya Borissovna's. It was very hard for her
to tell him this, but still harder to go on speaking of the details of
the meeting, as he did not question her, but simply gazed at her
with a frown.
  "I am very sorry you weren't there," she said. "It wasn't so much
the fact that you weren't in the room... I couldn't have been so
natural in your presence... I am blushing now much more- much, much
more," she said, blushing till the tears came into her eyes. "But it's
a pity you couldn't have looked through a peephole."
  The truthful eyes told Levin that she was satisfied with herself,
and, in spite of her blushing he was quickly reassured and began
questioning her, which was all she wanted. When he had heard
everything, even to the detail that for the first second she could not
help flushing, but that afterward she was just as direct and as much
at her ease as with any chance acquaintance, Levin was quite happy
again and said he was glad of it, and would not now behave as stupidly
as he had done at the election, but would try the first time he met
Vronsky to be as friendly as possible.
  "It's so wretched to feel that there's any man who is almost your
enemy, and whom it's painful to meet," said Levin. "I'm very, very
glad."
                             II.

  "Do go then, please, and call on the Bols," Kitty said to her
husband, when he came in to see her at eleven o'clock before going
out. "I know you are dining at the club; papa put down your name.
But what are you going to do in the morning?"
  "I am only going to Katavassov," answered Levin.
  "Why so early?"
  "He promised to introduce me to Metrov. I wanted to talk to him
about my work. He's a distinguished savant from Peterburg," said
Levin.
  "Yes; wasn't it his article you were praising so? Well, and after
that?" said Kitty.
  "I shall go to the court, perhaps, about my sister's business."
  "And the concert?" she queried.
  "I shan't go there all alone."
  "No? Do go; there are going to be some new things.... That used to
interest you so. I should certainly go."
  "Well, anyway, I shall come home before dinner," he said, looking at
his watch.
  "Put on your frock coat, so that you can go straight to call on
Countess Bol."
  "But is it absolutely necessary?"
  "Oh, absolutely! He has been to see us. Come, what is it? You go in,
sit down, talk for five minutes of the weather, get up, and go away."
  "Oh, you wouldn't believe it! I've got so out of the way of all this
that it makes me feel positively ashamed. It's such a horrible thing
to do! A complete outsider walks in, sits down, stays on with
nothing to do, wastes their time and upsets himself, and then goes
away!"
  Kitty laughed.
  "Why, I suppose you used to pay calls before you were married,
didn't you?"
  "Yes, I did, but I always felt ashamed, and now I'm so
unaccustomed to it that, by God, I'd sooner go two days running
without my dinner than pay this call! One's so ashamed! I feel all the
while that they're annoyed, that they're saying: What has he come
for?"
  "No, they won't. I'll answer for that," said Kitty, looking into his
face with a laugh. She took his hand. "Well, good-by.... Do go,
please."
  He was just going out after kissing his wife's hand, when she
stopped him.
  "Kostia, do you know I've only fifty roubles left?"
  "Oh, all right, I'll go to the bank and get some. How much?" he
said, with the expression of dissatisfaction she knew so well.
  "No, wait a minute." She held his hand. "Let's talk about it, it
worries me. I seem to spend nothing unnecessarily, but money seems
simply to fly away. We don't manage well, somehow."
  "Not at all," he said with a little cough, looking at her from under
his brows.
  That cough she knew well. It was a sign of intense
dissatisfaction, not with her, but with himself. He certainly was
displeased, not at so much money being spent, but at being reminded of
what he, knowing something was unsatisfactory, wanted to forget.
  "I have told Sokolov to sell the wheat, and to borrow an advance
on the mill. We shall have money enough in any case."
  "Yes, but I'm afraid that altogether it's too much...."
  "Not at all, not at all," he repeated. "Well, good-by, darling."
  "No, I'm really sorry sometimes that I listened to mamma. How nice
it would have been in the country! As it is, I'm worrying you all, and
we're wasting our money."
  "Not at all, not at all. Not once since I've been married have I
said that things could have been better than they are...."
  "Truly?" she said, looking into his eyes.
  He had said it without thinking, simply to console her. But when
he glanced at her and saw those sweet truthful eyes fastened
questioningly on him, he repeated it with his whole heart. "I was
positively forgetting her," he thought. And he remembered what was
before them, so soon to come.
  "Will it be soon? How do you feel?" he whispered, taking her two
hands.
  "I have so often thought so, that now I don't think about it, or
know anything about it."
  "And you're not frightened?"
  She smiled contemptuously.
  "Not the least little bit," she said.
  "Well, if anything happens, I shall be at Katavassov's."
  "No, nothing will happen, and don't think about it. I'm going for
a walk on the boulevard with papa. We're going to see Dolly. I shall
expect you before dinner. Oh, yes! Do you know that Dolly's position
is becoming utterly impossible? She's in debt all round; she hasn't
a penny. We were talking yesterday with mamma and Arsenii" (this was
her sister's husband, Lvov), "and we determined to send you with him
to talk to Stiva. It's really unbearable. One can't speak to papa
about it.... But if you and he..."
  "Why, what can we do?" said Levin.
  "You'll be at Arsenii's, anyway; talk to him- he will tell you
what we decided."
  "Oh, I agree to everything Arsenii thinks beforehand. I'll go and
see him. By the way, if I do go to the concert, I'll go with
Natalie. Well, good-by."
  On the steps Levin was stopped by his old servant Kouzma, who had
been with him before his marriage, and now looked after their
household in town.
  "Little Adonis" (that was the left shaft horse brought up from the
country) "has been shod anew, but she is still lame," he said. "What
does Your Honor wish to be done?"
  During the first part of their stay in Moscow, Levin had used his
own horses brought up from the country. He had tried to arrange this
part of their expenses in the best and cheapest way possible; but it
appeared that their own horses came dearer than hired horses, and they
still hired additional horses.
  "Send for the veterinary- there may be a bruise."
  "And for Katerina Alexandrovna?" asked Kouzma.
  Levin was not by now struck as he had been at first by the fact that
to get in Moscow from the Vozdvizhenka to the Ssivtzev-Vrazhek he
had to have two powerful horses put into a heavy carriage, to take the
carriage a quarter of a versta through the snowy mush and to keep it
standing there four hours, paying five roubles every time.
  Now it seemed quite natural.
  "Hire a pair for our carriage from the livery stable," said he.
  "Yes, sir."
  And so, simply and easily, thanks to the facilities of town life,
Levin settled a question which, in the country, would have called
for so much personal trouble and exertion, and, going out on the
steps, he called a sleigh, sat down, and drove to the Nikitskaia. On
the way he thought no more of money, but mused on the introduction
that awaited him to the Peterburg savant, a writer on sociology, and
what he would say to him about his book.
  Only during the first days of his stay in Moscow Levin had been
struck by the expenditure, strange to one living in the country,
unproductive but inevitable, that was expected of him on every side.
But by now he had grown used to it. That had happened to him in this
matter which is said to happen to drunkards- the first glass sticks in
the throat, the second flies down like a hawk, but after the third
they're like tiny little birds. When Levin had changed his first
hundred-rouble note to pay for liveries for his footman and hall
porter he could not help reflecting that these liveries were of no use
to anyone- but they were indubitably necessary, to judge by the
amazement of the Princess and Kitty when he suggested that they
might do without liveries- that these liveries would cost the wages of
two laborers for the summer- that is, would pay for about three
hundred working days from Easter to the fast of Advent, and each a day
of hard work from early morning to late evening- and that
hundred-rouble note did stick in his throat. But the next note,
changed to pay for providing a dinner for their relations, that cost
twenty-eight roubles, though it did excite in Levin the reflection
that twenty-eight roubles meant nine chetverts of oats, which men
would with groans and sweat have reaped and bound and threshed and
winnowed and sifted and sown- this next one he parted with more
easily. And now the notes he changed no longer aroused such
reflections, and they flew off like little birds. Whether the labor
devoted to obtaining the money corresponded to the pleasure given by
what was bought with it, was a consideration he had long ago
dismissed. His business calculation that there was a certain price
below which he could not sell certain grain was forgotten too. The
rye, for the price of which he had so long held out, had been sold for
fifty kopecks a chetvert cheaper than it had been fetching a month
ago. Even the consideration that with such an expenditure he could not
go on living for a year without debt, even that had no force. Only one
thing was essential: to have money in the bank, without inquiring
where it came from, so as to know that one had the wherewithal to
buy meat for tomorrow. And this condition had hitherto been fulfilled;
he had always had the money in the bank. But now the money in the bank
had gone, and he could not quite tell where to get the next
installment. And this it was which, at the moment when Kitty had
mentioned money, had disturbed him; but he had no time to think
about it. He drove off, thinking of Katavassov and the meeting with
Metrov which was before him.
                             III.

  Levin had on this visit to town seen a great deal of his old
friend at the university, Professor Katavassov, whom he had not seen
since his marriage. He liked in Katavassov the clearness and
simplicity of his conception of life. Levin thought that the clearness
of Katavassov's conception of life was due to the poverty of his
nature; Katavassov thought that the disconnectedness of Levin's
ideas was due to his lack of intellectual discipline; but Levin
enjoyed Katavassov's clearness, and Katavassov enjoyed the abundance
of Levin's untrained ideas, and they liked to meet and to dispute.
  Levin had read to Katavassov some parts of his book, and he had
liked them. On the previous day Katavassov had met Levin at a public
lecture and told him that the celebrated Metrov, whose article Levin
had so much liked, was in Moscow, that he had been much interested
by what Katavassov had told him about Levin's work, and that he was
coming to see him tomorrow at eleven, and would be very glad to make
Levin's acquaintance.
  "You're positively a reformed character, my dear, I'm glad to
see," said Katavassov, meeting Levin in the little drawing room. "I
heard the bell and thought: Impossible! It can't be he at the exact
time!... Well, what do you say to the Montenegrins now? They're a race
of warriors."
  "Why, what's happened?" asked Levin.
  Katavassov in a few words told him the last piece of news from the
war, and, going into his study, introduced Levin to a short,
thickset man of pleasant appearance. This was Metrov. The conversation
touched for a brief space on politics and on how recent events were
looked at in the higher spheres in Peterburg. Metrov repeated a saying
that had reached him through a most trustworthy source, reported as
having been uttered on this subject by the Czar and one of the
ministers. Katavassov had heard also on excellent authority that the
Czar had said something quite different. Levin tried to imagine
circumstances in which both sayings might have been uttered, and the
conversation on that topic dropped.
  "Yes, here he's practically written a book on the natural conditions
of the laborer in relation to the land," said Katavassov; "I'm not a
specialist, but I, as a student of natural science, was pleased at his
not taking mankind as something outside biological laws; but, on the
contrary, perceiving his dependence on his surroundings, and in that
dependence seeking the laws of his development."
  "That's very interesting," said Metrov.
  "To tell the truth, I began to write a book on agriculture; but,
studying the chief instrument of agriculture, the laborer," said
Levin, reddening, "I could not help coming to quite unexpected
results."
  And Levin began carefully, as though feeling his ground, to
expound his views. He knew Metrov had written an article against the
generally accepted theory of political economy, but to what extent
he could reckon on his sympathy with his own new views he did not know
and could not guess from the clever and serene face of the savant.
  "But in what do you see the special characteristics of the Russian
laborer?" said Metrov; "in his biological characteristics, so to
speak, or in the condition in which he is placed?"
  Levin saw that there was an idea underlying this question with which
he did not agree. But he went on explaining his own idea that the
Russian laborer has a quite special view of the land, different from
that of other people; and to support this proposition he made haste to
add that in his opinion this attitude of the Russian peasant was due
to the consciousness of his vocation to settle vast unoccupied
expanses in the East.
  "One may easily be led into error in basing any conclusion on the
general vocation of a people," said Metrov, interrupting Levin. "The
condition of the laborer will always depend on his relation to the
land and to capital."
  And without letting Levin finish explaining his idea, Metrov began
expounding to him the special point of his own theory.
  In what the point of his theory lay, Levin did not understand,
because he did not take the trouble to understand. He saw that Metrov,
like other people, in spite of his own article, in which he had
attacked the current theory of political economy, looked at the
position of the Russian peasant simply from the point of view of
capital, wages, and rent. He would indeed have been obliged to admit
that in the eastern- much the larger- part of Russia rent was as yet
nil, that for nine-tenths of the eighty millions of the Russian
peasants wages took the form simply of food provided for themselves,
and that capital does not so far exist except in the form of the
most primitive tools. Yet it was only from that point of view that
he considered every laborer, though in many points he differed from
the economists and had his own theory of the wage fund, which he
expounded to Levin.
  Levin listened reluctantly, and at first made objections. He would
have liked to interrupt Metrov, to explain his own thought, which in
his opinion would have rendered further exposition of Metrov's
theories superfluous. But later on, feeling convinced that they looked
at the matter so differently, that they could never understand one
another, he did not even oppose his statements, but simply listened.
Although what Metrov was saying was by now utterly devoid of
interest for him, he yet experienced a certain satisfaction in
listening to him. It flattered his vanity that such a learned man
should explain his ideas to him so eagerly, with such intensity and
confidence in Levin's understanding of the subject, sometimes with a
mere hint referring him to a whole aspect of the subject. He put
this down to his own credit, unaware that Metrov, who had already
discussed his theory over and over again with all his intimate
friends, talked of it with special eagerness to every new person,
and in general was eager to talk to anyone of any subject that
interested him, even if still obscure to himself.
  "We are late though," said Katavassov, looking at his watch directly
Metrov had finished his discourse.
  "Yes, there's a meeting of the Society of Amateurs today in
commemoration of the fifty-year jubilee of Svintich," said
Katavassov in answer to Levin's inquiry. "Piotr Ivanovich and I were
going. I've promised to deliver an address on his labors in zoology.
Come along with us, it's very interesting."
  "Yes, and it's really time to start," said Metrov. "Come with us,
and from there, if you care to, come to my place. I should very much
like to hear your work."
  "Oh, no! It's no good yet- it's unfinished. But I shall be very glad
to go to the meeting."
  "I say, my dear, have you heard? He has handed in a minority
report," Katavassov called from the other room, where he was putting
on his dress coat.
  And a conversation sprang up on the university question.
  The university question was a very important event that winter in
Moscow. Three old professors in the council had not accepted the
opinion of the younger professors. The young ones had registered a
separate resolution. This resolution, in the judgment of some
people, was monstrous, in the judgment of others it was the simplest
and most just thing to do, and the professors were split into two
parties.
  One party, to which Katavassov belonged, saw in the opposite party a
scoundrelly betrayal and treachery, while the opposite party saw in
them childishness and lack of respect for the authorities. Levin,
though he did not belong to the university, had several times
already during his stay in Moscow heard and talked about this
matter, and had his own opinion on the subject. He took part in the
conversation that was continued in the street, as all three walked
to the old buildings of the university.
  The meeting had already begun. Round the cloth-covered table, at
which Katavassov and Metrov seated themselves, there were some
half-dozen persons, and one of these was bending close over a
manuscript, reading something aloud. Levin sat down in one of the
empty chairs that were standing round the table, and in a whisper
asked a student sitting near what was being read. The student, eying
Levin with displeasure, said:
  "The biography."
  Though Levin was not interested in the biography, he could not
help listening, and learned some new and interesting facts about the
life of the distinguished man of science.
  When the reader had finished, the chairman thanked him and read some
verses of the poet Ment, sent him on the jubilee, and said a few words
by way of thanks to the poet. Then Katavassov in his loud, ringing
voice read his address on the scientific labors of the man whose
jubilee was being kept.
  When Katavassov had finished, Levin looked at his watch, saw it
was past one, and thought that there would not be time before the
concert to read his paper to Metrov, and indeed, he did not now care
to do so. During the reading he had thought over their conversation.
He saw distinctly now that though Metrov's ideas might perhaps have
value, his own ideas had a value too, and their ideas could only be
made clear and lead to something if each worked separately in his
chosen path, and that nothing would be gained by communicating these
ideas. And having made up his mind to refuse Metrov's invitation,
Levin went up to him at the end of the meeting. Metrov introduced
Levin to the chairman, with whom he was talking of the political news.
Metrov told the chairman what he had already told Levin, and Levin
made the same remarks on his news that he had already made that
morning, but for the sake of variety he expressed also a new opinion
which had only just struck him. After that the conversation turned
again on the university question. As Levin had already heard it all,
he made haste to tell Metrov that he was sorry he could not take
advantage of his invitation, took leave, and drove to Lvov's.
                             IV.

  Lvov, the husband of Natalie, Kitty's sister, had spent all his life
in the capitals and abroad, where he had been educated, and had been
in the diplomatic service.
  During the previous year he had left the diplomatic service, not
owing to any "unpleasantness" (he never had any "unpleasantness"
with anyone), and was transferred to the Palace Department in
Moscow, in order to give his two boys the best education possible.
  In spite of the striking contrast in their habits and views and
the fact that Lvov was older than Levin, they had seen a great deal of
one another that winter, and had taken a great liking to each other.
  Lvov was at home, and Levin went in to him unannounced.
  Lvov, in a house coat with a belt and in chamois leather shoes,
was sitting in an armchair, and with a pince-nez with blue lenses he
was reading a book that stood on a reading desk, while in his
beautiful hand he held a half-burned cigar carefully away from him.
  His handsome, delicate, and still youthful-looking face, to which
his curly, glistening silvery hair gave a still more aristocratic air,
lighted up with a smile when he saw Levin.
  "Capital! I intended to send to you. How's Kitty? Sit here, it's
more comfortable." He got up and pushed up a rocking chair. "Have
you read the last circular in the Journal de St Petersbourg? I think
it's excellent," he said with a slight French accent.
  Levin told him what he had heard from Katavassov was being said in
Peterburg, and, after talking a little about politics, he told him
of his interview with Metrov, and the learned society's meeting. To
Lvov it was very interesting.
  "That's what I envy you, that you are able to mix in these
interesting scientific circles," he said. And as he talked, he
passed as usual into French, which was easier for him. "It's true I
haven't the time for it. My official work and the children leave me no
time; and then I'm not ashamed to own that my education has been too
defective."
  "That I don't believe," said Levin with a smile, feeling, as he
always did, touched at Lvov's low opinion of himself, which was not in
the least put on from a desire to seem or to be modest, but was
absolutely sincere.
  "Oh, yes, indeed! I feel now how badly educated I am. To educate
my children I positively have to look up a great deal, and, in fact,
actually to study myself. For it's not enough to have teachers-
there must be someone to look after them; just as on your land you
want laborers and an overseer. See what I'm reading"- he pointed to
Buslaev's Grammar on the desk- "it's expected of Misha, and it's so
difficult.... Come, explain to me.... Here he says..."
  Levin tried to explain to him that it couldn't be understood, but
that it had to be taught; but Lvov would not agree with him.
  "Oh, you're laughing at it!"
  "On the contrary, you can't imagine how, when I look at you, I'm
always learning the task that lies before me- that is, the education
of one's children."
  "Well, there's nothing for you to learn," said Lvov.
  "All I know," said Levin, "is that I have never seen better
brought-up children than yours, and I wouldn't wish for children
better than yours."
  Lvov visibly tried to restrain the expression of his delight, but he
was positively radiant with smiles.
  "If only they're better than I! That's all I desire. You don't
know yet all the work," he said, "with boys who've been left like mine
to run wild abroad."
  "You'll catch up with all that. They're such clever children. The
great thing is the education of character. That's what I learn when
I look at your children."
  "You talk of the education of character. You can't imagine how
difficult that is! You have hardly succeeded in combating one tendency
when others crop up, and the struggle begins again. If one had not a
support in religion- you remember we talked about that- no father
could bring children up relying on his own strength alone, without
that help."
  This subject, which always interested Levin, was cut short by the
entrance of the beauty Natalya Alexandrovna, dressed to go out.
  "I didn't know you were here," she said, unmistakably feeling no
regret, but a positive pleasure, in interrupting this conversation
on a topic she had heard so much of that she was by now weary of it.
"Well, how is Kitty? I am dining with you today. I tell you what,
Arsenii," she turned to her husband, "you take the carriage."
  And the husband and wife began to discuss their arrangements for the
day. As the husband had to drive to meet someone on official business,
while the wife had to go to the concert and some public meeting of a
committee on the South-Eastern Question, there was a great deal to
consider and settle. Levin had to take part in their plans as one of
themselves. It was settled that Levin should go with Natalie to the
concert and the meeting, and that from there they should send the
carriage to the office for Arsenii and he should call for her and take
her to Kitty's; or that, if he had not finished his work, he should
send the carriage back and Levin would go with her.
  "He's spoiling me," Lvov said to his wife: "he assures me that our
children are splendid, when I know how much bad there is in them."
  "Arsenii goes to extremes, I always say," said his wife. "If you
look for perfection, you will never be satisfied. And it's true, as
papa says- that when we were brought up there was one extreme- we were
kept in the attic, while our parents lived in the best rooms; now it's
just the other way- the parents are in the washhouse, while the
children are in the best rooms. Parents now are not expected to live
at all, but to exist altogether for their children."
  "Well, what if they like it better? Lvov said, with his beautiful
smile, touching her hand. "Anyone who didn't know you would think
you were a stepmother, not a true mother."
  "No, extremes are not good in anything," Natalie said serenely,
putting his paper knife straight in its proper place on the table.
  "Well, come here, you perfect children," Lvov said to the two
handsome boys who came in, and, after bowing to Levin, went up to
their father, obviously wishing to ask him about something.
  Levin would have liked to talk to them, to hear what they would
say to their father, but Natalie began talking to him, and then Lvov's
colleague in the service, Makhotin, walked in, wearing his Court
dress, to go with him to meet someone, and a conversation was kept
up without a break upon Herzegovina, Princess Korzinskaya, the town
council, and the sudden death of Madame Apraksina.
  Levin even forgot the commission intrusted to him. He recollected it
as he was going into the hall.
  "O, Kitty told me to talk to you about Oblonsky," he said, as Lvov
was standing on the stairs, seeing his wife and Levin off.
  "Yes, yes, maman wants us, les beaux-freres, to attack him," he
said, blushing. "But why should I?"
  "Well, then, I will attack him," said Madame Lvova, with a smile,
standing in her round white dogskin opera cloak waiting till they
had finished speaking. "Come, let us go."
                             V.

  At the concert in the afternoon two very interesting things were
performed.
  One was a fantasia, King Lear in the Heath; the other was a
quartette dedicated to the memory of Bach. Both were new and in the
new style, and Levin was eager to form an opinion of them. After
escorting his sister-in-law to her stall, he stood against a column
and tried to listen as attentively and conscientiously as possible. He
tried not to let his attention be distracted, and not to spoil his
impression by looking at the conductor in a white tie, waving his
arms, which always disturbed his enjoyment of music so much, or the
ladies in bonnets, the ribbons of which, since it was a concert,
they had carefully tied over their ears, and all these people either
thinking of nothing at all, or thinking of all sorts of things
except the music. He tried to avoid meeting musical connoisseurs or
talkative acquaintances, and stood looking at the floor straight
before him, listening.
  But the more he listened to the fantasia of King Lear the further he
felt from forming any definite opinion of it. There was, as it were, a
continual beginning, a preparation of the musical expression of some
feeling, but it fell to pieces again directly, breaking into new
musical motifs, or simply nothing but the whims of the composer-
exceedingly complex but disconnected sounds. And these fragmentary
musical expressions, though sometimes beautiful, were disagreeable,
because they were utterly unexpected and not led up to by anything.
Gaiety and grief and despair and tenderness and triumph followed one
another without any ground, like the emotions of a madman. And those
emotions, like a madman's, sprang up quite unexpectedly.
  During the whole performance Levin felt like a deaf man watching
people dancing, and was in a state of complete bewilderment when the
fantasia was over, and felt a great weariness from the fruitless
strain on his attention. Loud applause resounded on all sides.
Everyone got up, moved about, and began talking. Anxious to throw some
light on his own perplexity from the impressions of others, Levin
began to walk about, looking for connoisseurs, and was glad to see a
well-known musical amateur in conversation with Pestsov, whom he knew.
  "Marvelous!" Pestsov was saying in his deep bass. "How are you,
Konstantin Dmitrievich? Particularly sculpturesque and plastic, so
to say, and richly colored is that passage where you feel Cordelia's
approach, where woman, das ewig Weibliche, enters into conflict with
fate. Isn't it?"
  "You mean... What has Cordelia to do with it?" Levin asked
timidly, forgetting that the fantasia was supposed to represent King
Lear.
  "Cordelia comes in... See here!" said Pestsov, tapping his finger on
the satiny surface of the program he held in his hand and passing it
to Levin.
  Only then Levin recollected the title of the fantasia, and made
haste to read in the Russian translation the lines from Shakespeare
that were printed on the back of the program.
  "You can't follow it without that," said Pestsov, addressing
Levin, as the person he had been speaking to had gone away, and he had
no one to talk to.
  In the entr'acte Levin and Pestsov fell into an argument upon the
merits and defects of the music of the Wagner school. Levin maintained
that the mistake of Wagner and all his followers lay in their trying
to take music into the sphere of another art, just as poetry goes
wrong when it tries to paint a face as the art of painting ought to
do, and as an instance of this mistake he cited the sculptor who
carved in marble certain poetic phantasms flitting round the figure of
the poet on the pedestal. "These phantoms were so far from being
phantoms that they were positively clinging to the stairs," said
Levin. The comparison pleased him, but he could not remember whether
he had not used the same phrase before, and to Pestsov, too, and as he
said it he felt confused.
  Pestsov maintained that art is one, and that it can attain its
highest manifestations only by the conjunction of all kinds of art.
  The second piece that was performed Levin could not hear. Pestsov,
who was standing beside him, was talking to him almost all the time,
condemning the music for its excessive affected assumption of
simplicity, and comparing it with the simplicity of the
Pre-Raphaelites in painting. As he went out Levin met many more
acquaintances, with whom he talked of politics, of music, and of
common acquaintances. Among others he met Count Bol, whom he had
utterly forgotten to call upon.
  "Well, go at once then," Madame Lvova said, when he told her;
"perhaps they'll not be at home, and then you can come to the
meeting to fetch me. You'll find me still there."
                             VI.

  "Perhaps they're not at home?" said Levin, as he went into the
hall of Countess Bol's house.
  "At home; please walk in," said the porter, resolutely removing
his overcoat.
  "How annoying!" thought Levin with a sigh, taking off one glove
and stroking his hat. "What did I come for? What have I to say to
them?"
  As he passed through the first drawing room Levin met in the doorway
Countess Bol, with a careworn and severe face, giving some order to
a servant. On seeing Levin she smiled, and asked him to come into
the next little drawing room where he heard voices. In this room there
were sitting in armchairs the two daughters of the Countess, and a
Moscow colonel, whom Levin knew. Levin walked up, greeted them, and
sat down beside the sofa, with his hat on his knees.
  "How is your wife? Have you been at the concert? We couldn't go.
Mamma had to be at the requiem."
  "Yes, I heard.... What a sudden death!" said Levin.
  The Countess came in, sat down on the sofa, and she too asked
after his wife and inquired about the concert.
  Levin answered, and repeated an inquiry about Madame Apraksina's
sudden death.
  "But she was always in poor health."
  "Were you at the opera yesterday?"
  "Yes, I was."
  "Lucca was very good."
  "Yes, very good," he said, and, as it was utterly of no
consequence to him what they thought of him, he began repeating what
they had heard a hundred times about the characteristics of the
singer's talent. Countess Bol pretended to be listening. Then, when he
had said enough and had paused, the colonel, who had been silent
till then, began to talk. The colonel too talked of the opera and
illumination. At last, after speaking of the proposed folle journee at
Turin's, the colonel laughed, got up noisily, and went away. Levin too
rose, but he saw by the face of the Countess that it was not yet
time for him to go. He must stay two minutes longer. He sat down.
  But as he was thinking all the while how stupid it was, he could not
find a subject for conversation, and sat silent.
  "You are not going to the public meeting? They say it will be very
interesting," began the Countess.
  "No, I promised my belle-soeur to fetch her from it," said Levin.
  A silence followed. The mother once more exchanged glances with
one of the daughters.
  "Well, now I think the time has come," thought Levin, and he got up.
The ladies shook hands with him, and begged him to say mille choses to
his wife for them.
  The porter asked him, as he gave him his coat: "Where is Your
Honor staying?" and immediately wrote down his address in a big
handsomely bound book.
  "Of course I don't care, but still I feel ashamed and awfully
stupid," thought Levin, consoling himself with the reflection that
everyone does it. He drove to the public meeting, where he was to find
his sister-in-law, so as to drive home with her.
  At the public meeting of the committee there were a great many
people, and almost all the highest society. Levin was in time for
the report which, as everyone said, was very interesting. When the
reading of the report was over, people moved about, and Levin met
Sviiazhsky, who invited him very pressingly to come that evening to
a meeting of the Society of Agriculture, where a celebrated report was
to be delivered, and Stepan Arkadyevich, who had only just come from
the races, and many other acquaintances; and Levin heard and uttered
various criticisms on the meeting, on the new play, and on a public
trial. But, probably from the mental fatigue he was beginning to feel,
he made a blunder in speaking of the trial, and this blunder he
recalled several times with vexation. Speaking of the sentence upon
a foreigner who had been condemned in Russia, and of how unfair it
would be to punish him by exile abroad, Levin repeated what he had
heard the day before in conversation from an acquaintance.
  "I think sending him abroad is much the same as punishing a carp
by putting it into the water," said Levin. Then he recollected that
this idea, which he had heard from an acquaintance and uttered as
his own, came from a fable of Krilov's, and that the acquaintance
had picked it up from a newspaper article.
  After driving home with his sister-in-law, and finding Kitty in good
spirits and quite well, Levin drove to the club.
                             VII.

  Levin reached the club just at the right time. Members and
visitors were driving up as he arrived. Levin had not been at the club
for a very long while- not since he lived in Moscow, when he was
leaving the university and going into society. He remembered the club,
the external details of its arrangement, but he had completely
forgotten the impression it had made on him in old days. But as soon
as, driving into the wide semicircular court and getting out of the
cab, he mounted the steps, and the hall porter, adorned with a
crossbelt, noiselessly opened the door to him with a bow; as soon as
he saw in the porter's room the cloaks and galoshes of members who
thought it less trouble to take them off downstairs; as soon as he
heard the mysterious ringing bell that preceded him as he ascended the
low-stepped, carpeted staircase, and saw the statue on the landing,
and the third porter at the top doors, a familiar figure grown
older, in the club livery, opening the door without haste or delay,
and scanning the visitors as they passed in- Levin felt the old
impression of the club come back in a rush, an impression of repose,
comfort, and propriety.
  "Your hat, please," the porter said to Levin, who forgot the club
rule of checking his hat in the porter's room. "Long time since you've
been here. The Prince put your name down yesterday. Prince Stepan
Arkadyevich is not here yet."
  The porter not only knew Levin, but also all his connections and
relationships, and so immediately mentioned his intimate friends.
  Passing through the outer hall, divided up by screens, and the
room partitioned on the right, where a man sits at the fruit buffet,
Levin passed by a shuffling old man, and entered the dining room, full
of noise and people.
  He walked along the tables, almost all full, and scrutinized the
visitors. He saw people of all sorts, old and young; some he knew a
little; some were intimate friends. There was not a single cross or
worried-looking face. All seemed to have checked their cares and
anxieties in the porter's room with their hats, and were all
deliberately getting ready to enjoy the material blessings of life.
Sviiazhsky was here and Shcherbatsky, Neviedovsky and the old
Prince, and Vronsky and Sergei Ivanovich.
  "Ah! Why are you late?" the Prince said smiling, and giving him
his hand over his own shoulder. "How's Kitty?" he added, smoothing out
the napkin he had tucked in at his waistcoat buttons.
  "Very well; they are dining at home, all three of them."
  "Ah, 'Alines-Nadines' to be sure! There's no room with us. Go to
that table, and make haste and take a seat," said the Prince, and
turning away he carefully took a plate of burbot soup.
  "Levin, this way!" a good-natured voice shouted a little farther on.
It was Turovtsin. He was sitting with a young officer, and beside them
were two chairs tipped over. Levin gladly went up to them. He had
always liked the goodhearted rake, Turovtsin- he was associated in his
mind with memories of his courtship- and at that moment, after the
strain of intellectual conversation, the sight of Turovtsin's
good-natured face was particularly welcome.
  "For you and Oblonsky. He'll be here directly."
  The young man, holding himself very erect, with eyes forever
twinkling with enjoyment, was an officer from Peterburg, Gaghin.
Turovtsin introduced them.
  "Oblonsky's always late."
  "Ah, here he is!
  "Have you only just come?" said Oblonsky, coming quickly toward
them. "Good day. Had some vodka? Well, come along then."
  Levin got up and went with him to the big table spread with
spirits and appetizers of the most varied kinds. One would have
thought that out of two dozen delicacies one might find something to
one's taste, but Stepan Arkadyevich asked for something special, and
one of the liveried waiters standing by immediately brought what was
required. They drank a pony each and returned to their table.
  At once, while they were still at their soup, Gaghin was served with
champagne, and told the waiter to fill four glasses. Levin did not
refuse the wine, and asked for a second bottle. He was very hungry,
and ate and drank with great enjoyment, and with still greater
enjoyment took part in the lively and simple conversation of his
companions. Gaghin, dropping his voice, told the last good story
from Peterburg, and the story, though improper and stupid, was so
ludicrous that Levin broke into roars of laughter so loud that those
near looked round.
  "That's in the same style as, 'that's a thing I can't endure!' You
know the story?" said Stepan Arkadyevich. "Ah, that's exquisite!
Another bottle," he said to the waiter, and he began to relate his
good story.
  "Piotr Illyich Vinovsky invites you to drink with him," a little old
waiter interrupted Stepan Arkadyevich, bringing two delicate glasses
of sparkling champagne, and addressing Stepan Arkadyevich and Levin.
Stepan Arkadyevich took the glass, and looking toward a bald man
with red mustaches at the other end of the table, he nodded to him,
smiling.
  "Who's that?" asked Levin.
  "You met him once at my place, don't you remember? A good-natured
fellow."
  Levin did the same as Stepan Arkadyevich and took the glass.
  Stepan Arkadyevich's anecdote too was very amusing. Levin told his
story, and that too was successful. Then they talked of horses, of the
races, of what they had been doing that day, and of how smartly
Vronsky's Atlas had won the first prize. Levin did not notice how
the time passed at dinner.
  "Ah! And here they are!" Stepan Arkadyevich said toward the end of
dinner, leaning over the back of his chair and holding out his hand to
Vronsky, who came up with a tall colonel of the Guards. Vronsky's face
too beamed with the look of good-humored enjoyment that was general in
the club. He propped his elbow playfully on Stepan Arkadyevich's
shoulder, whispering something to him, and he held out his hand to
Levin with the same good-humored smile.
  "Very glad to meet you," he said. "I looked out for you at the
election, but I was told you had gone away."
  "Yes, I left the same day. We've just been talking of your horse.
I congratulate you," said Levin. "It was run in very fast time."
  "Yes; you've race horses too, haven't you?"
  "No, my father had; but I remember and know something about them."
  "Where have you dined?" asked Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "We were at the second table, behind the columns."
  "We've been celebrating his success," said the tall colonel. "It's
his second Imperial prize. I wish I might have the luck at cards he
has with horses."
  "Well, why waste precious time? I'm going to the 'infernal
regions,'" added the colonel, and he walked away.
  "That's Iashvin," Vronsky said in answer to Turovtsin, and he sat
down in the vacated seat beside them. He drank the glass offered
him, and ordered a bottle of wine. Under the influence of the club
atmosphere or the wine he had drunk, Levin chatted away to Vronsky
of the best breeds of cattle, and was very glad not to feel the
slightest hostility to this man. He even told him, among other things,
that he had heard from his wife that she had met him at Princess Marya
Borissovna's.
  "Ah, Princess Marya Borissovna- she's exquisite!" said Stepan
Arkadyevich, and he told an anecdote about her which set them all
laughing. Vronsky in particular laughed with such simplehearted
amusement that Levin felt quite reconciled to him.
  "Well, have we finished?" said Stepan Arkadyevich, getting up with a
smile. "Let us go."
                             VIII.

  Getting up from the table, Levin walked with Gaghin through the
lofty rooms to the billiard room, feeling his arms swing as he
walked with a peculiar lightness and ease. As he crossed the big room,
he came upon his father-in-law.
  "Well, how do you like our Temple of Indolence?" said the Prince,
taking his arm. "Come along, come along!"
  "Yes, I wanted to walk about and look at everything. It's
interesting."
  "Yes, it's interesting for you. But its interest for me is quite
different. You look at such little ancients, now," he said, pointing
to a club member with bent back and pendulous lip, shuffling toward
them in his soft boots, "and imagine that they were shlupiks like that
from their birth up."
  "Shlupiks?"
  "I see you don't know that name. That's our club designation. You
know the game of rolling eggs: when one's rolled a long while it
becomes a shlupik. So it is with us; one goes on coming and coming
to the club, and ends by becoming a shlupik. Ah, you laugh! but we
look out, for fear of dropping into it ourselves. You know Prince
Chechensky?" inquired the Prince; and Levin saw by his face that he
was just going to relate something funny.
  "No, I don't know him."
  "You don't say so! Well, Prince Chechensky is a well-known figure.
No matter, though. He's always playing billiards here. Only three
years ago he was not a shlupik, and kept up his spirits, and even used
to call other people shlupiks. But one day he turns up, and our
porter... You know Vassilii? Why, that fat one; he's famous for his
bons mots. And so Prince Chechensky asks him, 'Come, Vassilii who's
here? Any shlupiks here yet?' And he says: 'You're the third.' Yes, my
dear boy, that he did!"
  Talking and greeting the friends they met, Levin and the Prince
walked through all the rooms: the great room where tables had
already been set, and the usual partners were playing for small
stakes; the divan room, where they were playing chess, and Sergei
Ivanovich was sitting talking to somebody; the billiard room, where,
about the sofa in a recess, there was a lively party drinking
champagne- Gaghin was one of them. They peeped into the "infernal
regions," where a good many men were crowding round one table, at
which Iashvin was sitting. Trying not to make a noise, they walked
into the dark reading room, where under the shaded lamps there sat a
young man with a wrathful countenance, turning over one journal
after another, and a bald general buried in a book. They went, too,
into what the Prince called the intellectual room, where three
gentlemen were engaged in a heated discussion of the latest
political news.
  "Prince, please come, we're ready," said one of his card party,
who had come to look for him, and the Prince went off. Levin sat
down and listened, but recalling all the conversation of the morning
he felt all of a sudden fearfully bored. He got up hurriedly, and went
to look for Oblonsky and Turovtsin, with whom it had been so pleasant.
  Turovtsin was one of the circle drinking in the billiard room, and
Stepan Arkadyevich was talking with Vronsky near the door at the
farther corner of the room.
  "It's not that she's dull; but this undefined, this unsettled
position," Levin caught, and he was going to hurry away, but Stepan
Arkadyevich called him.
  "Levin!" said Stepan Arkadyevich; and Levin noticed that his eyes
were not full of tears exactly, but moist, which always happened
when he had been drinking, or when he was touched. Today it was due to
both causes. "Levin, don't go," he said, and he warmly squeezed his
arm above the elbow, obviously not at all wishing to let him go.
  "This is a true friend of mine- almost my greatest friend," he
said to Vronsky. "You also are still closer and dearer to me. And I
want you, and I know you ought, to be friends, and great friends,
because you're both splendid fellows."
  "Well, there's nothing for us now but to kiss and be friends,"
Vronsky said, with good-natured playfulness, holding out his hand.
  Levin quickly took the offered hand, and squeezed it warmly.
  "I'm very, very glad," said Levin.
  "Waiter, a bottle of champagne," said Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "And I'm very glad," said Vronsky.
  But in spite of Stepan Arkadyevich's desire, and their own desire,
they had nothing to talk about, and both felt it.
  "Do you know, he has never met Anna?" Stepan Arkadyevich said to
Vronsky. "And I want above everything to take him to see her. Let us
go, Levin!"
  "Really?" said Vronsky. "She will be very glad to see you. I
should be going home at once," he added, "but I'm worried about
Iashvin, and I want to stay on till he finishes."
  "Why, is he losing?"
  "He keeps losing, and I'm the only friend that can restrain him."
  "Well, what do you say to pyramids? Levin, will you play?
Capital!" said Stepan Arkadyevich. "Get the table ready," he said to
the marker.
  "It has been ready a long while," answered the marker, who had
already set the balls in a triangle, and was knocking the red one
about for his own diversion.
  "Well, let us begin."
  After the game Vronsky and Levin sat down at Gaghin's table, and
at Stepan Arkadyevich's suggestion Levin took a hand in the game.
Vronsky sat down at the table, surrounded by friends, who were
incessantly coming up to him. Every now and then he went to the
"infernal" to keep an eye on Iashvin. Levin was enjoying a
delightful sense of repose after the mental fatigue of the morning. He
was glad that all hostility was at an end with Vronsky, and the
sense of peace, decorum and comfort never left him.
  When the game was over, Stepan Arkadyevich took Levin's arm.
  "Well, let us go to Anna's, then. At once? Eh? She is at home. I
promised her long ago to bring you. Where were you intending to
spend the evening?"
  "Oh, nowhere specially. I promised Sviiazhsky to go to the Society
of Agriculture. By all means, let us go," said Levin.
  "Very good; come along. Find out if my carriage is here," Stepan
Arkadyevich said to the waiter.
  Levin went up to the table, paid the forty roubles he had lost; paid
his bill, the amount of which was in some mysterious way ascertained
by the little old waiter who stood at the counter, and, swinging his
arms, he walked through all the rooms to the exit.
                             IX.

  "Oblonsky's carriage!" the porter shouted in an angry bass. The
carriage drove up and both got in. It was only for the first few
moments, while the carriage was driving out of the clubhouse gates,
that Levin was still under the influence of the club atmosphere of
repose, comfort, and unimpeachable good form. But as soon as the
carriage drove out into the street, and he felt it jolting over the
uneven road, heard the angry shout of a driver coming toward them, saw
in the uncertain light the red blind of a tavern and the shops, this
impression was dissipated, and he began to think over his actions, and
to wonder whether he was doing right in going to see Anna. What
would Kitty say? But Stepan Arkadyevich gave him no time for
reflection, and, as though divining his doubts, he dispersed them.
  "How glad I am," he said, "that you should know her! You know
Dolly has long wished for it. And Lvov's been to see her, and often
goes. Though she is my sister," Stepan Arkadyevich pursued, "I don't
hesitate to say that she's a remarkable woman.... But you will see.
Her position is very painful, especially now."
  "Why especially now?"
  "We are carrying on negotiations with her husband about a divorce.
And he's agreed; but there are difficulties in regard to the son,
and the business, which ought to have been arranged long ago, has been
dragging on for three months past. As soon as the divorce is over, she
will marry Vronsky. How stupid these old ritual forms are- 'Isaiah,
rejoice!'- which no one believes in, and which only prevent people
being comfortable!" Stepan Arkadyevich put in. "Well, then their
position will be as regular as mine, as yours."
  "What is the difficulty?" said Levin.
  "Oh, it's a long and tedious story The whole business is in such
an indefinite state with us. But the point is, she has been for
three months in Moscow, where everyone knows her, waiting for the
divorce; she goes out nowhere, sees no woman except Dolly, because, do
you understand, she doesn't care to have people come as a favor.
That fool Princess Varvara, even she has left her, considering this
a breach of propriety. Well, you see, in such a position any other
woman would not have found resources in herself. But you'll see how
she has arranged her life- how calm, how dignified she is. To the
left, in the alley opposite the church!" shouted Stepan Arkadyevich,
leaning out of the window of the carriage. "Phew! How hot it is!" he
said, in spite of twelve degrees of frost, flinging open his
unbuttoned overcoat still more.
  "But she has a daughter: no doubt she's busy looking after her?"
said Levin.
  "I believe you picture every woman simply as a female, une
couveuse," said Stepan Arkadyevich. "If she's occupied, it must be
with her children. No, she brings her up capitally, I believe, but one
doesn't hear about her. She's busy, in the first place, with what
she writes. I see you're smiling ironically, but you're wrong. She's
writing a children's book, and doesn't talk about it to anyone, but
she read it to me and I gave the manuscript to Vorkuev... you know,
the publisher.... And he's an author himself too, I fancy. He
understands those things, and he says it's a remarkable piece of work.
But are you fancying she's a writing woman? Not a bit of it. She's a
woman with a heart, before everything, but you'll see. Now she has a
little English girl with her, and a whole family she's looking after."
  "Oh, something in a philanthropic way?"
  "Why, you will look at everything in the worst light. It's not
from philanthropy, it's from the heart. They- that is, Vronsky- had
a trainer, an Englishman, first-rate in his own line, but a
drunkard. He's completely given up to drink- delirium tremens- and the
family were cast on the world. She saw them, helped them, got more and
more interested in them, and now the whole family is on her hands. But
not by way of patronage, you know, helping with money; she's herself
preparing the boys in Russian for the high school, and she's taken the
little girl to live with her. But you'll see her for yourself."
  The carriage drove into the courtyard, and Stepan Arkadyevich rang
loudly at the entrance where a sleigh was standing.
  And, without asking the servant who opened the door whether the lady
were at home, Stepan Arkadyevich walked into the hall. Levin
followed him, more and more doubtful whether he were doing right or
wrong.
  Looking at himself in the glass, Levin noticed that he was red in
the face, but he felt certain he was not drunk, and he followed Stepan
Arkadyevich up the carpeted stairs. At the top Stepan Arkadyevich
inquired of the footman, who bowed to him as to an intimate friend,
who was with Anna Arkadyevna, and received the answer that it was M.
Vorkuev.
  "Where are they?"
  "In the study."
  Passing through the dining room, a room not very large, with dark
paneled walls, Stepan Arkadyevich and Levin walked over the soft
carpet to the half-dark study, lighted up by a single lamp with a
big dark shade. Another lamp with a reflector was hanging on the wall,
lighting up a big full-length portrait of a woman, which Levin could
not help looking at. It was the portrait of Anna, painted in Italy
by Mikhailov. While Stepan Arkadyevich went behind the treillage,
and the man's voice which had been speaking paused, Levin gazed at the
portrait, which stood out from the frame in the brilliant light thrown
on it, and he could not tear himself away from it. He positively
forgot where he was, and not even hearing what was said, he could
not take his eyes off the marvelous portrait. It was not a picture,
but a living, charming woman, with black curling hair, with bare
arms and shoulders, with a pensive smile on the lips, covered with
soft down; triumphantly and softly she looked at him with eyes that
baffled him. She was not living, only because she was more beautiful
than any living woman can be.
  "I am delighted." He heard suddenly near him a voice, unmistakably
addressing him, the voice of the very woman he had been admiring in
the portrait. Anna had come from behind the treillage to meet him, and
Levin saw in the dim light of the study the very woman of the
portrait, in a dark-blue gown of changeable blue, not in the same
position nor with the same expression, but with the same perfection of
beauty which the artist had caught in the portrait. She was less
dazzling in reality, but, on the other hand, there was something fresh
and seductive in the living woman which was not in the portrait.
                             X.

  She had risen to meet him, without concealing her pleasure at seeing
him; and in the quiet ease with which she held out her little and
vigorous hand, introduced him to Vorkuev, and indicated a
red-haired, pretty little girl who was sitting at work, calling her
her pupil, Levin recognized and liked the manners of a woman of the
great world, always self-possessed and natural.
  "I am delighted, delighted," she repeated, and on her lips these
simple words took for Levin's ears a special significance. "I have
known you and liked you for a long while, both from your friendship
with Stiva and for your wife's sake.... I knew her for a very short
time, but she left on me the impression of an exquisite flower- just a
flower. And to think she will soon be a mother!"
  She spoke easily and without haste, looking now and then from
Levin to her brother, and Levin felt that the impression he was making
was good, and he felt immediately at home, at ease and happy with her,
as though he had known her from childhood.
  "Ivan Petrovich and I settled in Alexei's study," she said in answer
to Stepan Arkadyevich's question whether he might smoke, "just so as
to be able to smoke"- and glancing at Levin, instead of asking whether
he would smoke, she pulled closer a tortoise-shell cigarette case
and took a corn-leaf cigarette.
  "How are you feeling today?" her brother asked her.
  "Oh, nothing. Nerves, as usual."
  "Yes, isn't it extraordinarily fine?" said Stepan Arkadyevich,
noticing that Levin was glancing at the picture.
  "I have never seen a better portrait."
  "And extraordinarily like, isn't it?" said Vorkuev.
  Levin looked from the portrait to the original. A peculiar
brilliance lighted up Anna's face when she felt his eyes on her. Levin
flushed, and to cover his confusion would have asked whether she had
seen Darya Alexandrovna lately; but at that moment Anna spoke:
  "We were just talking, Ivan Petrovich and I, of Vashchenkov's last
pictures. Have you seen them?"
  "Yes, I have seen them," answered Levin.
  "But, I beg your pardon, I interrupted you... You were saying?..."
  Levin asked if she had seen Dolly lately.
  "She was here yesterday. She was very indignant with the high school
people on Grisha's account. The Latin teacher, it seems, had been
unfair to him."
  "Yes, I have seen his pictures. I didn't care for them very much,"
Levin went back to the subject she had started.
  Levin talked now not at all with that purely businesslike attitude
to the subject with which he had been talking all the morning. Every
word in his conversation with her had a special significance. And
talking to her was pleasant; still pleasanter was it to listen to her.
  Anna talked not merely naturally and cleverly, but cleverly and
carelessly, attaching no value to her own ideas and giving great
weight to the ideas of the person she was talking to.
  The conversation turned on the new movement in art, on the new
illustrations of the Bible by a French artist. Vorkuev attacked the
artist for a realism carried to the point of coarseness. Levin said
that the French had carried conventionality further than anyone, and
that consequently they see a great merit in the return to realism.
In the fact of not lying they see poetry.
  Never had anything clever said by Levin given him so much pleasure
as this remark. Anna's face lighted up at once, as she immediately
appreciated the thought. She laughed.
  "I laugh," she said, "as one laughs when one sees a very true
portrait. What you said so perfectly hits off French art now,
painting- and literature too, indeed- Zola, Daudet. But perhaps it
is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious,
conventional types, and then- all the combinaisons made- they are
tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true
figures."
  "That's perfectly true," said Vorkuev.
  "So you've been at the club?" she said to her brother.
  "Yes, yes, this a woman!" Levin thought, forgetting himself and
staring persistently at her lovely, mobile face, which at that
moment was all at once completely transformed. Levin did not hear what
she was talking of as she leaned over to her brother, but he was
struck by the change of her expression. Her face- so handsome a moment
before in its repose- suddenly wore a look of strange curiosity,
anger, and pride. But this lasted only an instant. She half-closed her
eyes, as though recollecting something.
  "Oh, well, but that's of no interest to anyone," she said, and she
turned to the English girl.
  "Please order the tea in the drawing room," she said in English.
  The girl got up and went out.
  "Well, how did she get through her examination?" asked Stepan
Arkadyevich.
  "Splendidly! She's a very gifted child and a sweet character."
  "It will end in your loving her more than your own."
  "There a man speaks. In love there's no such thing as more or
less. I love my daughter with one love, and her with another."
  "I was just telling Anna Arkadyevna," said Vorkuev, "that if she
were to put a hundredth part of the energy she devotes to this English
girl to the public question of the education of Russian children,
she would be doing a great and useful work."
  "Yes, but I can't help it; I couldn't do it. Count Alexei
Kirillovich urged me very much" (as she uttered the words Count Alexei
Kirillovich she glanced with appealing timidity at Levin, and he
unconsciously responded with a respectful and reassuring look), "he
urged me to take up the school in the village. I visited it several
times. The children were very dear, but I could not feel drawn to
the work. You speak of energy. Energy rests upon love; and, come as it
will, there's no forcing it. I took to this child- I could not
myself say why."
  And she glanced again at Levin. And her smile and her glance- all
told him that it was to him only she was addressing her words, valuing
his good opinion, and at the same time sure beforehand that they
understood one another.
  "I quite understand that," Levin answered. "It's impossible to
give one's heart to a school or such institutions in general, and I
believe that that's just why philanthropic institutions always give
such poor results."
  She was silent for a while, then she smiled. "Yes, yes," she agreed;
"I never could. Je n'ai pas le coeur assez large to love a whole
asylum of horrid little girls. Cela ne m'a jamais reussi. There are so
many women who have made themselves une position sociale in that
way. And now more than ever," she said with a mournful, confiding
expression, ostensibly addressing her brother, but unmistakably
intending her words only for Levin, "now when I have such need of some
occupation, I cannot." And suddenly frowning (Levin saw that she was
frowning at herself for talking about herself) she changed the
subject. "I know about you," she said to Levin; "that you're not a
public-spirited citizen, and I have defended you to the best of my
ability."
  "How have you defended me?"
  "Oh, according to the attacks made on you. But won't you have some
tea?" She rose and took up a book bound in morocco.
  "Give it to me, Anna Arkadyevna," said Vorkuev, indicating the book.
"It's well worth taking up."
  "Oh, no, it's all so sketchy."
  "I told him about it," Stepan Arkadyevich said to his sister,
nodding at Levin.
  "You shouldn't have. My writing is something after the fashion of
those little baskets and carvings which Liza Mertsalova used to sell
me from the prisons. She had the direction of the prison department in
that society," she turned to Levin; "and they were miracles of
patience, the work of those poor wretches."
  And Levin saw a new trait in this woman, who attracted him so
extraordinarily. Besides wit, grace, and beauty, she had truth. She
had no wish to hide from him all the bitterness of her position. As
she said that she sighed, and her face, suddenly assuming a hard
expression, looked, as it were, turned to stone. With that
expression on her face she was more beautiful than ever; but the
expression was new; it was utterly unlike that expression, radiant
with happiness and creating happiness, which had been caught by the
painter in her portrait. Levin looked more than once at the portrait
and at her figure, as taking her brother's arm she walked with him
to the high doors, and he felt for her a tenderness and pity at
which he wondered himself.
  She asked Levin and Vorkuev to go into the drawing room, while she
stayed behind to say a few words to her brother. "About her divorce,
about Vronsky, and what he's doing at the club, about me?" wondered
Levin. And he was so keenly interested by the question of what she was
saying to Stepan Arkadyevich, that he scarcely heard what Vorkuev
was telling him of the qualities of the story for children Anna
Arkadyevna had written.
  At tea the same pleasant sort of talk, full of interesting matter,
continued. There was not a single instant when a subject for
conversation was to seek; on the contrary, it was felt that one had
hardly time to say what one had to say, and eagerly held back to
hear what the others were saying. And all that was said, not only by
her, but by Vorkuev and Stepan Arkadyevich- all, so it seemed to
Levin, gained peculiar significance from her attention to him and
her criticism.
  While he followed this interesting conversation, Levin was all the
time admiring her- her beauty, her intelligence, her culture, and at
the same time her directness and her cordiality. He listened and
talked, and all the while he was thinking of her inner life, trying to
divine her feelings. And though he had judged her so severely
hitherto, now by some strange chain of reasoning he was justifying her
and also was sorry for her, and afraid that Vronsky did not fully
understand her. At ten o'clock, when Stepan Arkadyevich got up to go
(Vorkuev had left earlier), it seemed to Levin that he had only just
come. Regretfully Levin too rose.
  "Good-by," she said, holding his hand and glancing into his face
with a winning look. "I am very glad que la glace est rompue."
  She dropped his hand, and half-closed her eyes.
  "Tell your wife that I love her as before, and that if she cannot
pardon me my position, then my wish for her is that she may never
pardon me. To pardon it, one must go through what I have gone through,
and may God spare her that."
  "Certainly, yes, I will tell her..." Levin said, blushing.
                             XI.

  "What a marvelous, sweet and unhappy woman!" he was thinking, as
he stepped out into the frosty air with Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "Well, didn't I tell you?" said Stepan Arkadyevich, seeing that
Levin had been completely won over.
  "Yes," said Levin pensively, "an extraordinary woman! It's not her
cleverness, but she has such wonderful depth of feeling. I'm awfully
sorry for her!"
  "Now, please God everything will soon be settled. Well, well,
don't be hard on people in future," said Stepan Arkadyevich, opening
the carriage door. "Good-by; we don't go the same way."
  Still thinking of Anna, of everything, even the simplest phrase in
their conversation with her, and recalling the minutest changes in her
expression, entering more and more into her position, and feeling
sympathy for her, Levin reached home.

  At home Kouzma told Levin that Katerina Alexandrovna was quite well,
and that her sisters had just gone, and he handed him two letters.
Levin read them at once in the hall, that he might not overlook them
later. One was from Sokolov, his bailiff. Sokolov wrote that the wheat
could not be sold, that the price was only five and a half roubles,
and that he did not know where he had to get the money. The other
letter was from his sister. She scolded him for her business being
still unsettled.
  "Well, we must sell it at five and a half if we can't get more,"
Levin decided on the spot the first question which had always before
seemed such a weighty one, with extraordinary facility. "It's
extraordinary how all one's time is taken up here," he thought,
considering the second letter. He felt himself to blame for not having
got done what his sister had asked him to do for her. "Today, again,
I've not been to court, but today I've certainly not had time." And
resolving that he would not fail to do it next day, he went up to
his wife. As he went in, Levin mentally ran rapidly through the day he
had spent. All the events of the day were conversations: conversations
he had heard and taken part in. All the conversations were upon
subjects which, if he had been alone in the country, he would never
have taken up, but here they were very interesting. And all these
conversations were right enough, only in two places there was
something not quite right. One was what he had said about the carp,
the other was something not quite the thing in the tender sympathy
he was feeling for Anna.
  Levin found his wife low-spirited and dull. The dinner of the
three sisters had gone off very well, but then they had waited and
waited for him, all of them had felt dull, the sisters had departed,
and she had been left alone.
  "Well, and what have you been doing?" she asked him, looking
straight into his eyes, which shone with rather a suspicious
brightness. But that she might not prevent his telling her everything,
she concealed her close scrutiny of him, and with an approving smile
listened to his account of how he had spent the evening.
  "Well, I'm very glad I met Vronsky. I felt quite at ease and natural
with him. You understand, I shall try not to see him, but I'm glad
that this awkwardness is all over," he said, and remembering that,
by way of trying not to see him, he had immediately gone to call on
Anna, he blushed. "We talk about the peasants drinking; I don't know
who drinks most, the peasantry or our own class; the peasants do it on
holidays, but..."
  But Kitty took not the slightest interest in discussing the drinking
habits of the peasants. She saw that he blushed, and she wanted to
know why.
  "Well, and then where did you go?"
  "Stiva urged me awfully to go and see Anna Arkadyevna."
  And as he said this, Levin blushed even more, and his doubts as to
whether he had done right in going to see Anna were settled once for
all. He knew now that he ought not to have done so.
  Kitty's eyes opened in a curious way and gleamed at Anna's name, but
controlling herself with an effort, she concealed her emotion and
deceived him.
  "Oh!" was all she said.
  "I'm sure you won't be angry at my going. Stiva begged me to, and
Dolly wished it," Levin went on.
  "Oh, no!" she said, but he saw in her eyes a constraint that boded
him no good.
  "She is a very sweet, a very, very unhappy, good woman," he said,
telling her about Anna, her occupations, and what she had told him
to say to her.
  "Yes, of course, she is very much to be pitied," said Kitty, when he
had finished. "Whom was your letter from?"
  He told her, and believing in her calm tone, he went to change his
coat.
  Coming back, he found Kitty in the same easy chair. When he went
up to her, she glanced at him and broke into sobs.
  "What? What is it?" he asked, knowing beforehand what.
  "You're in love with that hateful woman; she has bewitched you! I
saw it in your eyes. Yes, yes! What can it all lead to? You were
drinking at the club, drinking and gambling, and then you went...
Where? No, we must go away... I shall go away tomorrow."
  It was a long while before Levin could soothe his wife. At last he
succeeded in calming her, only by confessing that a feeling of pity,
in conjunction with the wine he had drunk, had been too much for
him; that he had succumbed to Anna's artful influence, and that he
would avoid her. One thing he did with more sincerity confess to was
that living so long in Moscow, a life of nothing but conversation,
eating and drinking, he was growing crazy. They talked till three
o'clock in the morning. Only at three o'clock were they sufficiently
reconciled to be able to go to sleep.
                             XII.

  After taking leave of her guests, Anna did not sit down, but began
walking up and down the room. She had unconsciously the whole
evening done her utmost to arouse in Levin a feeling of love- as of
late she had fallen into doing with all young men- and she knew she
had attained her aim, as far as was possible in one evening, with a
married and conscientious man. She liked him very much indeed, and, in
spite of the striking difference, from the masculine point of view,
between Vronsky and Levin, as a woman she saw something they had in
common, which had made Kitty able to love both. Yet as soon as he
was out of the room, she ceased to think of him.
  One thought, and one only, pursued her in different forms, and
refused to be shaken off. "If I have so much effect on others, on this
man, who loves his home and his wife, why is it he is so cold to
me?... Not cold exactly- he loves me, I know that! But something new
is drawing us apart now. Why wasn't he here all the evening? He told
Stiva to say he could not leave Iashvin, and must watch over his play.
Is Iashvin a child? But supposing it's true. He never tells a he.
But there's something else in it if it's true. He is glad of an
opportunity of showing me that he has other duties; I know that, I
submit to that. But why prove that to me? He wants to show me that his
love for me is not to interfere with his freedom. But I need no
proofs- I need love. He ought to understand all the bitterness of this
life for me here in Moscow. Is this life? I am not living, but waiting
for an event, which is continually put off and put off. No answer
again! And Stiva says he cannot go to Alexei Alexandrovich. And I
can't write again. I can do nothing, can begin nothing, can alter
nothing; I hold myself in, I wait, inventing amusements for myself-
the English family, writing, reading- but it's all nothing but a sham,
it's all the same as morphine. He ought to feel for me," she said,
feeling tears of self-pity coming into her eyes.
  She heard Vronsky's abrupt ring and hurriedly dried her tears- not
only dried her tears, but sat down by a lamp and opened a book,
affecting composure. She wanted to show him that she was displeased
that he had not come home as he had promised- displeased only, and not
on any account to let him see her distress, and, least of all, her
self-pity. She might pity herself, but he must not pity her. She did
not want strife, she blamed him for wanting to quarrel, but
unconsciously put herself into an attitude of antagonism.
  "Well, you've not been dull?" he said, eagerly and good-humoredly,
going up to her. "What a terrible passion it is- gambling!"
  "No, I've not been dull; I've learned long ago not to be dull. Stiva
has been here, and Levin."
  "Yes, they meant to come and see you. Well, how did you like Levin?"
he said, sitting down beside her.
  "Very much. They have not been gone long. What was Iashvin doing?"
  "He was winning- seventeen thousand. I got him away. He had really
started home, but he went back again, and now he's losing."
  "Then what did you stay for?" she asked, suddenly lifting her eyes
to him. The expression of her face was cold and ungracious. "You
told Stiva you were staying on to get Iashvin away. And you have
left him there."
  The same expression of cold readiness for the conflict appeared on
his face too.
  "In the first place, I did not ask him to give you any message;
and secondly, I never tell lies. But the chief point is, I wanted to
stay, and I stayed," he said, frowning. "Anna, what is it for, why
will you do this?" he said after a moment's silence, bending over
toward her; and he opened his hand, hoping she would lay hers in it.
  She was glad of this appeal for tenderness. But some strange force
of evil would not let her give herself up to her feelings, as though
the rules of warfare would not permit her to surrender.
  "Of course you wanted to stay, and you stayed. You do everything you
want to. But what do you tell me that for? With what object?" she
said, getting more and more excited. "Does anyone contest your rights?
But you want to be right, and you're welcome to be right."
  His hand closed, he turned away, and his face wore a still more
obstinate expression.
  "For you it's a matter of obstinacy," she said, watching him
intently and suddenly finding the right word for that expression
that irritated her, "simply obstinacy. For you it's a question of
whether you keep the upper hand of me, while for me..." Again she felt
sorry for herself, and she almost burst into tears. "If you knew
what it is for me! When I feel as I do now, that you are hostile- yes,
hostile to me- if you knew what this means for me! If you knew how I
feel on the brink of calamity at this instant, how afraid I am of
myself!" And she turned away, hiding her sobs.
  "But what are you talking about?" he said, horrified at her
expression of despair and again bending over her, he took her hand and
kissed it. "What is it for? Do I seek amusements outside our home?
Don't I avoid the society of women?"
  "Well, yes! If that were all!" she said.
  "Come, tell me what I ought to do to give you peace of mind? I am
ready to do anything to make you happy," he said, touched by her
expression of despair; "what wouldn't I do to save you from distress
of any sort, as now, Anna!" he said.
  "It's nothing, nothing!" she said. "I don't know myself whether it's
the solitary life, my nerves... Come, don't let us talk of it. What
about the race? You haven't told me!" she inquired, trying to
conceal her triumph at the victory, which had been on her side after
all.
  He asked for supper, and began telling her about the races; but in
his tone, in his eyes, which became more and more cold, she saw that
he did not forgive her for her victory, that the feeling of
obstinacy with which she had been struggling had asserted itself again
in him. He was colder to her than before, as though he were regretting
his surrender. And she, remembering the words that had given her the
victory, "how I feel on the brink of calamity, how afraid I am of
myself," saw that this weapon was a dangerous one, and that it could
not be used a second time. And she felt that beside the love that
bound them together there had grown up between them some evil spirit
of strife, which she could not exorcise from his heart, and still less
from her own.
                             XIII.

  There are no conditions to which a man cannot become used,
especially if he sees that all around him are living in the same
way. Levin could not have believed three months before that he could
have gone quietly to sleep in the state in which he was that day- that
leading an aimless, irrational life, also living beyond his means,
after drinking to excess (he could not call what happened at the
club anything else), forming inappropriately friendly relations with a
man with whom his wife had once been in love, and after a still more
inappropriate call upon a woman who could only be called a lost woman,
after being fascinated by that woman and causing his wife distress- he
could still go quietly to sleep. But under the influence of fatigue, a
sleepless night, and the wine he had drunk, his sleep was sound and
untroubled.
  At five o'clock the creak of a door opening waked him. He jumped
up and looked round. Kitty was not in bed beside him. But there was
a light moving behind the screen, and he heard her steps.
  "What is it?... What is it?" he said, half-asleep. "Kitty! What is
it?"
  "Nothing," she said, coming from behind the screen with a candle
in her hand. "I felt unwell," she said, smiling a particularly sweet
and meaning smile.
  "What? Has it begun?" he said in terror. "We ought to send..." and
hurriedly he reached after his clothes.
  "No, no," she said, smiling and holding his hand. "It's sure to be
nothing. I was rather unwell, only a little. It's all over now."
  And, getting into bed, she blew out the candle, lay down and was
still. Though he thought her stillness suspicious, as though she
were holding her breath, and still more suspicious the expression of
peculiar tenderness and excitement with which, as she came from behind
the screen, she had said "Nothing," he was so sleepy that he fell
asleep at once. Only later he remembered the stillness of her
breathing, and understood all that must have been passing in her
sweet, precious heart while she lay beside him, not stirring, in
anticipation of the greatest event in a woman's life. At seven o'clock
he was waked by the touch of her hand on his shoulder, and a gentle
whisper. She seemed struggling between regret at waking him, and the
desire to talk to him.
  "Kostia, don't be frightened. It's all right. But I fancy... We
ought to send for Lizaveta Petrovna."
  The candle was lighted again. She was sitting up in bed, holding
some knitting, which she had been busy upon during the last few days.
  "Please, don't be frightened, it's all right. I'm not a bit afraid,"
she said, seeing his scared face, and she pressed his hand to her
bosom and then to her lips.
  He hurriedly jumped up, hardly awake, and kept his eyes fixed on
her, as he put on his dressing gown; then he stopped, still looking at
her. He had to go, but he could not tear himself away from her eyes.
He thought he loved her face, knew her expression, her eyes, but never
had he seen it like this. How hateful and horrible he seemed to
himself, thinking of the distress he had caused her yesterday. Her
flushed face, fringed with soft curling hair under her nightcap, was
radiant with joy and courage.
  Though there was so little that was artificial or pretended in
Kitty's character in general, Levin was struck by what was revealed
now, when suddenly all disguises were thrown off and the very kernel
of her soul shone in her eyes. And in this simplicity and nakedness of
her soul, she, the very woman he loved in her, was more manifest
than ever. She looked at him, smiling; but all at once her brows
twitched, she threw up her head, and, going quickly up to him,
clutched his hand and pressed close up to him, breathing her hot
breath upon him. She was in pain and was, as it were, complaining to
him of her suffering. And for the first minute, from habit, it
seemed to him that he was to blame. But in her eyes there was a
tenderness that told him that she was far from reproaching him, that
she loved him for her sufferings. "If not I, who is to blame for
it?" he thought unconsciously, seeking someone responsible for this
suffering for him to punish; but there was no one responsible. She was
suffering, complaining, and triumphing in her sufferings, and
rejoicing in them, and loving them. He saw that something sublime
was being accomplished in her soul, but what? He could not make it
out. It was beyond his understanding.
  "I have sent to mamma. You go quickly to fetch Lizaveta Petrovna....
Kostia!... Never mind- it's over."
  She moved away from him and rang the bell.
  "Well, go now; Pasha's coming. I am all right."
  And Levin saw with astonishment that she had taken up the knitting
she had brought in in the night, and had begun working at it again.
  As Levin was going out of one door, he heard the maidservant come in
at the other. He stood at the door and heard Kitty giving exact
directions to the maid, and beginning to help her move the bedstead.
  He dressed, and while they were putting in his horse, as there
were no hacks about as yet, he ran again up to the bedroom, not on
tiptoe, it seemed to him, but on wings. Two maidservants were
carefully shifting something about in the bedroom. Kitty was walking
about knitting rapidly and giving directions.
  "I'm going for the doctor. They have sent for Lizaveta Petrovna, but
I'll go on there too. Isn't there anything wanted? Yes- shall I go
to Dolly's?"
  She looked at him, obviously not hearing what he was saying.
  "Yes, yes. Do go," she said quickly, frowning and waving her hand to
him.
  He had just gone into the drawing room, when suddenly a plaintive
moan sounded from the bedroom, smothered instantly. He stood still,
and for a long while he could not understand.
  "Yes, that is she," he said to himself, and, clutching at his
head, he ran downstairs.
  "Lord have mercy on us! Forgive us! Help us!" he repeated the
words that for some reason came suddenly to his lips. And he, an
unbeliever, repeated these words not with his lips only. At that
instant he knew that all his doubts, even the impossibility of
believing with his reason, of which he was aware in himself, did not
in the least hinder his turning to God. All of that now floated out of
his soul like dust. To whom was he to turn if not to Him in whose
hands he felt himself, his soul, and his love?
  The horse was not yet ready, but feeling a peculiar concentration of
his physical forces and his intellect on what he had to do, he, losing
no minute, started off on foot without waiting for the horse, and told
Kouzma to overtake him.
  At the corner he met a night hack driving hurriedly. In the little
sleigh, wrapped in a velvet cloak, sat Lizaveta Petrovna with a
kerchief round her head. "Thank God! thank God!" he said, overjoyed to
recognize her little fair face which wore a peculiarly serious, even
stern expression. Telling the driver not to stop, he ran along
beside her.
  "For two hours, then? Not more?" she inquired. "You should let Piotr
Dmitrievich know, but don't hurry him. And get some opium at the
chemist's."
  "So you think that it will go well? Lord have mercy on us and help
us!" Levin said, seeing his own horse driving out of the gate. Jumping
into the sleigh beside Kouzma, he told him to drive to the doctor's.
                             XIV.

  The doctor was not yet up, and the footman said that "he had been up
late, and had given orders not to be waked, but would get up soon."
The footman was cleaning the lamp chimneys, and seemed very busy about
them. This concentration of the footman upon his lamps, and his
indifference to what was passing in Levin, at first astounded him, but
immediately on considering the question he realized that no one knew
or was bound to know his feelings, and that it was all the more
necessary to act calmly, sensibly, and resolutely to get through
this wall of indifference and attain his aim. "Don't be in a hurry
or let anything slip," Levin said to himself, feeling a greater and
greater flow of physical energy and attention to all he had yet to do.
  Having ascertained that the doctor was not getting up, Levin
considered various plans, and decided on the following one; that
Kouzma should go for another doctor, while he himself should go to the
chemist's for opium, and if, when he came back, the doctor had not yet
begun to get up, he would, either by tipping the footman, or by force,
wake the doctor at all hazards.
  At the chemist's the lank pharmacist wafered a packet of powders for
a coachman who stood waiting, and refused him opium with the same
callousness with which the doctor's footman had cleaned his lamp
chimneys. Trying not to get flustered or out of temper, Levin
mentioned the names of the doctor and midwife, and explaining what the
opium was needed for, tried to persuade him. The assistant inquired in
German whether he should give it, and receiving an affirmative reply
from behind the partition, he took out a bottle and a funnel,
deliberately poured the opium from a bigger bottle into a little
one, stuck on a label, sealed it up, in spite of Levin's request
that he would not do so, and was about to wrap it up too. This was
more than Levin could stand; he took the bottle firmly out of his
hands, and ran to the big glass doors. The doctor was not even now
getting up, and the footman, busy now in putting down the rugs,
refused to wake him. Levin deliberately took out a ten-rouble note,
and careful to speak slowly, though losing no time over the
business, he handed him the note, and explained that Piotr Dmitrievich
(what a great and important personage he seemed to Levin now, this
Piotr Dmitrievich, who had been of so little consequence in his eyes
before) had promised to come at any time; that he would certainly
not be angry! And that he must therefore wake him at once.
  The footman agreed, and went upstairs, taking Levin into the waiting
room.
  Levin could hear through the door the doctor coughing, moving about,
washing, and saying something. Three minutes passed; it seemed to
Levin that more than an hour had gone by. He could not wait any
longer.
  "Piotr Dmitrievich, Piotr Dmitrievich?" he said in an imploring
voice at the open door. "For God's sake, forgive me! See me as you
are. It's been going on more than two hours already."
  "In a minute; in a minute!" answered a voice, and to his amazement
heard that the doctor was smiling as he spoke.
  "For one instant!"...
  "In a minute."
  Two minutes more passed while the doctor was putting on his boots,
and two minutes more while the doctor put on his coat and combed his
hair.
  "Piotr Dmitrievich!" Levin was beginning again in a plaintive voice,
just as the doctor came in, dressed and ready. "These people have no
conscience," thought Levin. "Combing his hair, while we're dying!"
  "Good morning!" the doctor said to him, shaking hands, and, as it
were, teasing him with his composure. "There's no hurry. Well, now?"
  Trying to be as accurate as possible, Levin began to tell him
every unnecessary detail of his wife's condition, interrupting his
account repeatedly with entreaties that the doctor would come with him
at once.
  "Oh, you needn't be in any hurry. You don't understand, you know.
I'm certain I'm not wanted; still I've promised, and, if you like,
I'll come. But there's no hurry. Please sit down; won't you have
some coffee?"
  Levin stared at him with eyes that asked whether he was laughing
at him; but the doctor had no notion of making fun of him.
  "I know, I know," the doctor said, smiling; "I'm a married man
myself; and at these moments we husbands are very much to be pitied.
I've a patient whose husband always takes refuge in the stables on
such occasions."
  "But what do you think, Piotr Dmitrievich? Do you suppose it will go
all right?"
  "Everything points to a favorable issue."
  "So you'll come immediately?" said Levin, looking wrathfully at
the servant who was bringing in the coffee.
  "In just an hour."
  "Oh, for God's sake!"
  "Well, let me drink my coffee, anyway."
  The doctor started upon his coffee. Both were silent.
  "The Turks are really getting beaten, though. Did you read
yesterday's telegrams?" said the doctor, thoroughly masticating a
roll.
  "No, I can't stand it!" said Levin, jumping up. "So you'll be with
us in a quarter of an hour?"
  "In half an hour."
  "On your honor?"
  When Levin got home, he drove up at the same time as the Princess,
and they went up to the bedroom together. The Princess had tears in
her eyes, and her hands were shaking. Seeing Levin, she embraced
him, and burst into tears.
  "Well, my dear Lizaveta Petrovna?" she queried, clasping the hand of
the midwife, who came out to meet them with a beaming and anxious
face.
  "Everything is going on well," she said; "persuade her to lie
down. She will feel easier that way."
  From the moment when he had waked up and understood what was going
on, Levin had prepared his mind to bear resolutely what was before
him, and without considering or anticipating anything, to avoid
upsetting his wife, and, on the contrary, to soothe her and keep up
her courage. Without allowing himself even to think of what was to
come, of how it would end, judging from his inquiries as to the
usual duration of these ordeals, Levin had in his imagination braced
himself to bear up and to keep a tight rein on his feelings for five
hours, and it had seemed to him he could do this. But when he came
back from the doctor's and saw her sufferings again, he fell to
repeating more and more frequently: "Lord, have mercy on us, and
succor us!" He sighed, and flung his head up, and began to feel afraid
he could not bear it, that he would burst into tears or run away- such
agony it was to him. Yet only one hour had passed.
  But after that hour there passed another hour, two hours, three, the
full five hours he had fixed as the furthest limit of his
sufferings, and the situation was still unchanged; and he was still
bearing it because there was nothing to be done but bear it- every
instant feeling that he had reached the utmost limits of his
endurance, and that his heart would break with sympathy and pain.
  But still the minutes passed by, and the hours, and still more
hours, and his misery and horror grew and were more and more intense.
  All the ordinary conditions of life, without which one can form no
conception of anything, had ceased to exist for Levin. He lost all
sense of time. Minutes- those minutes when she sent for him and he
held her moist hand, that would squeeze his hand with extraordinary
violence and then push it away- seemed to him hours, and hours
seemed to him minutes. He was surprised when Lizaveta Petrovna asked
him to light a candle behind a screen, and he found that it was five
o'clock in the afternoon. If he had been told it was only ten
o'clock in the morning he would not have been surprised. Where he
was all this time, he knew as little as the time of anything. He saw
her swollen face, sometimes bewildered and in agony, sometimes smiling
and trying to reassure him. He saw the old Princess too, flushed and
overwrought, with her gray curls in disorder, forcing herself to
gulp down her tears, biting her lips; he saw Dolly too, and the
doctor, smoking thick cigarettes, and Lizaveta Petrovna with a firm,
resolute, reassuring face, and the old Prince walking up and down
the hall with a frowning face. But why they came in and went out,
where they were, he did not know. The Princess was with the doctor
in the bedroom, then in the study, where a table set for dinner
suddenly appeared; then she was not there, but Dolly was. Then Levin
remembered he had been sent somewhere. Once he had been sent to move a
table and sofa. He had done this eagerly, thinking it had to be done
for her sake, and only later on he found it was his own bed he had
been getting ready. Then he had been sent to the study to ask the
doctor something. The doctor had answered and then had said
something about the irregularities in the municipal council. Then he
had been sent to the bedroom to help the old Princess move the holy
image in its silver-gilt setting, and with the Princess's old
waiting maid he had clambered on a shelf to reach it and had broken
the lampad, and the old servant had tried to reassure him about the
lampad and about his wife, and he carried the holy image in and set it
at the head of Kitty's bed, carefully tucking the image in behind
the pillow. But where, when, and why all this had happened, he could
not tell. He did not understand why the old Princess took his hand,
and looking compassionately at him, begged him not to worry himself,
and Dolly persuaded him to eat something and led him out of the
room, and even the doctor looked seriously and with commiseration at
him, and offered him a drop of something.
  All he knew and felt was that what was happening was what had
happened nearly a year before in the hotel of the country town at
the deathbed of his brother Nikolai. But that had been grief- this was
joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary
conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that
ordinary life, through which there came glimpses of something sublime.
And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was
exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no
conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.
  "Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!" he repeated to himself
incessantly, feeling, in spite of his long and, as it seemed, complete
alienation from religion, that he turned to God just as trustfully and
simply as he had in his childhood and first youth.
  All this time he had two distinct moods. One was away from her, with
the doctor, who kept smoking one thick cigarette after another and
extinguishing them on the edge of a full ash tray; with Dolly, and
with the old Prince, where there was talk about dinner, about
politics, about Maria Petrovna's illness, and where Levin suddenly
forgot for a minute what was happening, and felt as though he had
waked up from sleep; the other mood was in her presence, at her
pillow, where his heart seemed breaking, and still did not break, from
sympathetic suffering, and he prayed to God without ceasing. And every
time he was brought back from a moment of oblivion by a scream
reaching him from the bedroom, he fell into the same strange terror
that had come upon him the first minute. Every time he heard a shriek,
he jumped up, ran to justify himself, remembered on the way that he
was not to blame, and he longed to defend her, to help her. But as
he looked at her, he saw again that help was impossible, and he was
filled with terror and prayed: "Lord, have mercy on us, and help
us!" And as time went on, both these moods became more intense; the
calmer he became away from her, completely forgetting her, the more
agonizing became both her sufferings and his feeling of helplessness
before them. He jumped up, would have liked to run away, but ran to
her.
  Sometimes, when again and again she called upon him, he blamed
her; but seeing her submissive, smiling face, and hearing the words "I
am worrying you," he threw the blame on God; but thinking of God, at
once he fell beseeching God to forgive him and have mercy.
                             XV.

  He did not know whether it was late or early. The candles had all
burned out. Dolly had just been in the study and had suggested to
the doctor that he should lie down. Levin sat listening to the
doctor's stories of a quack mesmerizer and looking at the ashes of his
cigarette. There had been a period of repose, and he had sunk into
oblivion. He had completely forgotten what was going on now. He
heard the doctor's chat and understood it. Suddenly there came an
unearthly shriek. The shriek was so awful that Levin did not even jump
up, but, holding his breath, gazed in terrified inquiry at the doctor.
The doctor put his head on one side, listened, and smiled approvingly.
Everything was so extraordinary that nothing could strike Levin as
strange. "I suppose it must be so," he thought, and still sat where he
was. Whose scream was this? He jumped up, ran on tiptoe to the
bedroom, edged round Lizaveta Petrovna and the Princess, and took up
his position at Kitty's pillow. The scream had subsided, but there was
some change now. What it was he did not see and did not comprehend,
and he had no wish to see or comprehend. But he saw it by the face
of Lizaveta Petrovna. Lizaveta Petrovna's face was stern and pale, and
still as resolute, though her jaws were twitching, and her eyes were
fixed intently on Kitty. Kitty's swollen and agonized face, a tress of
hair clinging to her moist brow, was turned to him and sought his
eyes. Her lifted hands asked for his hands. Clutching his chill
hands in her moist ones, she began squeezing them to her face.
  "Don't go, don't go! I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid!" she said
rapidly. "Mamma, take my earrings. They bother me. You're not
afraid? Soon, soon, Lizaveta Petrovna..."
  She spoke quickly, very quickly, and tried to smile. But suddenly
her face was drawn- she pushed him away.
  "Oh, this is awful! I'm dying, I'm dying! Go away!" she shrieked,
and again he heard that unearthly scream.
  Levin clutched at his head and ran out of the room.
  "It's nothing, it's nothing, it's all right," Dolly called after
him.
  But they might say what they liked, he knew now that all was over.
He stood in the next room, his head leaning against the doorpost,
and heard shrieks, howls, such as he had never heard before, and he
knew that what had been Kitty was uttering these shrieks. He had
long ago ceased to wish for the child. By now he loathed this child.
He did not even pray for her life now- all he longed for was the
cessation of this awful anguish.
  "Doctor! What is it? What is it? My God!" he said, snatching at
the doctor's hand as he came up.
  "It's the end," said the doctor. And the doctor's face was so
grave as he said it that Levin took the end as meaning her death.
  Beside himself, he ran into the bedroom. The first thing he saw
was the face of Lizaveta Petrovna. It was even more frowning and
stern. Kitty's face he did not know. In the place where it had been
was something that was fearful in its strained distortion and in the
sounds that came from it. He fell down with his head on the wooden
framework of the bed, feeling that his heart was bursting. The awful
scream never paused, it became still more awful, and as though it
had reached the utmost limit of terror, suddenly it ceased. Levin
could not believe his ears, but there could be no doubt; the scream
had ceased and he heard a subdued stir and bustle, and hurried
breathing, and her voice, gasping, alive, tender, and blissful,
uttered softly: "It's over!"
  He lifted his head. With her hands hanging exhausted on the quilt,
looking extraordinarily lovely and serene, she looked at him in
silence and tried to smile, and could not.
  And suddenly, from the mysterious and awful faraway world in which
he had been living for the last twenty-two hours, Levin felt himself
all in an instant borne back to the old everyday world, though
glorified now by such a radiance of happiness that he could not bear
it. The strained chords snapped; sobs and tears of joy which he had
never foreseen rose up with such violence that his whole body shook,
and for long they prevented him from speaking.
  Falling on his knees before the bed, he held his wife's hand
before his lips and kissed it, and the hand, with a weak movement of
the fingers, responded to his kiss. And meanwhile, there at the foot
of the bed, in the deft hands of Lizaveta Petrovna, like a
flickering light in a lamp, lay the life of a human creature, which
had never existed before, and which would now with the same right,
with the same importance to itself, live and create in its own image.
  "Alive! alive! And a boy too! Set your mind at rest!" Levin heard
Lizaveta Petrovna saying, as she slapped the baby's back with a
shaking hand.
  "Mamma, is it true?" said Kitty's voice.
  The Princess's sobs were all the answer she could make.
  And in the midst of the silence there came in unmistakable reply
to the mother's question, a voice quite unlike the subdued voices
speaking in the room. It was the bold, clamorous, self-assertive
squall of the new human being, which had so incomprehensibly appeared.
  If Levin had been told before that Kitty was dead, and that he had
died with her, and that their children were angels, and that God was
standing before him, he would have been surprised at nothing. But now,
coming back to the world of reality, he had to make great mental
efforts to take in that she was alive and well, and that the
creature squalling so desperately was his son. Kitty was alive, her
agony was over. And he was unutterably happy. That he understood;
and he was completely happy in it. But the baby? Whence, why, who
was he?... He could not get used to the idea. It seemed to him
something extraneous, superfluous, to which he could not accustom
himself.
                             XVI.

  At ten o'clock the old Prince, Sergei Ivanovich, and Stepan
Arkadyevich, were sitting at Levin's. Having inquired after Kitty,
they had dropped into conversation upon other subjects. Levin heard
them, and unconsciously, as they talked, going over the past, over
what they had been up to that morning, he thought of himself as he had
been yesterday till that point. It was as though a hundred years had
passed since then. He felt himself exalted to unattainable heights,
from which he studiously lowered himself so as not to wound the people
he was talking to. He talked, and was all the time thinking of his
wife, of her present condition, of his son, in whose existence he
tried to school himself into believing. The whole world of woman,
which had taken for him since his marriage a new value he had never
suspected before, was now so exalted that his imagination could not
embrace it. He heard them talk of yesterday's dinner at the club,
and thought: "What is happening with her now? Is she asleep? How is
she? What is she thinking of? Is he crying- my son Dmitrii?" And in
the middle of the conversation, in the middle of a sentence, he jumped
up and went out of the room.
  "Send me word if I can see her," said the Prince.
  "Very well, in a minute," answered Levin, and without stopping, he
went to her room.
  She was not asleep, she was talking gently with her mother, making
plans about the christening.
  Carefully set to rights, with hair well brushed, in a smart little
cap with some blue in it, her arms out on the quilt, she was lying
on her back. Meeting his eyes, her eyes drew him to her. Her face,
bright before, brightened still more as he drew near her. There was
the same change in it from earthly to unearthly that is seen in the
face of the dead. But there it means farewell- here it meant
welcome. Again a rush of emotion, such as he had felt at the moment of
the child's birth, flooded his heart. She took his hand and asked
him if he had slept. He could not answer, and turned away, realizing
his weakness.
  "I have had a nap, Kostia!" she said to him. "And I am so
comfortable now."
  She looked at him, but suddenly her expression changed.
  "Give him to me," she said, hearing the baby's cry. "Give him to me,
Lizaveta Petrovna, and he shall look at him."
  "To be sure, his papa shall look at him," said Lizaveta Petrovna,
getting up and bringing something red, and queer and wriggling.
"Wait a minute, we'll array ourselves first," and Lizaveta Petrovna
laid the red wobbling thing on the bed, began untrussing and
trussing up the baby, lifting it up and turning it over with one
finger and powdering it with something.
  Levin, looking at the tiny, pitiful creature, made strenuous efforts
to discover in his heart some traces of fatherly feeling for it. He
felt nothing toward it but disgust. But when it was undressed and he
caught a glimpse of wee, wee, little hands, little feet,
saffron-colored, with little toes, too; and even with a little big toe
different from the rest, and when he saw Lizaveta Petrovna closing the
wide-open little hands, as though they were soft springs, and
putting them into linen garments, such pity for the little creature
came upon him, and such terror that she would hurt it, that he held
her hand back.
  Lizaveta Petrovna laughed.
  "Don't be frightened, don't be frightened!"
  When the baby had been arrayed and transformed into a solid doll,
Lizaveta Petrovna dandled it as though proud of her handiwork, and
stood a little away so that Levin might see his son in all his glory.
  Kitty looked sideways in the same direction, never taking her eyes
off the baby. "Give him to me! Give him to me!" she said, and even
made as though she would sit up.
  "What are you thinking of, Katerina Alexandrovna, you mustn't move
like that! Wait a minute. I'll give him to you. Here we're showing
papa what a fine fellow we are!"
  And Lizaveta Petrovna, with one hand supporting the wobbling head,
lifted up on the other arm the strange, limp, red creature, whose head
was lost in its swaddling clothes. But it had a nose, too, and
slanting eyes, and smacking lips.
  "A splendid baby!" said Lizaveta Petrovna.
  Levin sighed with mortification. This splendid baby excited in him
no feeling but disgust and compassion. It was not at all the feeling
he had looked forward to.
  He turned away while Lizaveta Petrovna put the baby to the
unaccustomed breast.
  Suddenly laughter made him look round. The baby had taken the
breast.
  "Come that's enough, that's enough!" said Lizaveta Petrovna, but
Kitty would not let the baby go. He fell asleep in her arms.
  "Look, now," said Kitty, turning the baby so that he could see it.
The aged-looking little face suddenly puckered up still more, and
the baby sneezed.
  Smiling, hardly able to restrain his tears, Levin kissed his wife
and went out of the dark room.
  What he felt toward this little creature was utterly unlike what
he had expected. There was nothing cheerful and joyous in the feeling;
on the contrary, it was a new torture of apprehension. It was the
consciousness of a new sphere of liability to pain. And this sense was
so painful at first, the apprehension lest this helpless creature
should suffer was so intense, that it prevented him from noticing
the strange thrill of senseless joy and even pride that he had felt
when the baby had sneezed.
                             XVII.

  Stepan Arkadyevich's affairs were in a very bad way.
  The money for two-thirds of the forest had all been spent already,
and he had borrowed from the merchant in advance at ten per cent
discount almost all the remaining third. The merchant would not give
more, especially as Darya Alexandrovna, for the first time that winter
insisting on her right to her own property, had refused to sign the
receipt for the payment of the last third of the forest. All his
salary went on household expenses and in payment of petty debts that
could not be put off. There was positively no money.
  This was unpleasant and awkward, and in Stepan Arkadyevich's opinion
things could not go on like this. The explanation of the position was,
in his view, to be found in the fact that his salary was too small.
The post he filled had been unmistakably very good five years ago, but
it was so no longer. Petrov, the bank director, had twelve thousand;
Sventitsky, a company director, had seventeen thousand; Mitin, who had
founded a bank, received fifty thousand. "Clearly I've been napping,
and they've overlooked me," Stepan Arkadyevich thought about
himself. And he began keeping his eyes and ears open, and toward the
end of the winter he had discovered a very good berth and had formed a
plan of attack upon it, at first from Moscow through aunts, uncles,
and friends, and then, when the matter was well advanced, in the
spring, he went himself to Peterburg. It was one of those berths (with
incomes ranging from one thousand to fifty thousand roubles), of which
there are so many more nowadays than there were snug, bribable ones in
the past. It was the post of secretary of the committee of the
amalgamated agency of the Southern Railways, and of certain banking
companies. This position, like all such appointments, called for
such immense energy and such varied qualifications, that it was
difficult for them to be found united in any one man. And since a
man combining all the qualifications was not to be found, it was at
least better that the post be filled by an honest than by a
dishonest man. And Stepan Arkadyevich was not merely an honest man,
unemphatically, in the common acceptation of the word; he was an
honest man, emphatically, in that special sense which the word has
in Moscow, when they talk of an "honest" politician, an "honest"
writer, an "honest" newspaper, an "honest" institution, an "honest"
tendency, meaning not simply that the man or the institution is not
dishonest, but that they are capable on occasion of stinging the
authorities. Stepan Arkadyevich moved in those circles in Moscow in
which that expression had come into use, was regarded there as an
honest man, and so had more right to this appointment than others.
  The appointment yielded an income of from seven to ten thousand a
year, and Oblonsky could fill it without giving up his government
position. It was in the hands of two ministers, one lady, and two
Jews, and all these people, though the way had been paved already with
them, Stepan Arkadyevich had to see in Peterburg. Besides this
business, Stepan Arkadyevich had promised his sister Anna to obtain
from Karenin a definite answer on the question of divorce. And begging
fifty roubles from Dolly, he set off for Peterburg.
  Stepan Arkadyevich sat in Karenin's study listening to his report on
the causes of the unsatisfactory position of Russian finance, and only
waiting for the moment when he would finish to speak about his own
business or about Anna.
  "Yes, that's very true," he said, when Alexei Alexandrovich took off
the pince-nez, without which he could not read now, and looked
inquiringly at his quondam brother-in-law, "that's very true in
particular cases, but still, the principle of our day is freedom."
  "Yes, but I lay down another principle, embracing the principle of
freedom," said Alexei Alexandrovich, with emphasis on the word
"embracing", and he put on his pince-nez again, so as to read the
passage in which this statement was made.
  And turning over the beautifully written, wide-margined
manuscript, Alexei Alexandrovich read aloud the conclusive passage
once more.
  "I don't advocate protection for the sake of private interest, but
for the public weal- and for the lower and upper classes equally,"
he said, looking over his pince-nez at Oblonsky. "But they cannot
grasp that, they are taken up now with personal interests, and carried
away by phrases."
  Stepan Arkadyevich knew that when Karenin began to talk of what they
were doing and thinking, the persons who would not accept his report
and were the cause of everything wrong in Russia, that it was coming
near the end. And so now he eagerly abandoned the principle of free
trade, and fully agreed. Alexei Alexandrovich paused, thoughtfully
turning over the pages of his manuscript.
  "Oh, by the way," said Stepan Arkadyevich, "I wanted to ask you,
some time when you see Pomorsky, to drop him a hint that I should be
very glad to get that new appointment of member of the committee of
the amalgamated agency of the Southern Railways and banking
companies." Stepan Arkadyevich was familiar by now with the title of
the post he coveted, and he brought it out rapidly without mistake.
  Alexei Alexandrovich questioned him as to the duties of this new
committee, and pondered. He was considering whether the new
committee would not be acting in some way contrary to the views he had
been advocating. But as the influence of the new committee was of a
very complex nature, and his views were of very wide application, he
could not decide this straight off, and taking off his pince-nez, he
said:
  "Of course, I can mention it to him; but what is your reason
precisely for wishing to obtain the appointment?"
  "It's a good salary, rising to nine thousand, and my means..."
  "Nine thousand!" repeated Alexei Alexandrovich, and he frowned.
  The high figure of the salary made him reflect that on that side
Stepan Arkadyevich's proposed position ran counter to the main
tendency of his own projects of reform, which always leaned toward
economy.
  "I consider, and I have embodied my views in a note on the
subject, that in our day these immense salaries are evidence of the
unsound economic assiette of our finances."
  "But what's to be done?" said Stepan Arkadyevich. "Suppose a bank
director gets ten thousand- well, he's worth it; or an engineer gets
twenty thousand- after all, it's a growing thing, you know!"
  "I assume that a salary is the price paid for a commodity, and it
ought to conform with the law of supply and demand. If the salary is
fixed without any regard for that law, as, for instance, when I see
two engineers leaving college together, both equally well trained
and efficient, and one getting forty thousand while the other is
satisfied with two; or when I see lawyers and hussars, having no
special qualifications, appointed directors of banking companies
with immense salaries, I conclude that the salary is not fixed in
accordance with the law of supply and demand, but simply through
personal interest. And this is an abuse of great gravity in itself,
and one that reacts injuriously on the government service. I
consider..."
  Stepan Arkadyevich made haste to interrupt his brother-in-law.
  "Yes; but you must agree that the new institution being started is
of undoubted utility. After all, you know, it's a growing thing!
What they lay particular stress on is the thing being carried on
honestly," said Stepan Arkadyevich with emphasis.
  But the Moscow significance of the word honest was lost on Alexei
Alexandrovich.
  "Honesty is only a negative qualification," he said.
  "Well, you'll do me a great service, anyway," said Stepan
Arkadyevich, "by putting in a word to Pomorsky- just in the way of
conversation..."
  "But I fancy it depends more on Bolgarinov," said Alexei
Alexandrovich.
  "Bolgarinov has fully assented, as far as he's concerned," said
Stepan Arkadyevich, turning red. Stepan Arkadyevich reddened at the
mention of that name, because he had been that morning at the Jew
Bolgarinov's, and the visit had left an unpleasant recollection.
  Stepan Arkadyevich believed most positively that the committee in
which he was trying to get an appointment was a new, genuine, and
honest public body, but that morning when Bolgarinov had-
intentionally, beyond a doubt- kept him two hours waiting with other
petitioners in his waiting room, he had suddenly felt uneasy.
  Whether he was uncomfortable because he, a descendant of Rurik,
Prince Oblonsky, had been kept for two hours waiting to see a Jew,
or that for the first time in his fife he was not following the
example of his ancestors in serving the government, but was turning
off into a new career- at any rate he was very uncomfortable. During
those two hours in Bolgarinov's waiting room Stepan Arkadyevich,
stepping jauntily about the room, pulling his side whiskers,
entering into conversation with the other petitioners, and inventing a
calembour dealing with his wait in the Jew's anteroom, assiduously
concealed from others, and even from himself, the feeling he was
experiencing.
  But all the time he was uncomfortable and perturbed, he could not
have said why- whether because he could not get his calembour just
right, or from some other reason. When at last Bolgarinov had received
him with exaggerated politeness and unmistakable triumph at his
humiliation, and had all but refused the favor asked of him, Stepan
Arkadyevich had made haste to forget it all as soon as possible. And
now, at the mere recollection, he blushed.
                             XVIII.

  "Now there is something I want to talk about, and you know what it
is... about Anna," Stepan Arkadyevich said, pausing for a brief space,
and shaking off the unpleasant impression.
  As soon as Oblonsky uttered Anna's name, the face of Alexei
Alexandrovich became completely transformed; all the life went out
of it, and it looked weary and dead.
  "What is it exactly that you want from me?" he said, moving in his
chair and snapping his pince-nez.
  "A definite settlement, Alexei Alexandrovich- some settlement of the
situation. I'm appealing to you" ("not as to an injured husband,"
Stepan Arkadyevich was going to say, but, afraid of wrecking his
negotiation by this, he changed the words) "not as to a statesman"
(which did not sound apropos), "but simply as to a man, and a
goodhearted man, and a Christian. You must have pity on her," he said.
  "That is, in what way, precisely?" Karenin said softly.
  "Yes, pity on her. If you had seen her as I have!- I have been
spending all the winter with her- you would have pity on her. Her
position is awful, simply awful!"
  "I had imagined," answered Alexei Alexandrovich in a higher,
almost shrill voice, "that Anna Arkadyevna had everything she had
desired for herself."
  "Oh, Alexei Alexandrovich, for God's sake, let's not indulge in
recriminations! What is past is past, and you know what she wants
and is waiting for- a divorce."
  "But I believe Anna Arkadyevna refuses a divorce, if I make it a
condition to leave me my son. I replied in that sense, and supposed
that the matter was ended. I consider it at an end," shrieked Alexei
Alexandrovich.
  "But, for heaven's sake, don't get excited!" said Stepan
Arkadyevich, touching his brother-in-law's knee. "The matter is not
ended. If you will allow me to recapitulate, it was like this: when
you parted, you were as magnanimous as could possibly be; you were
ready to give her everything- freedom, even divorce. She appreciated
that. No, make no doubt. She did appreciate it- to such a degree that,
at the first moment, feeling how she had wronged you, she did not
consider and could not consider everything. She gave up everything.
But experience, time, have shown that her position is unbearable,
impossible."
  "The life of Anna Arkadyevna can have no interest for me," Alexei
Alexandrovich put in, raising his eyebrows.
  "Allow me to disbelieve that," Stepan Arkadyevich replied gently.
"Her position is intolerable for her, and of no benefit to anyone
whatever. She has deserved it, you will say. She knows that and asks
you for nothing; she says plainly that she dare not ask you. But I,
all of us- her relatives, all who love her- beg you, entreat you.
Why should she suffer? Who is any the better for it?"
  "Excuse me, you seem to put me in the position of the guilty party,"
observed Alexei Alexandrovich.
  "Oh, no, oh, no, not at all! Please understand me," said Stepan
Arkadyevich again touching him- this time his hand- as though
feeling sure this physical contact would soften his brother-in-law.
"All I say is this: her position is intolerable, and it might be
alleviated by you, and you will lose nothing by it. I will arrange
it all for you, so that you'll never notice it. You did promise it,
you know."
  "The promise was given before. And I had supposed that the
question of my son had settled the matter. Besides, I hoped that
Anna Arkadyevna had enough magnanimity..." Alexei Alexandrovich
articulated with difficulty, his lips twitching and his face white.
  "She leaves it all to your magnanimity. She begs, she implores one
thing of you- to extricate her from the impossible position in which
she is placed. She does not ask for her son now. Alexei Alexandrovich,
you are a good man. Put yourself in her position for a minute. The
question of divorce for her in her position is a question of life
and death. If you had not promised it once, she would have
reconciled herself to her position, she would have gone on living in
the country. But you promised it, and she wrote to you, and moved to
Moscow. And here she's been for six months in Moscow, where every
chance meeting cuts her to the heart, every day expecting an answer.
Why, it's like keeping a condemned criminal for six months with the
rope round his neck, promising him perhaps death, perhaps mercy.
Have pity on her, and I will undertake to arrange everything.... Vos
scrupules..."
  "I am not talking about that, about that..." Alexei Alexandrovich
interrupted with disgust. "But, perhaps, I promised what I had no
right to promise."
  "So you go back on your promise?"
  "I have never refused to do all that is possible, but I want time to
consider how much of what I promised is possible."
  "No, Alexei Alexandrovich!" cried Oblonsky, jumping up. "I won't
believe that! She's unhappy as only a woman can be unhappy, and you
cannot refuse in such..."
  "As much of what I promised as is possible. Vous professez d'etre
libre penseur. But I, as a believer, cannot, in a matter of such
gravity, act in opposition to the Christian law."
  "But in Christian societies and among us, as far as I'm aware,
divorce is allowed," said Stepan Arkadyevich. "Divorce is sanctioned
even by our church. And we see..."
  "It is allowed, but not in the sense..."
  "Alexei Alexandrovich, you are not like yourself," said Oblonsky,
after a brief pause. "Wasn't it you (and didn't we all appreciate it
in you?) who forgave everything, and, moved simply by Christian
feeling, were ready to make any sacrifice? You said yourself: if a man
take thy cloak, give him thy coat also, and now..."
  "I beg," said Alexei Alexandrovich shrilly, getting suddenly onto
his feet, his face white and his jaws twitching, "I beg you to drop
this... to drop... this subject!"
  "Oh, no! Oh, forgive me, forgive me if I have wounded you," said
Stepan Arkadyevich, holding out his hand with a smile of
embarrassment; "but like a messenger I have simply performed the
commission given me."
  Alexei Alexandrovich gave him his hand, pondered a little, and said:
  "I must think it over and seek for guidance. The day after
tomorrow I will give you a final answer," he said, after considering a
moment.
                             XIX.

  Stepan Arkadyevich was about to go away when Kornei came in to
announce:
  "Sergei Alexeevich!"
  "Who's Sergei Alexeevich?" Stepan Arkadyevich was about to ask,
but he remembered immediately.
  "Ah, Seriozha!" he said aloud.- "'Sergei Alexeevich!' I thought it
was the director of some department.- Anna asked me to see him too,"
he remembered.
  And he recalled the timid, piteous expression with which Anna had
said to him at parting: "Anyway, you will see him. Find out exactly
where he is, who is looking after him. And Stiva... If it were
possible! Could it be possible?" Stepan Arkadyevich knew what was
meant by that "if it were possible,"- if it were possible to arrange
the divorce so as to let her have her son.... Stepan Arkadyevich saw
now that it was useless to dream of that, but still he was glad to see
his nephew.
  Alexei Alexandrovich reminded his brother-in-law that they never
spoke to the boy of his mother, and he begged him not to mention a
single word about her.
  "He was very ill after that interview with his mother, which we
had not foreseen," said Alexei Alexandrovich. "Indeed, we feared for
his life. But with rational treatment, and sea bathing in the
summer, he regained his strength, and now, by the doctor's advice, I
have let him go to school. And certainly the companionship at school
has had a good effect on him, and he is perfectly well, and making
good progress."
  "What a fine fellow he's grown! And he's no longer Seriozha, but
quite full-fledged- Sergei Alexeevich!" said Stepan Arkadyevich,
smiling, as he looked at the handsome, broad-shouldered lad in blue
jacket and long trousers, who walked in alertly and confidently. The
boy looked healthy and good-humored. He bowed to his uncle as to a
stranger, but, recognizing him, he blushed and turned hurriedly away
from him, as though offended and irritated at something. The boy
went up to his father and handed him a note of the marks he had gained
in school.
  "Well, that's very fair," said his father, "you may go."
  "He's thinner and taller, and has grown from a child into a boy; I
like that," said Stepan Arkadyevich. "Do you remember me?"
  The boy looked back quickly at his uncle.
  "Yes, mon oncle," he answered, glancing at his father, and again
he looked downcast.
  His uncle called him to him, and took his hand.
  "Well, and how are you getting on?" he said, wanting to talk to him,
and not knowing what to say.
  The boy, blushing and making no answer, cautiously drew his hand
away. As soon as Stepan Arkadyevich let go his hand, he glanced
doubtfully at his father, and, like a bird set free, he darted out
of the room.
  A year had passed since the last time Seriozha had seen his
mother. Since then he had heard nothing more of her. And in the course
of that year he had gone to school, and made friends among his
schoolfellows. The dreams and memories of his mother, which had made
him ill after seeing her, did not occupy his thoughts now. When they
came back to him, he studiously drove them away, regarding them as
shameful and girlish, below the dignity of a boy and a schoolboy. He
knew that his father and mother were separated by some quarrel, he
knew that he had to remain with his father, and he tried to get used
to that idea.
  He disliked seeing his uncle, so like his mother, for it called up
those memories which he was ashamed of. He disliked it all the more
as, from certain words he had caught as he waited at the study door,
and still more from the faces of his father and uncle, he had
guessed that they must have been talking of his mother. And to avoid
condemning the father with whom he lived and on whom he was dependent,
and, above all, to avoid giving way to sentimentality, which he
considered so degrading, Seriozha tried not to look at his uncle,
who had come to disturb his peace of mind, and not to think of what he
recalled to him.
  But when Stepan Arkadyevich, going out after him, saw him on the
stairs, and, calling to him, asked him how he spent his playtime at
school, Seriozha talked more freely to him away from his father's
presence.
  "We have a railway now," he said in answer to his uncle's
question. "It's like this, you see: two sit on a bench- they're the
passengers; and one stands up straight on the bench. And all are
harnessed to it by their arms or by their belts, and they run
through all the rooms- the doors are left open beforehand. Well, and
it's pretty hard work being the conductor!"
  "That's the one that stands?" Stepan Arkadyevich inquired, smiling.
  "Yes, you want pluck for it, and cleverness too, especially when
they stop all of a sudden, or someone falls down."
  "Yes, that must be a serious matter," said Stepan Arkadyevich,
watching with mournful interest the eager eyes, like his mother's; not
childish now- no longer fully innocent. And though he had promised
Alexei Alexandrovich not to speak of Anna, he could not restrain
himself.
  "Do you remember your mother?" he asked suddenly.
  "No, I don't," Seriozha said quickly. He blushed crimson, his eyes
drooping. And his uncle could get nothing more out of him.
  His Slavic tutor found his pupil on the staircase half an hour
later, and for a long while he could not make out whether he was
ill-tempered or crying.
  "What is it? I expect you hurt yourself when you fell down?" said
the tutor. "I told you it was a dangerous game. And we shall have to
speak to the director."
  "If I had hurt myself, nobody should have found it out, that's
certain."
  "Well, what is it, then?"
  "Leave me alone! If I remember, or if I don't remember?... What
business is it of his? Why should I remember? Leave me in peace!" he
said, addressing not his tutor, but the whole world.
                             XX.

  Stepan Arkadyevich, as usual, did not waste his time in Peterburg.
In Peterburg, besides business, his sister's divorce, and his
coveted appointment, he wanted, as he always did, to freshen himself
up, as he said, after the mustiness of Moscow.
  In spite of its cafes chantants and its omnibuses, Moscow was yet
a stagnant bog. Stepan Arkadyevich always felt it. After living for
some time in Moscow, especially in close relations with his family, he
was conscious of a depression of spirits. After being a long time in
Moscow without a change, he reached a point when he positively began
to be worrying himself over his wife's ill-humor and reproaches,
over his children's health and education, and the petty details of his
official work; even the fact of being in debt worried him. But he
had only to go and stay a little while in Peterburg, in the circle
in which he moved there, where people lived- really lived- instead
of vegetating as in Moscow, and all such ideas vanished and melted
away at once, like wax before the fire.
  A wife?... Only that day he had been talking to Prince Chechensky.
Prince Chechensky had a wife and family, grown-up children in the
Corps of Pages.... And he had another illegitimate family of
children also. Though the first family was very fine too, Prince
Chechensky felt happier in his second family; and he used to take
his eldest son with him to his second family, and told Stepan
Arkadyevich that he thought it good for his son, enlarging his
ideas. What would have been said to that in Moscow?
  Children?... In Peterburg children did not prevent their parents
from enjoying life. The children were brought up in schools, and there
was no trace of the wild idea that prevailed in Moscow, in Lvov's
household, for instance, that all the luxuries of life were for the
children, while the parents have nothing but work and anxiety. Here
people understood that a man is in duty bound to live for himself,
as every man of culture should live.
  Official duties?... Official work here was not the stiff, hopeless
drudgery that it was in Moscow. Here there was some interest in
official life. A chance meeting, a service rendered, a happy phrase, a
knack of facetious mimicry, and a man's career might be made in a
trice. So it had been with Briantsev, whom Stepan Arkadyevich had
met the previous day, and who was one of the highest functionaries
in government now. There was some interest in official work like that.
  The Peterburg attitude on pecuniary matters had an especially
soothing effect on Stepan Arkadyevich. Bartniansky, who must spend
at least fifty thousand to judge by the style he lived in, had made
a remarkable comment the day before on that subject.
  As they were talking before dinner, Stepan Arkadyevich said to
Bartniansky:
  "You're friendly, I fancy, with Mordvinsky; you might do me a favor:
say a word to him, please, for me. There's an appointment I should
like to get- member of the agency..."
  "Oh, I shan't remember all that, if you tell it to me.... But what
possesses you to have to do with railways and Yids?... Take it as
you will, it's a low business."
  Stepan Arkadyevich did not say to Bartniansky that it was a "growing
thing"- Bartniansky would not have understood that.
  "I want the money- I've nothing to live on."
  "You're living, aren't you?"
  "Yes, but in debt."
  "Are you, though? Heavily?" said Bartniansky sympathetically.
  "Very heavily: twenty thousand."
  Bartniansky broke into good-humored laughter.
  "Oh, lucky fellow!" said he. "My debts mount up to a million and a
half, and I've nothing, and still I can live, as you see!"
  And Stepan Arkadyevich saw the correctness of this view not in words
only but in actual fact. Zhivakhov owed three hundred thousand, and
hadn't a copper to bless himself with, and he lived, and in style too!
Count Krivtsov was considered a hopeless case by everyone, and yet
he kept two mistresses. Petrovsky had run through five millions, and
still lived in just the same style, and was even a manager in the
financial department with a salary of twenty thousand. But besides
this, Peterburg had physically an agreeable effect on Stepan
Arkadyevich. It made him younger. In Moscow he sometimes found a
gray hair in his head, dropped asleep after dinner, stretched,
walked slowly upstairs, breathing heavily, was bored by the society of
young women, and did not dance at balls. In Peterburg he always felt
ten years younger.
  His experience in Peterburg was exactly what had been described to
him on the previous day by Prince Piotr Oblonsky, a man of sixty,
who had just come back from abroad:
  "We don't know how to live here," said Piotr Oblonsky. "I spent
the summer in Baden, and you wouldn't believe it, I felt quite a young
man. At a glimpse of a pretty woman, my thoughts... One dines and
drinks a glass of wine, and feels strong and ready for anything. I
came home to Russia- had to see my wife, and, what's more, go to my
country place; and there, you'd hardly believe it, in a fortnight
I'd got into a dressing gown and given up dressing for dinner. Needn't
say I had no thoughts left for pretty women. I became quite an old
gentleman. There was nothing left for me but to think of my eternal
salvation. I went off to Paris- I was at once as right as could be."
  Stepan Arkadyevich felt exactly the difference that Piotr Oblonsky
described. In Moscow he degenerated so much that if he had had to be
there for long together, he might in good earnest have come to
considering his salvation; in Peterburg he felt himself a man of the
world again.
  Between Princess Betsy Tverskaia and Stepan Arkadyevich there had
long existed rather curious relations. Stepan Arkadyevich always
flirted with her in jest, and used to say to her, also in jest, the
most unseemly things, knowing that nothing delighted her so much.
The day after his conversation with Karenin, Stepan Arkadyevich went
to see her, and felt so youthful that in this jesting flirtation and
nonsense he recklessly went so far that he did not know how to
extricate himself, as unluckily he was so far from being attracted
by her that he thought her positively disagreeable. What made it
hard to change the conversation was the fact that he was very
attractive to her. So that he was considerably relieved at the arrival
of Princess Miaghkaia, which cut short their tete-a-tete.
  "Ah, so you're here!" said she when she saw him. "Well, and what
news of your poor sister? You needn't look at me like that," she
added. "Ever since they've all turned against her, all those who're
a thousand times worse than she, I've thought she did a very fine
thing. I can't forgive Vronsky for not letting me know when she was in
Peterburg. I'd have gone to see her and gone about with her
everywhere. Please give her my love. Come, tell me about her."
  "Yes, her position is very difficult; she..." began Stepan
Arkadyevich, in the simplicity of his heart accepting as sterling coin
Princess Miaghkaia's words: "Tell me about her." Princess Miaghkaia
interrupted him immediately, as she always did, and began talking
herself.
  "She's done what they all do, except me- only the others hide it.
But she wouldn't be deceitful, and she did a fine thing. And she did
better still in throwing up that crazy brother-in-law of yours. You
must excuse me. Everybody used to say he was so clever, so very
clever; I was the only one that said he was a fool. Now that he's so
thick with Lidia Ivanovna and Landau, they all say he's crazy, and I
should prefer not to agree with everybody, but this time I can't
help it."
  "Oh, do please explain," said Stepan Arkadyevich; "what does it
mean? Yesterday I was seeing him on my sister's behalf, and I asked
him to give me a final answer. He gave me no answer, and said he would
think it over. But this morning, instead of an answer, I received an
invitation from Countess Lidia Ivanovna for this evening."
  "Ah, so that's it, that's it!" said Princess Miaghkaia gleefully,
"they're going to ask Landau what he's to say."
  "Ask Landau? What for? Who or what's Landau?"
  "What! you don't know Jules Landau, le fameux Jules Landau, le
clairvoyant? He's crazy too, but on him your sister's fate depends.
See what comes of living in the provinces- you know nothing about
anything. Landau, do you see, was a commis in a shop in Paris, and
he went to a doctor's; and in the doctor's waiting room he fell
asleep, and in his sleep he began giving advice to all the patients.
And wonderful advice it was! Then the wife of Iury Meledinsky- you
know, the invalid?- heard of this Landau, and had him to see her
husband. And he cures her husband, though I can't say that I see he
did him much good, for he's just as feeble a creature as ever he
was, but they believed in him, and took him along with them, and
brought him to Russia. Here there's been a general rush to him, and
he's begun doctoring everyone. He cured Countess Bezzubova, and she
took such a fancy to him that she adopted him."
  "Adopted him?"
  "Yes, as her son. He's not Landau any more now, but Count
Bezzubov. That's neither here nor there, though; but Lidia- I'm very
fond of her, but she has a screw loose somewhere- has lost her heart
to this Landau now, and nothing is settled now in her house or
Alexei Alexandrovich's without him, and so your sister's fate is now
in the hands of Landau, alias Count Bezzubov."
                             XXI.

  After a capital dinner and a great deal of cognac drunk at
Bartniansky's, Stepan Arkadyevich, only a little later than the
appointed time, went in to Countess Lidia Ivanovna's.
  "Who else is with the countess? A Frenchman?" Stepan Arkadyevich
asked the hall porter, as he glanced at the familiar overcoat of
Alexei Alexandrovich and a queer, rather naive-looking overcoat with
clasps.
  "Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin and Count Bezzubov," the porter
answered austerely.
  "Princess Miaghkaia guessed right," thought Stepan Arkadyevich, as
he went upstairs. "Curious! It would be quite as well, though, to
get on friendly terms with her. She has immense influence. If she
would say a word to Pomorsky, the thing would be a certainty."
  It was still quite light out-of-doors, but in Countess Lidia
Ivanovna's little drawing room the blinds were drawn and the lamps
lighted.
  At a round table under a lamp sat the Countess and Alexei
Alexandrovich, talking softly. A short, thinnish man, very pale and
handsome, with feminine hips and knock-kneed legs, with fine brilliant
eyes and long hair lying on the collar of his coat, was standing at
the other end of the room gazing at the portraits on the wall. After
greeting the lady of the house and Alexei Alexandrovich, Stepan
Arkadyevich could not resist glancing once more at the unknown man.
  "Monsieur Landau!" the Countess addressed him with a suavity and
circumspection that impressed Oblonsky. And she introduced them.
  Landau looked round hurriedly, came up, and, smiling, laid his
moist, lifeless hand in Stepan Arkadyevich's outstretched hand and
immediately walked away, and fell to gazing at the portraits again.
The Countess and Alexei Alexandrovich looked at each other
significantly.
  "I am very glad to see you, particularly today," said Countess Lidia
Ivanovna, pointing out to Stepan Arkadyevich a seat beside Karenin.
  "I introduced you to him as Landau," she said in a soft voice,
glancing at the Frenchman and again immediately after at Alexei
Alexandrovich, "but he is really Count Bezzubov, as you're probably
aware. Only he does not like the title."
  "Yes, I heard so," answered Stepan Arkadyevich; "they say he
completely cured Countess Bezzubova."
  "She was here today, poor thing!" the Countess said, turning to
Alexei Alexandrovich. "This separation is awful for her. It's such a
blow to her!"
  "And he positively is going?" queried Alexei Alexandrovich.
  "Yes, he's going to Paris. He heard a voice yesterday," said
Countess Lidia Ivanovna, looking at Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "Ah, a voice!" repeated Oblonsky, feeling that he must be as
circumspect as he possibly could in this society, where something
peculiar was happening, or was about to happen, to which he had not
the key.
  A moment's silence followed, after which Countess Lidia Ivanovna, as
though approaching the main topic of conversation, said with a fine
smile to Oblonsky:
  "I've known you for a long while, and am very glad to make a
closer acquaintance with you. Les amis de nos amis sont nos amis.
But to be a true friend, one must enter into the spiritual state of
one's friend, and I fear that you are not doing so in the case of
Alexei Alexandrovich. You understand what I mean?" she said, lifting
her fine pensive eyes.
  "In part, Countess, I understand the position of Alexei
Alexandrovich..." said Oblonsky. Having no clear idea what they were
talking about, he wanted to confine himself to generalities.
  "The change is not in his external position," Countess Lidia
Ivanovna said sternly, following with eyes of love the figure of
Alexei Alexandrovich as he got up and crossed over to Landau; "his
heart is changed, a new heart has been vouchsafed him, and I fear
you don't fully apprehend the change that has taken place in him."
  "Oh, well, in general outlines I can conceive the change. We have
always been friendly, and now..." said Stepan Arkadyevich,
responding with a sympathetic glance to the expression of the
Countess, and mentally balancing the question with which of the two
ministers she was more intimate, so as to know which to have her speak
to.
  "The change that has taken place in him cannot lessen his love for
his neighbors; on the contrary, that change can only intensify love in
his heart. But I am afraid you do not understand me. Won't you have
some tea?" she said, with her eyes indicating the footman, who was
handing round tea on a tray.
  "Not quite, Countess. Of course, his misfortune..."
  "Yes, a misfortune which has proved the highest happiness, when
his heart was made new, was filled to the full with it," she said,
gazing with eyes full of love at Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "I do believe I might ask her to speak to both of them," thought
Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "Oh, of course, Countess," he said; "but I imagine such changes
are a matter so private that no one, even the most intimate friend,
would care to speak of them."
  "On the contrary! We ought to speak freely and help one another."
  "Yes, undoubtedly so, but there is such a difference of convictions,
and besides..." said Oblonsky with a soft smile.
  "There can be no difference where it is a question of holy truth."
  "Oh, no, of course; but..." and Stepan Arkadyevich paused in
confusion. He understood at last that they were talking of religion.
  "I fancy he will go into a trance immediately," said Alexei
Alexandrovich in a whisper full of meaning, going up to Lidia
Ivanovna.
  Stepan Arkadyevich looked round. Landau was sitting at the window,
leaning on his elbow and the back of his chair, his head drooping.
Noticing that all eyes were turned on him, he raised his head and
smiled a smile of childlike artlessness.
  "Don't take any notice," said Lidia Ivanovna, and she lightly
moved a chair up for Alexei Alexandrovich. "I have observed..." she
was beginning, when a footman came into the room with a letter.
Lidia Ivanovna rapidly ran her eyes over the note, and, excusing
herself, wrote an answer with extraordinary rapidity, handed it to the
man, and came back to the table. "I have observed," she went on, "that
Moscow people, especially the men, are more than all others
indifferent to religion."
  "Oh, no, Countess, I thought Moscow people had the reputation of
being the firmest in the faith," answered Stepan Arkadyevich.
  "But as far as I can make out, you are unfortunately one of the
indifferent ones," said Alexei Alexandrovich, turning to him with a
weary smile.
  "How anyone can be indifferent!" said Lidia Ivanovna.
  "I am not so much indifferent on that subject as I am waiting in
suspense," said Stepan Arkadyevich, with his most deprecating smile.
"I hardly think that the time for such questions has come yet for me."
  Alexei Alexandrovich and Lidia Ivanovna looked at each other.
  "We can never tell whether the time has come for us or not," said
Alexei Alexandrovich sternly. "We ought not to think whether we are
ready or not ready. God's grace is not guided by human considerations:
sometimes it comes not to those who strive for it, and comes to
those who are unprepared, like Saul."
  "No, I believe it won't be just yet," said Lidia Ivanovna, who had
been meanwhile watching the movements of the Frenchman. Landau got
up and came to them.
  "Do you allow me to listen?" he asked.
  "Oh, yes; I did not want to disturb you," said Lidia Ivanovna,
gazing tenderly at him; "sit here with us."
  "One has only not to close one's eyes to shut out the light," Alexei
Alexandrovich went on.
  "Ah, if you knew the happiness we know, feeling His presence ever in
our hearts!" said Countess Lidia Ivanovna with a rapturous smile.
  "But a man may feel himself inapt sometimes to rise to that height,"
said Stepan Arkadyevich, conscious of hypocrisy in admitting this
religious height, but at the same time unable to bring himself to
acknowledge his freethinking views before a person who, by a single
word to Pomorsky, might procure him the coveted appointment.
  "That is, you mean that sin keeps him back?" said Lidia Ivanovna.
"But that is a false idea. There is no sin for believers, their sin
has been atoned for. Pardon," she added, looking at the footman, who
came in again with another letter. She read it and gave a verbal
answer: "Tomorrow at the Grand Duchess's, say.- For the believer sin
is not," she went on.
  "Yes, but faith without works is dead," said Stepan Arkadyevich,
recalling the phrase from the catechism, and only by his smile
clinging to his independence.
  "There you have it- from the epistle of St. James," said Alexei
Alexandrovich, addressing Lidia Ivanovna, with a certain
reproachfulness in his tone. It was unmistakably a subject they had
discussed more than once before. "What harm has been done by the false
interpretation of that passage! Nothing holds men back from belief
like that misinterpretation. 'I have not works, so I cannot
believe,' though all the while that's not what is said, but the very
opposite."
  "Striving for God, saving the soul by fasting," said Countess
Lidia Ivanovna, with disgusted contempt, "those are the crude ideas of
our monks.... Yet that is nowhere said. It is far simpler and easier,"
she added, looking at Oblonsky with the same encouraging smile with
which at Court she encouraged youthful maids of honor, disconcerted by
the new surroundings of the Court.
  "We are saved by Christ who suffered for us. We are saved by faith,"
Alexei Alexandrovich chimed in, with a glance of approval at her
words.
  "Vous comprenez l'anglais?" asked Lidia Ivanovna, and receiving a
reply in the affirmative, she got up and began looking through a shelf
of books.
  "I want to read him Safe and Happy, or Under the Wing," she said,
looking inquiringly at Karenin. And finding the book, and sitting down
again in her place, she opened it. "It's very short. In it is
described the way by which faith can be reached, and the happiness,
above all earthly bliss, with which it fills the soul. The believer
cannot be unhappy because he is not alone. But you will see." She
was just settling herself to read when the footman came in again.
"Madame Borozdina? Tell her tomorrow, at two o'clock. Yes," she
said, marking the place in the book by inserting a finger, and
gazing before her with her fine pensive eyes, "that is how true
faith acts. You know Marie Sanina? You know about her trouble? She
lost her only child. She was in despair. And what happened? She
found this comforter, and she thanks God now for the death of her
child. Such is the happiness faith brings!"
  "Oh, yes, that is most..." said Stepan Arkadyevich, glad they were
going to read, and let him have a chance to collect his faculties.
"No, I see I'd better not ask her about anything today," he thought.
"If only I can get out of this without putting my foot in it!"
  "It will be dull for you," said Countess Lidia Ivanovna,
addressing Landau; "you don't know English- but it's short."
  "Oh, I shall understand," said Landau, with the same smile, and he
closed his eyes.
  Alexei Alexandrovich and Lidia Ivanovna exchanged meaning glances,
and the reading began.
                             XXII.

  Stepan Arkadyevich felt completely nonplused by the strange talk
which he was hearing for the first time. The complexity of
Peterburg, as a rule, had a stimulating effect on him, rousing him out
of his Moscow stagnation. But he liked these complications, and
understood them only in the circles he knew and was at home in. In
these unfamiliar surroundings he was puzzled and disconcerted, and
could not get his bearings. As he listened to Countess Lidia Ivanovna,
aware of the beautiful, naive- or perhaps knavish, he could not decide
which- eyes of Landau fixed upon him, Stepan Arkadyevich began to be
conscious of a peculiar heaviness in his head.
  The most incongruous ideas were in confusion in his head. "Marie
Sanina is glad her child's dead.... How good a smoke would be
now!... To be saved, one need only believe, and the monks don't know
how the thing's to be done, but Countess Lidia Ivanovna does
know.... And why is my head so heavy? Is it the cognac, or the fact of
all this being so very queer? Anyway, I fancy I've done nothing
unseemly so far. But, anyway, it won't do to ask her now. They say
they make one pray. I only hope they won't make me! That'll be too
imbecile. And what stuff it is she's reading! But she has a good
accent. Landau- Bezzubov- what's he Bezzubov for?" All at once
Stepan Arkadyevich became aware that his lower jaw was
uncontrollably forming a yawn. He pulled his whiskers to cover the
yawn, and shook himself together. But soon after he became aware
that he was dropping asleep and on the very point of snoring. He
recovered himself at the very moment when the voice of Countess
Lidia Ivanovna was saying "he's asleep."
  Stepan Arkadyevich started with dismay, feeling guilty and caught.
But he was reassured at once by seeing that the words "he's asleep"
asleep referred not to him, but to Landau. The Frenchman had fallen
asleep as well as Stepan Arkadyevich. But Stepan Arkadyevich's being
asleep would have offended them, as he thought (though even this, he
thought, might not be so, as everything seemed so queer), while
Landau's being asleep delighted them extremely, especially Countess
Lidia Ivanovna.
  "Mon ami," said Lidia Ivanovna, carefully holding the folds of her
silk gown so as not to rustle, and in her excitement calling Karenin
not Alexei Alexandrovich, but mon ami, "donnez-lui la main. Vous
voyez? Sh!" she hissed at the footman as he came in again. "Not at
home!"
  The Frenchman was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, with his
head on the back of his chair, and his moist hand, as it lay on his
knee, made faint movements, as though trying to catch something.
Alexei Alexandrovich got up, tried to move carefully, but stumbled
against the table, drew up, and laid his hand in the Frenchman's hand.
Stepan Arkadyevich got up too, and opening his eyes wide, trying to
wake himself up if he was asleep, he looked first at one and then at
the other. It was all real. Stepan Arkadyevich felt that his head
was getting worse and worse.
  "Que la personne qui est arrivee la derniere, celle qui demande,
qu'elle- sorte! Qu'elle sorte!" articulated the Frenchman, without
opening his eyes.
  "Vous m'excuserez, mais vous voyez... Revenez vers dix heures,
encore mieux demain."
  "Qu'elle sorte!" repeated the Frenchman impatiently.
  "C'est moi, n'est-ce pas?" And receiving an answer in the
affirmative, Stepan Arkadyevich, forgetting the favor he had meant
to ask of Lidia Ivanovna, and forgetting his sister's affairs,
caring for nothing, but filled with the sole desire to escape as
soon as possible, went out on tiptoe and ran out into the street as
though from a plague-stricken house. For a long while he chatted and
joked with his driver, trying to recover his spirits.
  At the French theater where he arrived for the last act, and
afterward at the Tatar restaurant after his champagne, Stepan
Arkadyevich felt a little refreshed in the atmosphere he was used
to. But still he felt quite unlike himself all that evening.
  On getting home to Piotr Oblonsky's, where he was staying, Stepan
Arkadyevich found a note from Betsy. She wrote to him that she was
very anxious to finish their interrupted conversation, and begged
him to come the next day. He had scarcely read this note, and
frowned at its contents, when he heard below the ponderous tramp of
the servants carrying something heavy.
  Stepan Arkadyevich went out to look. It was the rejuvenated Piotr
Oblonsky. He was so drunk that he could not walk upstairs; but he told
them to set him on his legs when he saw Stepan Arkadyevich, and,
clinging to him, walked with him into his room, and there began
telling him how he had spent the evening, and fell asleep doing so.
  Stepan Arkadyevich was in very low spirits, which happened rarely
with him, and for a long while he could not go to sleep. Everything he
could recall to his mind, everything was disgusting; but, most
disgusting of all, as if it were something shameful, was the memory of
the evening he had spent at Countess Lidia Ivanovna's.
  Next day he received from Alexei Alexandrovich a final answer,
refusing to grant Anna's divorce, and he understood that his
decision was based on what the Frenchman had said in his real or
pretended trance.
                             XXIII.

  In order to carry through any undertaking in family life, there must
necessarily be either complete dissension between the husband and
wife, or loving agreement. When the relations of a couple are
vacillating and neither one thing nor the other, no sort of enterprise
can be undertaken.
  Many families remain for years in the same place, though both
husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither
complete dissension nor agreement between them.
  Both Vronsky and Anna felt life in Moscow insupportable in the
heat and dust, when the spring sunshine was followed by the glare of
summer, and all the trees in the boulevards had long since been in
full leaf, and the leaves were covered with dust. But they did not
go back to Vozdvizhenskoe, as they had arranged to do long before;
they went staying on in Moscow, though they both loathed it, because
of late there had been no agreement between them.
  The irritability that kept them apart had no external cause, and all
efforts to come to an understanding intensified it, instead of
removing it. It was an inner irritation, grounded in her mind on the
conviction that his love had grown less; in his, on regret that he had
put himself for her sake in a difficult position, which she, instead
of lightening, made still more difficult. Neither of them gave full
utterance to his or her sense of grievance, but they considered each
other in the wrong, and tried on every pretext to prove this to one
another.
  In her eyes the whole of him, with all his habits, ideas, desires,
with all his spiritual and physical temperament, was one thing- love
for women, and that love, as she felt, ought to be entirely
concentrated on her alone. That love was less; consequently, as she
reasoned, he must have transferred part of his love to other women
or to another woman- and she was jealous. She was jealous not of any
particular woman but of the decrease of his love. Not having found
an object for her jealousy, she was on the lookout for it. At the
slightest hint she transferred her jealousy from one object to
another. At one time she was jealous of those low women with whom he
might so easily renew his old bachelor ties; then she was jealous of
the society women he might meet; then she was jealous of the imaginary
girl whom he might want to marry, for whose sake he would break with
her. And this last form of jealousy tortured her most of all,
especially as he had unwarily told her, in a moment of frankness, that
his mother knew him so little that she had had audacity to try to
persuade him to marry the young Princess Sorokina.
  And being jealous of him, Anna was indignant against him and found
grounds for indignation in everything. For everything that was
difficult in her position she blamed him. The agonizing condition of
suspense she had passed at Moscow, the tardiness and indecision of
Alexei Alexandrovich, her solitude- she put it all down to him. If
he had loved her he would have seen all the bitterness of her
position, and would have rescued her from it. For her being in
Moscow and not in the country, he was to blame too. He could not
live buried in the country as she would have liked to do. He must have
society, and he had put her in this awful position, the bitterness
of which he would not see. And again, it was his fault that she was
forever separated from her son.
  Even the rare moments of tenderness that came from time to time
did not soothe her; in his tenderness now she saw a shade of
complacency, of self-confidence, which had not been of old and which
exasperated her.
  It was already dusk. Anna was alone, and waiting for him to come
back from a bachelor dinner. She walked up and down in his study
(the room where the noise from the street was least heard), and
thought over every detail of their yesterday's quarrel. Going back
from the well-remembered, offensive words of the quarrel to what had
been the ground of it, she arrived at last at its origin. For a long
while she could hardly believe that their dissension had arisen from a
conversation so inoffensive, of so little moment to either. But so
it actually had been. It all arose from his laughing at the girls'
high schools, declaring they were useless, while she defended them. He
had spoken slightingly of women's education in general, and had said
that Hannah, Anna's English protegee, had not the slightest need to
know anything of physics.
  This had irritated Anna. She saw in this a contemptuous reference to
her occupations. And she had bethought her of a phrase to pay him back
for the pain he had inflicted upon her, and had uttered it.
  "I don't expect you to understand me, my feelings, as anyone who
loved me might, but simple delicacy I did expect," she had said.
  And he had actually flushed with vexation, and had said something
unpleasant. She could not recall her answer, but at that point, with
an unmistakable desire to wound her too, he had said:
  "I feel no interest in your infatuation over this girl, that's true,
because I see it's unnatural."
  The cruelty with which he shattered the world she had built up for
herself so laboriously to enable her to endure her hard life, the
injustice with which he had accused her of affectation, of
artificiality, aroused her.
  "I am very sorry that nothing but the coarse and material is
comprehensible and natural to you," she had said, and walked out of
the room.
  When he had come in to her yesterday evening, they had not
referred to the quarrel; both felt that the quarrel had been
smoothed over, but was not at an end.
  Today he had not been at home all day, and she felt so lonely and
wretched in being on bad terms with him that she wanted to forget it
all, to forgive him, and be reconciled with him; she wanted to throw
the blame on herself and to justify him.
  "I am myself to blame. I'm irritable, I'm insanely jealous. I will
make it up with him, and we'll go away to the country; there I shall
be more at peace," she said to herself.
  "Unnatural!" She suddenly recalled the word that had stung her
most of all, not so much the word itself as the intent to wound her
with which it was said. "I know what he meant; he meant- unnatural,
not loving my own daughter to love another person's child. What does
he know of love for children, of my love for Seriozha, whom I've
sacrificed for him? But that wish to wound me! No, he loves another
woman, it can't be otherwise."
  And perceiving that, while trying to regain her peace of mind, she
had gone round the same circle that she had been round so often
before, and had come back to her former state of exasperation, she was
horrified at herself. "Can it be impossible? Can I really take the
blame on myself?" she said to herself, and began again from the
beginning. "He's truthful, he's honest, he loves me. I love him, and
in a few days the divorce will come. What more do I want? I want peace
of mind and trust, and I will take the blame on myself. Yes, now
when he comes in, I will tell him I was wrong, though I was not wrong,
and we will go away."
  And to escape thinking any more, and being overcome by irritability,
she rang and ordered the boxes to be brought up for packing their
things for the country.
  At ten o'clock Vronsky came in.
                             XXIV.

  "Well, was it amusing?" she asked, coming out to meet him with a
penitent and meek expression.
  "Just as usual," he answered, seeing at a glance that she was in one
of her good moods. He was used by now to these transitions, and he was
particularly glad to see it today, as he was in a specially good humor
himself.
  "What do I see? Come, that's good!" he said, pointing to the boxes
in the passage.
  "Yes, we must go. I went out for a drive, and it was so fine I
longed to be in the country. There's nothing to keep you, is there?"
  "It's the one thing I desire. I'll be back directly, and we'll
talk it over; I only want to change my coat. Order some tea."
  And he went into his room.
  There was something mortifying in the way he had said "Come,
that's good," as one says to a child when it leaves off being naughty,
and still more mortifying was the contrast between her penitent and
his self-confident tone; and for one instant she felt the lust of
strife rising up in her again, but making an effort she conquered
it, and met Vronsky as good-humoredly as before.
  When he came in she told him, partly repeating phrases she had
prepared beforehand, how she had spent the day, and her plans for
going away.
  "You know, it came to me almost like an inspiration," she said. "Why
wait here for the divorce? Won't it be just the same in the country? I
can't wait any longer! I don't want to go on hoping, I don't want to
hear anything about the divorce. I have made up my mind it shall not
have any more influence on my life. Do you agree?"
  "Oh, yes!" he said, glancing uneasily at her excited face.
  "What did you do? Who was there?" she said, after a pause.
  Vronsky mentioned the names of the guests. "The dinner was
first-rate, and the boat race, and it was all pleasant enough, but
in Moscow they can never do anything without something ridicule. A
lady of a sort appeared on the scene, teacher of swimming to the Queen
of Sweden, and gave us an exhibition of her skill."
  "How? Did she swim?" asked Anna, frowning.
  "In an absurd red costume de natation; she was old and hideous
too. So when shall we go?"
  "What an absurd fancy! Why, did she swim in some special way, then?"
said Anna, not answering.
  "There was absolutely nothing in it. That's just what I say- it
was awfully stupid. Well, then, when do you think of going?"
  Anna shook her head as though trying to drive away some unpleasant
idea.
  "When? Why, the sooner the better! By tomorrow we shan't be ready.
The day after tomorrow."
  "Yes.... Oh, no, wait a minute! The day after tomorrow's Sunday- I
have to be at maman's," said Vronsky, embarrassed, because as soon
as he uttered his mother's name he was aware of her intent, suspicious
eyes. His embarrassment confirmed her suspicion. She flushed hotly and
drew away from him. It was now not the Queen of Sweden's swimming
mistress who filled Anna's imagination, but the young Princess
Sorokina. She was staying in a village near Moscow with Countess
Vronsky.
  "Can't you go tomorrow?" she said.
  "Well, no! The deeds and the money for the business I'm going
there for I can't get by tomorrow," he answered.
  "If so, we won't go at all."
  "But why so?"
  "I shall not go later. Monday or never!"
  "What for?" said Vronsky, as though in amazement. "Why, there's no
meaning in it!"
  "There's no meaning in it to you, because you care nothing for me.
You don't care to understand my life. The one thing that I cared for
here was Hannah. You say it's affectation. Why, you said yesterday
that I don't love my daughter, that I love this English girl, that
it's unnatural. I should like to know what life there is for me that
could be natural!"
  For an instant she had a clear vision of what she was doing, and was
horrified at how she had fallen away from her resolution. But even
though she knew it was her own ruin, she could not restrain herself,
could not keep herself from proving to him that he was wrong, could
not give way to him.
  "I never said that; I said I did not sympathize with this sudden
passion."
  "How is it, though you boast of your straightforwardness, you
don't tell the truth?"
  "I never boast, and I never tell lies," he said slowly,
restraining his rising anger. "It's a great pity if you can't
respect..."
  "Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should
be.... And if you don't love me any more, it would be better and
more honest to say so."
  "No, this is becoming unbearable!" cried Vronsky, getting up from
his chair; and stopping short, facing her, he said speaking
deliberately:
  "What do you try my patience for?" looking as though he might have
said much more, but was restraining himself. "It has limits."
  "What do you mean by that?" she cried, looking with terror at the
undisguised hatred in his whole face, and especially in his cruel,
sinister eyes.
  "I mean to say..." he was beginning, but he checked himself. "I must
ask what it is you want of me?"
  "What I can want? All I can want is that you should not desert me,
as you think of doing," she said, understanding all he had not
uttered. "But that I don't want; that's secondary. I want love, and
there is none. So then, all is at an end."
  She turned toward the door.
  "Stop! sto-op!" said Vronsky, with no change in the gloomy lines
of his brows, though he held her by the hand. "What is it all about? I
said that we must put off going for three days, and on that you told
me I was lying, that I was not an honorable man."
  "Yes, and I repeat that the man who reproaches me with having
sacrificed everything for me," she said, recalling the words of a
still earlier quarrel, "is worse than a dishonorable man- he's a
heartless man."
  "Oh, there are limits to endurance!" he cried, and hastily let go
her hand.
  "He hates me, that's clear," she thought, and in silence, without
looking round, she walked with faltering steps out of the room. "He
loves another woman, that's even clearer," she said to herself as
she went into her own room. "I want love, and there is none. So, then,
all is at an end," she repeated the words she had said, "and it must
be put to an end."
  "But how?" she asked herself, and she sat down in a low chair before
the looking glass.
  Thoughts of where she would go now, whether to the aunt who had
brought her up, to Dolly, or simply alone, abroad, and of what he
was doing now alone in his study; whether this was the final
quarrel, or whether reconciliation were still possible; and of what
all her old friends at Peterburg would say of her now; and of how
Alexei Alexandrovich would look at it, and many other ideas of what
would happen now after the rupture, came into her head; but she did
not give herself up to them with all her heart. At the bottom of her
heart was some obscure idea that alone interested her, but she could
not get clear sight of it. Thinking once more of Alexei Alexandrovich,
she recalled the time of her illness after her confinement, and the
feeling which never left her at that time. "Why didn't I die?" she
recalled the words and the feeling of that time. And all at once she
knew what was in her soul. Yes, it was that idea which alone solved
all. "Yes, to die!..."
  "And the shame and disgrace of Alexei Alexandrovich and of Seriozha,
and my awful shame- death will be the salvation of everything. To die!
And he will feel remorse; will be sorry; will love me; he will
suffer on my account." With a fixed smile of commiseration for herself
she sat down in the armchair, taking off and putting on the rings on
her left hand, vividly picturing from different sides his feelings
after her death.
  Approaching footsteps- his steps- distracted her attention. As
though absorbed in the arrangement of her rings, she did not even turn
to him.
  He went up to her, and taking her by the hand, said softly:
  "Anna, we'll go the day after tomorrow, if you like. I agree to
everything."
  She did not speak.
  "What is it?" he urged.
  "You know," she said, and at the same instant, unable to restrain
herself any longer, she burst into sobs.
  "Cast me off- do!"- she articulated between her sobs. "I'll go
away tomorrow.... I'll do more than that. What am I? A depraved woman!
A stone round your neck. I don't want to make you wretched; I don't
want to! I'll set you free. You don't love me; you love someone else!"
  Vronsky besought her to be calm, and declared that there was no
trace of foundation for her jealousy; that he had never ceased, and
never would cease, to love her; that he loved her more than ever.
  "Anna, why distress yourself and me so?" he said to her, kissing her
hands. There was tenderness now in his face, and she fancied she
caught the sound of tears in his voice, and she felt them wet on her
hand. And instantly Anna's despairing jealousy changed to a despairing
passion of tenderness. She put her arms round him, and covered with
kisses his head, his neck, his hands.
                             XXV.

  Feeling that the reconciliation was complete, Anna set eagerly to
work in the morning preparing for their departure. Though it was not
settled whether they should go on Monday or Tuesday, as they had
each given way to the other, Anna packed busily, feeling absolutely
indifferent whether they went a day earlier or later. She was standing
in her room over an open box, taking things out of it, when he came in
to see her earlier than usual, dressed to go out.
  "I'm going off at once to see maman; she can send me the money by
Iegorov. And I shall be ready to go tomorrow," he said.
  Though she was in such a good mood, the mention of his visit to
his mother's gave her a pang.
  "No, I shan't be ready by then myself," she said; and at once
reflected, "so then it was possible to arrange to do as I wished."-
"No, do as you meant to do. Go into the dining room, I'm coming
directly. It's only to turn out those things that aren't wanted,"
she said, putting something more on the heap of frippery that lay in
Annushka's arms.
  Vronsky was eating his beefsteak when she came into the dining room.
  "You wouldn't believe how distasteful these rooms have become to
me," she said, sitting down beside him to her coffee. "There's nothing
more awful than these chambres garnies. There's no individuality in
them, no soul. These clocks, and curtains, and, worst of all, the
wallpapers- they're a nightmare. I think of Vozdvizhenskoe as the
promised land. You're not sending the horses off yet?"
  "No, they will come after us. Where are you going to?"
  "I wanted to go to Wilson's to take some dresses to her. So it's
really to be tomorrow?" she said in a cheerful voice; but suddenly her
face changed.
  Vronsky's valet came in to ask him to sign a receipt for a
telegram from Peterburg. There was nothing out of the way in Vronsky's
getting a telegram, but he said, as though anxious to conceal
something from her, that the receipt was in his study, and he turned
hurriedly to her.
  "By tomorrow, without fail, I will finish it all."
  "From whom is the telegram?" she asked, not hearing him.
  "From Stiva," he answered reluctantly.
  "Why didn't you show it to me? What secret can there be between
Stiva and me?"
  Vronsky called the valet back, and told him to bring the telegram.
  "I didn't want to show it to you, because Stiva has such a passion
for telegraphing: why telegraph when nothing is settled?"
  "About the divorce?"
  "Yes; but he says he has not been able to come at anything yet. He
has promised a decisive answer in a day or two. But here it is; read
it."
  With trembling hands Anna took the telegram, and read what Vronsky
had told her. At the end was added: "little hope; but I will do
everything possible and impossible."
  "I said yesterday that it's absolutely nothing to me when I get a
divorce, or whether I never get it," she said, flushing crimson.
"There was not the slightest necessity to hide it from me."- "So he
may hide, and does hide, his correspondence with women from me," she
thought.
  "Iashvin meant to come this morning with Voitov," said Vronsky; "I
believe he's won from Pievtsov all and more than he can pay- about
sixty thousand."
  "No," she said, further irritated by his so obviously showing by
this change of subject that he knew she was irritated, "why did you
suppose that this news would affect me so, that you must even try to
hide it? I said I don't want to consider it, and I should have liked
you to care as little about it as I do."
  "I care about it because I like definiteness," he said.
  "Definiteness is not in the form, but in love," she said, more and
more irritated, not by his words, but by the tone of cool composure in
which he spoke. "What do you want it for?"
  "My God! Love again," he thought, frowning.
  "Oh, you know what for; for your sake and your children's in the
future."
  "There won't be any children in the future."
  "That's a great pity," he said.
  "You want it for the children's sake, but you don't think of me?"
she said, quite forgetting, or not having heard that he had said, "For
your sake and the children's."
  The question of the possibility of having children had long been a
subject of dispute and irritation to her. His desire to have
children she interpreted as a proof he did not prize her beauty.
  "Oh, I said: for your sake. Above all for your sake," he repeated,
frowning as though in pain, "because I am certain that the greater
part of your irritability comes from the indefiniteness of the
position."
  "Yes, now he has laid aside all pretense, and all his cold hatred
for me is apparent," she thought, not hearing his words, but
watching with terror the cold, cruel judge who, mocking her, looked
out of his eyes.
  "The cause isn't that," she said, "and, indeed, I don't see how
the cause of my irritability, as you call it, can be in my being
completely in your power. What indefiniteness is there in the
position? On the contrary."
  "I am very sorry that you don't care to understand," he interrupted,
obstinately anxious to give utterance to his thought. "The
indefiniteness consists in your imagining that I am free."
  "On that score you can set your mind quite at rest," she said, and
turning away from him, she began drinking her coffee.
  She lifted her cup, with her little finger held apart, and put it to
her lips. After drinking a few sips she glanced at him, and by his
expression she saw clearly that he was repelled by her hand, and her
gesture, and the sound made by her lips.
  "I don't care in the least what your mother thinks, and what match
she wants to make for you," she said, putting the cup down with a
shaking hand.
  "But we are not talking about that."
  "Yes, that's just what we are talking about. And let me tell you
that a heartless woman, whether she's old or not old, your mother or
anyone else, is of no consequence to me, and I would not consent to
know her."
  "Anna, I beg you not to speak disrespectfully of my mother."
  "A woman whose heart does not tell her where her son's happiness and
honor lie has no heart."
  "I repeat my request that you will not speak disrespectfully of my
mother, whom I respect," he said, raising his voice and looking
sternly at her.
  She did not answer. Looking intently at him, at his face, his hands,
she recalled all the details of their reconciliation the previous day,
and his passionate caresses. "There, just such caresses he has
lavished, and will lavish, and longs to lavish on other women!" she
thought.
  "You don't love your mother. That's all talk, and talk, and talk!"
she said, looking at him with hatred in her eyes.
  "Even if so, you must..."
  "Must decide, and I have decided," she said, and she would have gone
away, but at that moment Iashvin walked into the room. Anna greeted
him and remained.
  Why, when there was a tempest in her soul, and she felt she was
standing at a turning point in her life, which might have fearful
consequences- why, at that minute, she had to keep up appearances
before an outsider, who sooner or later must know it all- she did
not know. But at once quelling the storm within her, she sat down
and began talking to their guest.
  "Well, how are you getting on? Has your debt been paid you?" she
asked Iashvin.
  "Oh, pretty fair; I fancy I shan't get it all, while I ought to go
on Wednesday. And when are you off?" said Iashvin, looking at Vronsky,
and unmistakably surmising a quarrel.
  "The day after tomorrow, I think," said Vronsky.
  "You've been intending to go so long, though."
  "But now it's quite decided," said Anna, looking Vronsky straight in
the face with a look which told him not to dream of the possibility of
reconciliation.
  "Don't you feel sorry for that unlucky Pievtsov?" she went on,
talking to Iashvin.
  "I've never asked myself the question, Anna Arkadyevna, whether
I'm sorry for him or not. You see, all my fortune's here"- he
touched his breast pocket- "and just now I'm a wealthy man. But
today I'm going to the club, and I may come out a beggar. You see,
whoever sits down to play with me wants to leave me without a shirt to
my back, and I wish the same to him. And so we fight it out, and
that's the pleasure of it."
  "Well, but suppose you were married," said Anna, "how would it be
for your wife?"
  Iashvin laughed.
  "That's to all appearance why I'm not married, and never mean to
be."
  "And Helsingfors?" said Vronsky, entering into the conversation
and glancing at Anna's smiling face. Meeting his eyes, Anna's face
instantly took a coldly severe expression as though she were saying to
him: "It's not forgotten. It's all the same."
  "Were you really in love?" she said to Iashvin.
  "Oh heavens! Ever so many times! But, you see, some men can play,
but only so that they can always lay down their cards when the hour of
a rendez-vous comes, while I can take up love, but only so as not to
be late for my cards in the evening. That's how I manage things."
  "No, I didn't mean that, but the real thing." She would have said
Helsingfors, but would not repeat the word used by Vronsky.
  Voitov, who was buying the horse, came in. Anna got up and went
out of the room.
  Before leaving the house, Vronsky went into her room. She would have
pretended to be looking for something on the table, but ashamed of
making a pretense, she looked straight in his face with cold eyes.
  "What do you want?" she asked in French.
  "To get the guarantee for Gambetta- I've sold him," he said, in a
tone which said more clearly than words, "I've no time for
discussing things, and it would lead to nothing."
  "I'm not to blame in any way," he thought. "If she will punish
herself, tant pis pour elle." But as he was going he fancied that
she said something, and his heart suddenly ached with pity for her.
  "Eh, Anna?" he queried.
  "I said nothing," she answered just as coldly and calmly.
  "Oh, nothing, tant pis then," he thought, feeling cold again, and he
turned and went out. As he was going out he caught a glimpse in the
looking glass of her face, white, with quivering lips. He even
wanted to stop and to say some comforting word to her, but his legs
carried him out of the room before he could think what to say. The
whole of that day he spent away from home, and when he came in late in
the evening the maid told him that Anna Arkadyevna had a headache
and begged him not to go in to her.
                             XXVI.

  Never before had a day been passed in quarrel. Today was the first
time. And this was not a quarrel. It was the open acknowledgment of
complete coldness. Was it possible to glance at her as he had
glanced when he came into the room for the guarantee?- to look at her,
see her heart was breaking with despair, and go out without a word
with that face of callous composure? He was not merely cold to her, he
hated her because he loved another woman- that was clear.
  And remembering all the cruel words he had said, Anna supplied, too,
the words that he had unmistakably wished to say and could have said
to her, and she grew more and more exasperated.
  "I won't prevent you," he might say. "You can go where you like. You
were unwilling to be divorced from your husband, no doubt so that
you might go back to him. Go back to him. If you want money, I'll give
it to you. How many roubles do you want?"
  All the most cruel words that a brutal man could say, he said to her
in her imagination, and she could not forgive him for them, as
though he had actually said them.
  "But didn't he only yesterday swear he loved me, he, a truthful
and sincere man? Haven't I despaired for nothing many times
already?" she said to herself right after this.
  All that day, except for the visit to Wilson's, which occupied two
hours, Anna spent in doubts whether everything were over or whether
there were still hope of reconciliation; whether she should go away at
once or see him once more. She was expecting him the whole day, and in
the evening, as she went to her own room, leaving a message for him
that her head ached, she said to herself, "If he comes in spite of
what the maid says, it means that he loves me still. If not, it
means that all is over, and then I will decide what I am to do!..."
  In the evening she heard the rumbling of his carriage stop at the
entrance, his ring, his steps, and his conversation with the
servant; he believed what was told him, did not care to find out more,
and went to his own room. So then, everything was at an end.
  And death rose clearly and vividly before her mind as the sole means
of bringing back love for her in his heart, of punishing him and of
gaining the victory in that strife which the evil spirit in possession
of her heart was waging with him.
  Now nothing mattered: going or not going to Vozdvizhenskoe,
getting or not getting a divorce from her husband- all that did not
matter. The one thing that mattered was punishing him.
  When she poured herself out her usual dose of opium, and thought
that she had only to drink off the whole bottle to die, it seemed to
her so simple and easy, that she began musing with enjoyment on how he
would suffer, and repent, and love her memory when it would be too
late. She lay in bed with open eyes, by the light of a single
guttering candle, gazing at the carved cornice of the ceiling and at
the shadow of the screen that covered part of it, while she vividly
pictured to herself how he would feel when she would be no more,
when she would be only a memory to him. "How could I say such cruel
things to her?" he would say. "How could I go out of the room
without saying anything to her? But now she is no more. She has gone
away from us forever. She is..." Suddenly the shadow of the screen
wavered, pounced on the whole cornice, the whole ceiling; other
shadows from the other side swooped to meet it; for an instant the
shadows flitted back, but then with fresh swiftness they darted
forward, wavered, mingled, and all was darkness. "Death!" she thought.
And such horror came upon her that for a long while she could not
realize where she was, and for a long while her trembling hands
could not find the matches and light another candle, instead of the
one that had burned down and gone out. "No, anything- only to live!
Why, I love him! Why, he loves me! This has been before and will
pass," she said, feeling that tears of joy at the return to life
were trickling down her cheeks. And to escape from her panic she
went hurriedly to his room.
  He was asleep there, and sleeping soundly. She went up to him, and
holding the light above his face, she gazed a long while at him. Now
when he was asleep, she loved him so that at the sight of him she
could not keep back tears of tenderness. But she knew that if he waked
up he would look at her with cold eyes, convinced that he was right,
and that before telling him of her love, she would have to prove to
him that he had been wrong in his treatment of her. Without waking
him, she went back, and after a second dose of opium she fell toward
morning into a heavy, incomplete sleep, during which she never quite
lost consciousness.
  In the morning she was waked by a horrible nightmare, which had
recurred several times in her dreams, even before her connection
with Vronsky. A little old man with unkempt beard was doing something,
stooping over some iron, muttering meaningless French words, and
she, as she always did in this nightmare (it was what made the
horror of it), felt that this peasant was taking no notice of her, but
was doing something horrible with the iron- over her. And she waked up
in a cold sweat.
  When she got up, the previous day came back to her as though
veiled in mist.
  "There was a quarrel. Just what has happened several times. I said I
had a headache, and he did not come in to see me. Tomorrow we're going
away; I must see him and get ready for the journey," she said to
herself. And learning that he was in his study, she went down to
him. As she passed through the drawing room she heard a carriage
stop at the entrance, and looking out of the window she saw the
carriage, from which a young girl in a lilac hat was leaning out,
giving some direction to the footman who was ringing the bell. After a
parley in the hall, someone came upstairs, and Vronsky's steps could
be heard passing the drawing room. He went rapidly downstairs. Anna
went again to the window. She saw him come out on the steps without
his hat and go up to the carriage. The young girl in the lilac hat
handed him a parcel. Vronsky, smiling, said something to her. The
carriage drove away; he ran rapidly upstairs again.
  The mists that had shrouded everything in her soul parted
suddenly. The feelings of yesterday pierced the sick heart with a
fresh pang. She could not understand now how she could have lowered
herself by spending a whole day with him in his house. She went into
his room to announce her determination.
  "That was Madame Sorokina and her daughter. They came and brought me
the money and the deeds from maman. I couldn't get them yesterday. How
is your head, better?" he said quietly, not wishing to see and to
understand the gloomy and solemn expression of her face.
  She looked silently, intently at him, standing in the middle of
the room. He glanced at her, frowned for a moment, and went on reading
a letter. She turned, and went deliberately out of the room. He
still might have turned her back, but she had reached the door, he was
still silent, and the only sound audible was the rustling of the
note paper as he turned it.
  "Oh, by the way," he said at the very moment she was in the doorway,
"we're going tomorrow for certain, aren't we?"
  "You, but not I," she said, turning round to him.
  "Anna, we can't go on like this..."
  "You, but not I," she repeated.
  "This is getting unbearable!"
  "You... You will be sorry for this," she said, and went out.
  Frightened by the desperate expression with which these words were
uttered, he jumped up and would have run after her, but on second
thoughts he sat down and scowled, setting his teeth. This vulgar- as
he thought it- threat of something vague exasperated him. "I've
tried everything," he thought; "the only thing left is not to pay
attention," and he began to get ready to drive into town, and again to
his mother's, to get her signature to the deeds.
  She heard the sound of his steps about the study and the dining
room. At the drawing room he stood still. But he did not turn in to
see her; he merely gave an order that the horse should be given to
Voitov if he came while he was away. Then she heard the carriage
brought round, the door opened, and he came out again. But he went
back into the porch again, and someone was running upstairs. It was
the valet running up for his forgotten gloves. She went to the
window and saw him take the gloves without looking, and, touching
the coachman on the back, he said something to him. Then, without
looking up at the window, he settled himself in his usual attitude
in the carriage, with his legs crossed, and, drawing on his gloves, he
vanished round the corner.
                             XXVII.

  "He has gone! It is the end!" Anna said to herself, standing at
the window; and in answer to this question the impression of the
darkness when the candle had flickered out and of her fearful dream,
mingling into one, filled her heart with cold terror.
  "No, that cannot be!" she cried, and crossing the room she rang
the bell. She was afraid now of being alone, that, without waiting for
the servant to come in, she went out to meet him.
  "Inquire where the Count has gone," she said.
  The servant answered that the Count had gone to the stable.
  "His Honor left word that if you cared to drive out, the carriage
would be back immediately."
  "Very good. Wait a minute. I'll write a note at once. Send Mikhail
with the note to the stables. Make haste."
  She sat down and wrote:
  "I was wrong. Come back home; I must explain. For God's sake come!
I'm afraid."
  She sealed it up and gave it to the servant.
  She was afraid of being left alone now; she followed the servant out
of the room, and went to the nursery.
  "Why, this isn't it- this isn't he! Where are his blue eyes, his
sweet, shy smile?" was her first thought when she saw her chubby, rosy
little girl, with her black, curly hair, instead of Seriozha, whom
in the tangle of her ideas she had expected to see in the nursery. The
little girl sitting at the table was obstinately and violently
battering on it with a cork, and staring aimlessly at her mother
with her pitch-black eyes. Answering the English nurse that she was
quite well, and that she was going to the country tomorrow, Anna sat
down by the little girl and began spinning the cork to show her. But
the child's loud, ringing laugh, and the motion of her eyebrows,
recalled Vronsky so vividly that she got up hurriedly, restraining her
sobs, and went away. "Can it be all over? No, it cannot be!" she
thought. "He will come back. But how can he explain that smile, that
excitement after he had been talking to her? But even if he doesn't
explain, I will believe. If I don't believe, there's only one thing
left for me... and I can't do it."
  She looked at her watch. Twenty minutes had passed. "By now he has
received the note and is coming back. Not long, ten minutes more....
But what if he doesn't come? No, that cannot be. He mustn't see me
with tear-stained eyes. I'll go and wash. Yes, yes; did I do my hair
or not?" she asked herself. And she could not remember. She felt her
head with her hand. "Yes, my hair has been done, but when I did it I
can't in the least remember." She could not believe the evidence of
her hand, and went up to the pier glass to see whether she really
had done her hair. She certainly had, but she could not think when she
had done it. "Who's that?" she thought, looking in the looking glass
at the swollen face with strangely glittering eyes, that looked in a
scared way at her. "Why, it's I!" she suddenly understood, and,
looking round, she seemed all at once to feel his kisses on her, and
twitched her shoulders, shuddering. Then she lifted her hand to her
lips and kissed it.
  "What is it? Why, I'm going out of my mind!" And she went into her
bedroom, where Annushka was tidying the room.
  "Annushka," she said, coming to a standstill before her, and she
stared at the maid, not knowing what to say to her.
  "You meant to go and see Darya Alexandrovna," said the maid, as
though she understood.
  "Darya Alexandrovna? Yes, I'll go."
  "Fifteen minutes there, fifteen minutes back. He's coming, he'll
be here soon." She took out her watch and looked at it. "But how could
he go away, leaving me in such a state? How can he live, without
making it up with me?" She went to the window and began looking into
the street. Judging by the time, he might be back now. But her
calculations might be wrong, and she began once more to recall when he
had started and to count the minutes.
  At the moment when she had moved away to the big clock to compare it
with her watch, someone drove up. Glancing out of the window, she
saw his carriage. But no one came upstairs, and voices could be
heard below. It was the messenger who had come back in the carriage.
She went down to him.
  "We didn't catch the Count. The Count had driven off on the
Nizhny-Novgorod line."
  "What do you say? What!..." she said to the rosy, good-humored
Mikhail, as he handed her back her note.
  "Why, then, he has never received it!" she thought.
  "Go with this note to Countess Vronsky's place in the country- do
you know where it is? And bring an answer back immediately," she
said to the messenger.
  "And I- what am I going to do?" she thought. "Yes, I'm going to
Dolly's- that's best, or else I shall go out of my mind. Yes, and I
can telegraph, too." And she wrote a telegram:
  "I absolutely must talk to you; come at once."
  After sending off the telegram, she went to dress. When she was
dressed and in her hat, she glanced again into the eyes of the
plump, comfortable-looking Annushka. There was unmistakable sympathy
in those good-natured little gray eyes.
  "Annushka, dear, what am I to do?" said Anna, sobbing and sinking
helplessly into a chair.
  "Why fret yourself so, Anna Arkadyevna? Why, there's nothing out
of the way. You drive out a little, and it'll cheer you up," said
the maid.
  "Yes, I'm going," said Anna, rousing herself and getting up. "And if
there's a telegram while I'm away, send it on to Darya
Alexandrovna's.... But no, I shall be back myself."
  "Yes, I mustn't think; I must do something, drive somewhere, and,
most of all, get out of this house," she said, feeling with terror the
strange turmoil going on in her own heart, and she made haste to go
out, and get into the carriage.
  "Where to?" asked Piotr before getting on the box.
  "The Znamenka- the Oblonskys'."
                             XXVIII.

  It was bright and sunny. A fine rain had been falling all the
morning, and now it had not long cleared up. The iron roofs, the flags
of the sidewalks, the cobbles of the pavements, the wheels and
leather, the brass and the tinplate of the carriages- all glistened
brightly in the May sunshine. It was three o'clock, and the very
liveliest time in the streets.
  As she sat in a corner of the comfortable carriage that hardly
swayed on its supple springs, while the grays trotted swiftly, in
the midst of the unceasing rattle of wheels and the changing
impressions in the pure air, Anna ran over the events of the last
days, and she saw her position quite differently from what it had
seemed at home. Now the thought of death seemed no longer so
terrible and so clear to her, and death itself no longer seemed so
inevitable. Now she blamed herself for the humiliation to which she
had lowered herself. "I entreat him to forgive me. I have given in
to him. I have owned myself in fault. What for? Can't I live without
him?" And leaving unanswered the question how she was going to live
without him, she fell to reading the signs on the shops. "Office and
warehouse. Dental surgeon. Yes, I'll tell Dolly all about it. She
doesn't like Vronsky. I shall be sick and ashamed, but I'll tell her
everything. She loves me, and I'll follow her advice. I won't give
in to him; I won't let him train me as he pleases. Filippov,
'Kalaches.' They say he sends his dough to Peterburg. The Moscow water
is so good for it. And the wells at Mitishchy, and the pancakes."
And she remembered how, long, long ago, when she was a girl of
seventeen, she had gone with her aunt to Troitsa. "By horses at that
time. Was that really me, with red hands? How much of that which
seemed to me then splendid and out of reach has become worthless,
while what I had then has gone out of my reach forever! Could I ever
have believed then that I could come to such humiliation? How proud
and satisfied he will be when he gets my note! But I will show him....
How horrid that paint smells! Why is it they're always painting and
building? Modes et robes!" she read. A man bowed to her. It was
Annushka's husband. "Our parasites,"- she remembered how Vronsky had
said that. "Our? Why our? What's so awful is that one can't tear up
the past by its roots. One can't tear it out, but one can hide one's
memory of it. And I'll hide it." And then she thought of her past with
Alexei Alexandrovich, of how she had blotted it out of her memory.
"Dolly will think I'm leaving my second husband, and so I certainly
must be in the wrong. As if I cared to be right! I can't help it!" she
said, and she wanted to cry. But at once she fell to wondering what
those two girls could be smiling about. "Love, most likely. They don't
know how dreary it is, how low.... The boulevard and the children.
Three boys running, playing at horses. Seriozha! And I'm losing
everything and not getting him back. Yes, I'm losing everything, if he
doesn't return. Perhaps he was late for the train and has come back by
now. Longing for humiliation again!" she said to herself. "No, I'll go
to Dolly, and say straight out to her: I'm unhappy, I deserve this,
I'm to blame, but still I'm unhappy, help me. These horses, this
carriage- how loathsome I am to myself in this carriage- all his;
but I won't see them again."
  Thinking over the words in which she would tell Dolly, and
intentionally working her heart up to great bitterness, Anna went
upstairs.
  "Is there anyone with her?" she asked in the hall.
  "Katerina Alexandrovna Levina," answered the footman.
  "Kitty! Kitty, whom Vronsky was in love with!" thought Anna. "The
girl he thinks of with love. He's sorry he didn't marry her. But me he
thinks of with hatred, and is sorry he had anything to do with me."
  The sisters were having a consultation about nursing when Anna
called. Dolly went down alone to see the visitor who had interrupted
their conversation.
  "Well, so you've not gone away yet? I meant to have come to you,"
she said; "I had a letter from Stiva today."
  "We had a telegram too," answered Anna, looking round for Kitty.
  "He writes that he can't make out quite what Alexei Alexandrovich
wants, but he won't go away without a decisive answer."
  "I thought you had someone with you. Can I see the letter?"
  "Yes- it's Kitty," said Dolly, embarrassed. "She stayed in the
nursery. She has been very ill."
  "So I heard. May I see the letter?"
  "I'll get it directly. But he doesn't refuse; on the contrary, Stiva
has hopes," said Dolly, stopping in the doorway.
  "I haven't, and indeed I don't wish it," said Anna.
  "What's this? Does Kitty consider it degrading to meet me?"
thought Anna when she was alone. "Perhaps she's right, too. But it's
not for her, the girl who was in love with Vronsky, it's not for her
to show me that, even if it is true. I know that in my position I
can't be received by any decent woman. I knew that from the first
moment I sacrificed everything to him. And this is my reward! Oh,
how I hate him! And what did I come here for? I'm worse here, more
miserable." She heard from the next room the sisters' voices in
consultation. "And what am I going to say to Dolly now? Amuse Kitty by
the sight of my wretchedness, submit to her patronizing? No; and
besides, Dolly wouldn't understand. And it would be no good my telling
her. It would only be interesting to see Kitty, to show her how I
despise everyone and everything, how nothing matters to me now."
  Dolly came in with the letter. Anna read it and handed it back in
silence.
  "I knew all that," she said, "and it doesn't interest me in the
least."
  "Oh, why so? On the contrary, I have hopes," said Dolly, looking
inquisitively at Anna. She had never seen her in such a strangely
irritable condition. "When are you going away?" she asked.
  Anna, half-closing her eyes, looked straight before her and did
not answer.
  "Why does Kitty shrink from me?" she said, looking at the door and
flushing red.
  "Oh, what nonsense! She's nursing, and things aren't going right
with her, and I've been advising her.... She's delighted. She'll be
here in a minute," said Dolly awkwardly, not clever at lying. "Yes,
here she is."
  Hearing that Anna had called, Kitty had wanted not to appear, but
Dolly persuaded her. Rallying her forces, Kitty went in, walked up
to her, blushing, and shook hands.
  "I am so glad to see you," she said with a trembling voice.
  Kitty had been thrown into confusion by the inward conflict
between her antagonism to this bad woman and her desire to be kind
to her. But as soon as she saw Anna's lovely and attractive face,
all feeling of antagonism disappeared.
  "I should not have been surprised if you had not cared to meet me.
I'm used to everything. You have been ill? Yes, you are changed," said
Anna.
  Kitty felt that Anna was looking at her with hostile eyes. She
ascribed this hostility to the awkward position in which Anna, who had
once patronized her, must feel with her now, and she felt sorry for
her.
  They talked of Kitty's illness, of the baby, of Stiva, but it was
obvious that nothing interested Anna.
  "I came to say good-by to you," she said, getting up.
  "Oh, when are you going?"
  But again not answering, Anna turned to Kitty.
  "Yes, I am very glad to have seen you," she said with a smile. "I
have heard so much of you from everyone, even from your husband. He
came to see me, and I liked him very much," she said, unmistakably
with malicious intent. "Where is he?"
  "He has gone back to the country," said Kitty, blushing.
  "Remember me to him- be sure you do."
  "I'll be sure to!" Kitty said naively, looking compassionately
into her eyes.
  "Good-by, then, Dolly." And kissing Dolly and shaking hands with
Kitty, Anna went out hurriedly.
  "She's just the same and just as charming! She's very lovely!"
said Kitty, when she was alone with her sister. "But there's something
piteous about her. Awfully piteous!"
  "Yes, there's something unusual about her today," said Dolly.
"When I went with her into the hall, I fancied she was almost crying."
                             XXIX.

  Anna got into the carriage again in an even worse frame of mind than
when she set out from home. To her previous tortures was added now
that sense of mortification and of being an outcast, which she had
felt so distinctly on meeting Kitty.
  "Where to? Home?" asked Piotr.
  "Yes, home," she said, not even thinking now where she was going.
  "How they looked at me as something dreadful, incomprehensible,
and curious! What can he be telling the other with such warmth?" she
thought, staring at two men who walked by. "Can one ever tell anyone
what one is feeling? I meant to tell Dolly, and it's a good thing I
didn't tell her. How pleased she would have been at my misery! She
would have concealed it, but her chief feeling would have been delight
at my being punished for the happiness she envied me for. Kitty- she
would have been even more pleased. How I can see through her! She
knows I was more than usually kind to her husband. And she's jealous
and hates me. And she despises me. In her eyes I'm an immoral woman.
If I were an immoral woman I could have made her husband fall in
love with me.... If I'd cared to. And, indeed, I did care to.
There's someone who's pleased with himself," she thought, as she saw a
fat, rubicund gentleman coming toward her. He took her for an
acquaintance, and lifted his glossy hat above his bald, glossy head,
and then perceived his mistake. "He thought he knew me. Well, he knows
me as well as anyone in the world knows me. I don't know myself. I
know my appetites, as the French say. They want that hokey-pokey, that
they do know for certain," she thought, looking at two boys stopping
an ice-cream seller, who took a barrel off his head and began wiping
his perspiring face with a towel. "We all want what is sweet and
tastes good. If there are no sweetmeats, then a hokey-pokey will do.
And Kitty's the same- if not Vronsky, then Levin. And she envies me.
And hates me. And we all hate each other. I Kitty- Kitty me. Yes,
that's the truth. Tiutkin, coiffeur.... Je me fais coiffer par
Tiutkin.... I'll tell him that when he comes," she thought and smiled.
But the same instant she remembered that she had no one now to tell
anything amusing to. "And there's nothing amusing, nothing mirthful,
really. It's all hateful. Vesper bells- and how carefully that
merchant crosses himself! As if he were afraid of missing something.
Why these churches, and these bells, and this humbug? Simply to
conceal that we all hate each other like these cabdrivers, who are
abusing each other so angrily. Iashvin says, 'He wants to strip me
of my shirt, and I wish him the same.' Yes, that's the truth!"
  She was plunged in these thoughts, which so engrossed her that she
left off thinking of her own position, when the carriage drew up at
the steps of her house. It was only when she saw the porter running
out to meet her that she remembered she had sent the note and the
telegram.
  "Is there any answer?" she inquired.
  "I'll see this minute," answered the porter, and, glancing into
his room, he took out and gave her the thin square envelope of a
telegram. "I can't come before ten o'clock.- Vronsky," she read.
  "And hasn't the messenger come back?"
  "No," answered the porter.
  "Then, since it's so, I know what I must do," she said, and
feeling a vague fury and craving for revenge rising up within her, she
ran upstairs. "I'll go to him myself. Before going away forever,
I'll tell him all. Never have I hated anyone as I hate that man!"
she thought. Seeing his hat on the rack, she shuddered with
aversion. She did not consider that this telegram was an answer to her
telegram and that he had not yet received her note. She pictured him
to herself as talking calmly to his mother and Princess Sorokina,
and rejoicing at her sufferings. "Yes, I must go quickly," she said,
not knowing yet where she was going. She longed to get away as quickly
as possible from the feelings she had gone through in that awful
house. The servants, the walls, the things in that house- all
aroused repulsion and hatred in her and lay like a weight upon her.
  "Yes, I must go to the railway station, and if he's not there,
then go there and catch him." Anna looked at the railway timetable
in the newspapers. An evening train went at two minutes past eight.
"Yes, I shall be in time." She gave orders for the other horses to
be put in the carriage, and packed in a traveling bag the things
needed for a few days. She knew she would never come back here again.
  Among the plans that came into her head she vaguely determined
that after what would happen at the station or at the Countess's
house, she would go as far as the first town on the Nizhny-Novgorod
railway and stop there.
  Dinner was on the table; she went up, but the smell of the bread and
cheese was enough to make her feel that all food was disgusting. She
ordered the carriage and went out. The house threw a shadow now
right across the street, but it was a bright evening and still warm in
the sunshine. Annushka, who came down with her things, and Piotr,
who put the things in the carriage, and the coachman, evidently out of
humor, were all hateful to her, and irritated her by their words and
actions.
  "I don't want you, Piotr."
  "But how about the ticket?"
  "Well, as you like, it doesn't matter," she said crossly.
  Piotr jumped on the box, and putting his arms akimbo, told the
coachman to drive to the station.
                             XXX.

  "Here it is again! Again I understand it all!" Anna said to herself,
as soon as the carriage had started and swaying lightly, rumbled
over the small cobbles of the paved road, and again one impression
followed rapidly upon another.
  "Yes; what was the last thing I thought of so clearly?" she tried to
recall. "Tiutkin, coiffeur?- No, not that. Yes, of what Iashvin
says, the struggle for existence and hatred is all that holds men
together. No, it's a useless journey you're making," she said,
mentally addressing a party in a coach and four, evidently going for
an excursion into the country. "And the dog you're taking with you
will be no help to you. You can't get away from yourselves." Turning
her eyes in the direction Piotr had turned to look, she saw a
factory hand almost dead-drunk, with hanging head, being led away by a
policeman. "Come, he's found a quicker way," she thought. "Count
Vronsky and I did not find that happiness either, though we expected
so much from it." And now for the first time Anna turned that
glaring light in which she was seeing everything on her relations with
him, which she had hitherto avoided thinking about. "What was it he
sought in me? Not love so much as the satisfaction of vanity." She
remembered his words, the expression of his face, that recalled a
submissive setter dog, in the early days of their connection. And
everything now confirmed this. "Yes, there was the triumph of vanity
in him. Of course there was love too, but the chief element was the
pride of success. He boasted of me. Now that's over. There's nothing
to be proud of. Not to be proud of, but to be ashamed of. He has taken
from me all he could, and now I am no use to him. He is weary of me
and is trying not to be dishonorable in his behavior to me. He let
that out yesterday- he wants divorce and marriage so as to burn his
ships. He loves me, but how? The zest is gone, as the English say.
That fellow wants everyone to admire him and is very much pleased with
himself," she thought, looking at a red-faced clerk, riding on a
riding-school horse. "Yes, there's not the same zest about me for
him now. If I go away from him, at the bottom of his heart he will
be glad."
  This was not mere supposition, she saw it distinctly in the piercing
light which revealed to her now the meaning of life and human
relations.
  "My love keeps growing more passionate and egoistic, while his is
waning and waning, and that's why we're drifting apart." She went on
musing. "And there's no help for it. He is everything for me, and I
want him more and more to give himself up to me entirely. And he wants
more and more to get away from me. Precisely: we went to meet one
another up to the time of our liaison, and since then we have been
irresistibly drifting in different directions. And there's no altering
that. He tells me I'm insanely jealous, and I have told myself that
I am insanely jealous; but it's not true. I'm not jealous, but I'm
unsatisfied. But..." she opened her lips, and shifted her place in the
carriage in the excitement, aroused by the thought that suddenly
struck her. "If I could be anything but a mistress, passionately
caring for nothing but his caresses; but I can't, and I don't care
to be anything else. And by that desire I rouse aversion in him, and
he rouses fury in me, and it cannot be different. Don't I know that he
wouldn't deceive me, that he has no schemes about Princess Sorokina,
that he's not in love with Kitty, that he won't desert me! I know
all that, but it makes it no better for me. If without loving me, from
duty, he'll be good and kind to me, without what I want- that's a
thousand times worse than unkindness! That's hell! And that's just how
it is. For a long while now he hasn't loved me. And where love ends,
hate begins. I don't know these streets at all. Hills, apparently, and
still houses, and houses.... And in the houses always people and
people.... How many of them- no end, and all hating each other!
Come, let me try and think what I want to make me happy. Well? Suppose
I am divorced, and Alexei Alexandrovich lets me have Seriozha, and I
marry Vronsky." Thinking of Alexei Alexandrovich, she at once pictured
him with extraordinary vividness as though he were alive before her,
with his mild, lifeless, dull eyes, the blue veins on his white hands,
his intonations, and the cracking of his fingers, and remembering
the feeling which had existed between them, and which was also
called love, she shuddered with loathing. "Well, I'm divorced, and
become Vronsky's wife. Well, will Kitty cease looking at me as she
looked at me today? No. And will Seriozha leave off asking and
wondering about my two husbands? And is there any new feeling I can
awaken between Vronsky and me? Is there possible, if not happiness,
some sort of ease from misery? No, no!" she answered now without the
slightest hesitation. "Impossible! We are drawn apart by life, and I
make his unhappiness, and he mine, and there's no altering him or
me. Every attempt has been made, the screw has come unscrewed. Oh, a
beggar woman with a baby. She thinks I'm sorry for her. Aren't we
all flung into the world only to hate each other, and so to torture
ourselves and each other? Schoolboys coming- laughing- Seriozha?"
she thought. "I thought, too, that I loved him, and used to be touched
by my own tenderness. But I have lived without him, I gave him up
for another love, and did not regret the exchange till that love was
satisfied." And with loathing she thought of what she meant by that
love. And the clearness with which she saw life now, her own and all
men's was a pleasure to her. "It's so with me and Piotr, and Fiodor
the coachman, and that merchant, and all the people living along the
Volga, where those placards invite one to go, and everywhere and
always," she thought when she had driven under the low-pitched roof of
the Nizhny-Novgorod station and the porters ran to meet her.
  "A ticket to Obiralovka?" said Piotr.
  She had utterly forgotten where and why she was going, and only by a
great effort she understood the question.
  "Yes," she said, handing him her purse, and, taking a little red bag
in her hand, she got out of the carriage.
  Making her way through the crowd to the first-class waiting room,
she gradually recollected all the details of her position, and the
plans between which she was hesitating. And again at the old sore
places, hope and then despair scraped the wounds of her tortured,
fearfully throbbing heart. As she sat on the star-shaped sofa
waiting for the train, she gazed with aversion at the people coming
and going (they were all hateful to her), and thought how she would
arrive at the station, would write him a note, and what she would
write to him, and how he was at this moment complaining to his
mother of his position, not understanding her sufferings, and how
she would go into the room, and what she would say to him. Then she
thought that life might still be happy, and how miserably she loved
and hated him, and how fearfully her heart was beating.
                             XXXI.

  A bell rang, some young men, ugly and impudent, and at the same time
careful of the impression they were making, hurried by. Piotr, too,
crossed the room in his livery and spatterdashes with his dull,
brutish face, and came up to her to take her to the train. The noisy
young men were quiet as she passed them on the platform, and one
whispered something about her to another- something vile, no doubt.
She stepped up on the high step, and sat down in a carriage by herself
on a dirty spring seat that had once been white. Her bag lay beside
her, shaken up and down by the springiness of the seat. With a foolish
smile Piotr raised his hat, with its gallooned band, at the window, in
token of farewell; an impudent conductor slammed the door and the
latch. A grotesque-looking lady wearing a bustle (Anna mentally
undressed the woman, and was appalled at her hideousness), and a
little girl laughing affectedly, ran down the platform.
  "Katerina Andreevna, she's got them all, ma tante!" cried the girl.
  "Even the child's hideous and affected," thought Anna. To avoid
seeing anyone, she got up quickly and seated herself at the opposite
window of the empty carriage. A misshapen-looking peasant covered with
dirt, in a cap from which his tangled hair stuck out all around,
passed by that window, stooping down to the carriage wheels.
"There's something familiar about that hideous peasant," thought Anna.
And remembering her dream, she moved away to the opposite door,
shaking with terror. The conductor opened the door and let in a man
and his wife.
  "Do you wish to get out?"
  Anna made no answer. The conductor and her two fellow passengers did
not notice under her veil her panic-stricken face. She went back to
her corner and sat down. The couple seated themselves on the
opposite side, and intently but surreptitiously scrutinized her
clothes. Both husband and wife seemed repulsive to Anna. The husband
asked if she would allow him to smoke, obviously not with a view to
smoking, but to getting into conversation with her. Receiving her
assent, he said to his wife in French something about caring less to
smoke than to talk. They made inane and affected remarks to one
another, entirely for her benefit. Anna saw clearly that they were
sick of each other, and hated each other. And no one could have helped
hating such miserable monstrosities.
  A second bell sounded, and was followed by moving of luggage, noise,
shouting and laughter. It was so clear to Anna that there was
nothing for anyone to be glad of, that this laughter irritated her
agonizingly, and she would have liked to stop up her ears not to
hear it. At last the third bell rang, there was a whistle and a hiss
of steam, and a clank of chains, and the man in her carriage crossed
himself. "It would be interesting to ask him what meaning he
attaches to that," thought Anna, looking angrily at him. She looked
past the lady out of the window at the people who seemed whirling
by, as they ran beside the train or stood on the platform. The
train, jerking at regular intervals at the junctions of the rails,
rolled by the platform, past a stone wall, a signal box, past other
trains; the wheels, moving more smoothly and evenly, resounded with
a slight clang on the rails. The window was lighted up by the bright
evening sun, and a slight breeze fluttered the curtain. Anna forgot
her fellow passengers, and to the light swaying of the train she
fell to thinking again, as she breathed the fresh air.
  "Yes, what did I stop at? That I couldn't find a condition in
which life would not be a misery, that we are all created to be
miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of
deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?"
  "That's why reason is given to man, to escape from what worries
him," said the lady in French, lisping affectedly, and obviously
pleased with her phrase.
  The words seemed an answer to Anna's thoughts.
  "To escape from what worries him," repeated Anna. And glancing at
the red-cheeked husband and the thin wife, she saw that the sickly
wife considered herself misunderstood, and the husband deceived her
and encouraged her in that idea of herself. Anna seemed to see all
their history and all the crannies of their souls, turning a light
upon them, as it were. But there was nothing interesting in them,
and she pursued her thought.
  "Yes, I'm very much worried, and that's why reason was given me,
to escape; so then, one must escape: why not put out the light when
there's nothing more to look at, when it's sickening to look at it
all? But how? Why did the conductor run along the footboard, why are
they shrieking, those young men in that train? Why are they talking,
why are they laughing? It's all falsehood, all lying, all humbug,
all cruelty!..."
  When the train came into the station, Anna got out into the crowd of
passengers, and moving apart from them as if they were lepers, she
stood on the platform, trying to think what she had come here for, and
what she meant to do. Everything that had seemed to her possible
before was now so difficult to consider, especially in this noisy
crowd of hideous people who would not leave her alone. At one moment
porters ran up to her proffering their services, then young men
clacking their heels on the planks of the platform and talking loudly,
stared at her, then people meeting her dodged past on the wrong
side. Remembering that she had meant to go on farther if there was
no answer, she stopped a porter and asked if her coachman were not
here with a note from Count Vronsky.
  "Count Vronsky? They sent up here from the Vronskys just this
minute, to meet Princess Sorokina and her daughter. And what is the
coachman like?"
  Just as she was talking to the porter, the coachman Mikhail, red and
cheerful in his smart blue coat and chain, evidently proud of having
so successfully performed his commission, came up to her and gave
her a letter. She broke it open, and her heart ached before she had
read it.
  "I am very sorry your note did not reach me. I will be home at ten,"
Vronsky had written carelessly.
  "Yes, that's what I expected!" she said to herself with an evil
smile.
  "Very good, you can go home now," she said softly, addressing
Mikhail. She spoke softly because the rapidity of her heart's
beating hindered her breathing. "No, I won't let Thee make me
miserable," she thought menacingly, addressing not him, not herself,
but the power that made her suffer, and she walked along the platform.
  Two maidservants walking along the platform turned their heads,
staring at her and making some remarks about her dress. "Real," they
said of the lace she was wearing. The young men would not leave her in
peace. Again they passed by, peering into her face, and with a laugh
shouting something in an unnatural voice. The stationmaster coming
up asked her whether she was going by the train. A boy selling kvass
never took his eyes off her. "My God! Where am I to go?" she
thought, going farther and farther along the platform. At the end
she stopped. Some ladies and children, who had come to meet a
gentleman in spectacles, paused in their loud laughter and talking,
and stared at her as she reached them. She quickened her pace and
walked away from them to the edge of the platform. A goods train was
coming in. The platform began to sway, and she fancied she was in
the train again.
  And all at once she thought of the man crushed by the train the
day she had first met Vronsky, and she knew what she had to do. With a
rapid, light step she went down the steps that led from the platform
to the rails and stopped quite near the approaching train. She
looked at the lower part of the carriages, at the screws and chains,
and the tall cast-iron wheel of the first carriage slowly moving up,
and tried to measure the middle between the front and back wheels, and
the very minute when that middle point would be opposite her.
  "There," she said to herself, looking into the shadow of the
carriage, at the sand and coal dust which covered the sleepers-
"there, in the very middle, and I will punish him and escape from
everyone and from myself."
  She tried to fling herself below the wheels of the first car as it
reached her; but the red bag which she tried to drop out of her hand
delayed her, and she was too late; she missed the middle of the car.
She had to wait for the next one. A feeling such as she had known when
about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she
crossed herself. That familiar gesture of crossing brought back into
her soul a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly
the darkness that had covered everything for her was torn apart, and
life rose up before her for an instant with all its bright past
joys. But she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the second car.
And exactly at the moment when the space between the wheels came
opposite her, she dropped the red bag, and drawing her head back
into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the car, and lightly, as
though she would rise again at once, dropped onto her knees. And at
the same instant she was terror-stricken at what she was doing. "Where
am I? What am I doing? What for?" She tried to get up, to drop
backward; but something huge and merciless struck her on the head
and drew along on her back. "Lord, forgive me all!" she said,
feeling it impossible to struggle. A peasant, muttering something, was
working at the iron. And the candle by which she had been reading
the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up
more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been
in darkness, sputtered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.
                         PART EIGHT

                             I.

  Almost two months had passed. The hot summer was half over, but
Sergei Ivanovich was only just preparing to leave Moscow.
  Sergei Ivanovich's life had not been uneventful during this time.
A year ago he had finished his book, the fruit of six years' labor. An
Inquiry Concerning the Principles and Forms of Government in Europe
and Russia. Several sections of this book and its introduction had
appeared in periodical publications, and other parts had been read
by Sergei Ivanovich to persons of his circle, so that the leading
ideas of the work could not be entirely novel to the public. But
still, Sergei Ivanovich had expected that on its appearance his book
would be sure to make a serious impression on society, and if it did
not cause a revolution in social science it would, at any rate, make a
great stir in the scientific world.
  After the most conscientious revision the book had last year been
published, and had been distributed among the booksellers.
  Though he asked no one about it, reluctantly and with feigned
indifference answered his friends' inquiries as to how the book was
going, and did not even inquire of the booksellers how the book was
selling, Sergei Ivanovich was all on the alert, with strained
attention, watching for the first impression his book would make in
the world and in literature.
  But a week passed, a second, a third, and in society no impression
whatever could be detected. Those of his friends, who were specialists
and savants, occasionally- unmistakably from politeness- alluded to
it. The rest of his acquaintances, not interested in a book on a
learned subject, did not talk of it at all. And society generally-
just now especially absorbed in other things- was absolutely
indifferent. In the press, too, for a whole month there was not a word
about his book.
  Sergei Ivanovich had calculated to a nicety the time necessary for
writing a review, but a month passed, and a second, and still there
was silence.
  Only in the Northern Beetle, in a comic article on the singer
Drabanti, who had lost his voice, there was a contemptuous allusion to
Koznishev's book, suggesting that the book had been long ago seen
through by everyone, and was a subject of general ridicule.
  At last, in the third month, a critical article appeared in a
serious review. Sergei Ivanovich knew the author of the article. He
had met him once at Golubtsov's.
  The author of the article was a young man, an invalid, very bold
as a writer, but extremely deficient in breeding and shy in personal
relations.
  In spite of his absolute contempt for the author, it was with
complete respect that Sergei Ivanovich set about reading the
article. The article was awful.
  The critic had undoubtedly put an interpretation upon the book which
could not possibly be put on it. But he had selected quotations so
adroitly that for people who had not read the book (and obviously
scarcely anyone had read it) it seemed absolutely clear that the whole
book was nothing but a medley of high-flown phrases, not even- as
suggested by marks of interrogation- used appropriately, and that
the author of the book was a person absolutely without knowledge of
the subject. And all this was so wittily done that Sergei Ivanovich
would not have disowned such wit himself. But that was just what was
so awful.
  In spite of the scrupulous conscientiousness with which Sergei
Ivanovich verified the correctness of the critic's arguments, he did
not for a minute stop to ponder over the faults and mistakes which
were ridiculed; but unconsciously he began immediately trying to
recall every detail of his meeting and conversation with the author of
the article.
  "Didn't I offend him in some way?" Sergei Ivanovich wondered.
  And remembering that when they met he had corrected the young man
about something he had said that betrayed ignorance, Sergei
Ivanovich found the explanation for the trend of the article.
  This article was followed by a deadly silence about the book both in
the press and in conversation, and Sergei Ivanovich saw that his six
years' task, toiled at with such love and labor, had gone, leaving
no trace.
  Sergei Ivanovich's position was still more difficult from the fact
that, since he had finished his book, he had had more literary work to
do, such as had hitherto occupied the greater part of his time.
  Sergei Ivanovich was clever, cultivated healthy and energetic, and
he did not know what use to make of his energy. Conversations in
drawing rooms, in meetings, assemblies, and committees- everywhere
where talk was possible- took up part of his time. But being used
for years to town life, he did not waste all his energies in talk,
as his less experienced younger brother did, when he was in Moscow. He
had a great deal of leisure and intellectual energy still to dispose
of.
  Fortunately for him, at this period so difficult for him because
of the failure of his book, the various public questions of the
dissenting sects, of the American Friends, of the Samara famine, of
exhibition, and of spiritualism, were definitely replaced in public
interest by the Slavonic question, which had hitherto rather languidly
interested society, and Sergei Ivanovich, who had been one of the
first to raise this subject, threw himself into it heart and soul.
  In the circle to which Sergei Ivanovich belonged, nothing was talked
of or written about just now but the Servian war. Everything that
the idle crowd usually does to kill time was done now for the
benefit of the Slavonic peoples. Balls, concerts, dinners, speeches,
ladies' dresses, beer, taverns- everything testified to sympathy
with the Slavonic peoples.
  From much of what was spoken and written on the subject, Sergei
Ivanovich differed on various points. He saw that the Slavonic
question had become one of those fashionable distractions which
succeed one another in providing society with an object and an
occupation. He saw, too, that a great many people were taking up the
subject from motives of self-interest and self-advertisement. He
recognized that the newspapers published a great deal that was
superfluous and exaggerated, with the sole aim of attracting attention
and talking one another down. He saw that in this general movement
those who thrust themselves most forward and shouted the loudest
were men who had failed and were smarting under a sense of injury-
generals without armies, ministers not in the ministry, journalists
not on any paper, party leaders without followers. He saw that there
was a great deal in it that was frivolous and absurd. But he saw and
recognized an unmistakable growing enthusiasm, uniting all classes,
with which it was impossible not to sympathize. The massacre of men
who were fellow Christians, and of the same Slavonic race, excited
sympathy for the sufferers and indignation against the oppressors. And
the heroism of the Servians and Montenegrins struggling for a great
cause begot in the whole people a longing to help their brothers not
in word but in deed.
  But in this there was another aspect that made Sergei Ivanovich
rejoice. That was the manifestation of public opinion. The public
had definitely expressed its desire. The soul of the people had, as
Sergei Ivanovich said, found expression. And the more he worked in
this cause, the more incontestable it seemed to him that it was a
cause destined to assume vast dimensions, to create an epoch.
  He threw himself heart and soul into the service of this great
cause, and forgot to think about his book.
  His whole time now was engrossed by it, so that he could scarcely
manage to answer all the letters and appeals addressed to him.
  He worked the whole spring and part of the summer, and it was only
in July that he prepared to go away to his brother's country place.
  He was going both to rest for a fortnight, and in the very heart
of the people, in the farthest wilds of the country, to enjoy the
sight of that uplifting of the spirit of the people, of which, like
all residents in the capital and big towns, he was fully persuaded.
Katavassov had long intended to carry out his promise to stay with
Levin, and so he was going with him.
                             II.

  Sergei Ivanovich and Katavassov had just reached the station of
the Kursk line, which was particularly busy and full of people that
day, when, looking round for the groom who was following with their
things, they saw a party of volunteers driving up in four cabs. Ladies
met them with bouquets of flowers, and, followed by the rushing crowd,
they went into the station.
  One of the ladies who had met the volunteers, came out of the hall
and addressed Sergei Ivanovich.
  "You also come to see them off?" she asked in French.
  "No, I'm going away myself, Princess. To my brother's for a holiday.
Do you always see them off?" said Sergei Ivanovich with a barely
perceptible smile.
  "Oh, that would be impossible!" answered the Princess. "Is it true
that eight hundred have been sent from us already? Malvinsky
wouldn't believe me."
  "More than eight hundred. If you reckon those who have been sent not
directly from Moscow, over a thousand," answered Sergei Ivanovich.
  "There! That's just what I said!" exclaimed the lady joyously.
"And it's true too, I suppose, that about a million has been
subscribed?"
  "Yes, Princess."
  "What do you say to today's telegram? The Turks have been
overwhelmed again."
  "Yes, so I saw," answered Sergei Ivanovich. They were speaking of
the last telegram stating that the Turks had been for three days in
succession beaten at all points and put to flight, and that tomorrow a
decisive engagement was expected.
  "Ah, by the way, a splendid young fellow has asked leave to go,
and they've made some difficulty- I don't know why. I meant to ask
you; I know him; please write a note about his case. He's being sent
by Countess Lidia Ivanovna."
  Sergei Ivanovich asked for all the details the Princess knew about
the young man, and, going into the first-class waiting room, wrote a
note to the person on whom the granting of leave of absence
depended, and handed it to the Princess.
  "You know Count Vronsky, the notorious one... is going by this
train?" said the Princess with a smile full of triumph and meaning,
when he found her again and gave her the letter.
  "I had heard he was going, but I did not know when. By this train?"
  "I've seen him. He's here: there's only his mother seeing him off.
It's the best thing, anyway, that he could do."
  "Oh, yes, of course."
  While they were talking the crowd streamed by them toward the dining
table. They went forward too, and heard a gentleman with a glass in
his hand delivering a loud discourse to the volunteers. "In the
service of religion, humanity, and our brethren," the gentleman
said, his voice growing louder and louder; "to this great cause mother
Moscow dedicates you with her blessing. Jivio!" he concluded,
concluded, loudly and tearfully.
  Everyone shouted Jivio! and a fresh crowd dashed into the hall,
almost carrying the Princess off her feet.
  "Ah, Princess! That was something like!" said Stepan Arkadyevich,
suddenly appearing in the midst of the crowd and beaming upon them
with a delighted smile. "Capitally, warmly said, wasn't it? Bravo! And
Sergei Ivanovich! Why, you ought to have said something- just a few
words, you know, to encourage them; you do that so well," he added
with a soft, respectful, and discreet smile, moving Sergei Ivanovich
forward a little by the arm.
  "No, I'm just off."
  "Where to?"
  "To the country, to my brother's," answered Sergei Ivanovich.
  "Then you'll see my wife. I've written to her, but you'll see her
first. Please tell her that they've seen me and that it's 'all right,'
as the English say. She'll understand. Oh, and be so good as to tell
her I'm appointed member of the committee.... But she'll understand!
You know, les petites misires de la vie humaine," he said, as it
were apologizing to the Princess. "And Princess Miaghkaia- not Liza,
but Bibish- is sending a thousand guns and twelve nurses, after all.
Did I tell you?"
  "Yes, I heard so," answered Koznishev indifferently.
  "It's a pity you're going away," said Stepan Arkadyevich.
"Tomorrow we're giving a dinner to two who are setting off-
Dimer-Biartniansky from Peterburg and our Veslovsky, Grisha. They're
both going. Veslovsky's only lately married. There's a fine fellow for
you! Eh, Princess?" he turned to the lady.
  The Princess looked at Koznishev without replying. But the fact that
Sergei Ivanovich and the Princess seemed anxious to get rid of him did
not in the least disconcert Stepan Arkadyevich. Smiling, he stared
at the feather in the Princess's hat, and then about him as though
he were going to pick something up. Seeing a lady approaching with a
collection box, he beckoned her up and put in a five-rouble note.
  "I can never see these collection boxes unmoved while I've money
in my pocket," he said. "And how about today's telegram? Fine chaps
those Montenegrins!"
  "You don't say so!" he cried, when the Princess told him that
Vronsky was going by this train. For an instant Stepan Arkadyevich's
face looked sad, but a minute later, when, stroking his whiskers and
swinging as he walked, he went into the hall where Vronsky was, he had
completely forgotten his own despairing sobs over his sister's corpse,
and he saw in Vronsky only a hero and an old friend.
  "With all his faults one can't refuse to do him justice," said the
Princess to Sergei Ivanovich, as soon as Stepan Arkadyevich had left
them. "What a typically Russian, Slav nature! Only, I'm afraid it
won't be pleasant for Vronsky to see him. Say what you will, I'm
touched by that man's fate. Do talk to him a little on the way,"
said the Princess.
  "Yes, perhaps, if the occasion arises."
  "I never liked him. But this atones for a great deal. He's not
merely going himself- he's taking a squadron at his own expense."
  "Yes, so I heard."
  A bell sounded. Everyone crowded to the doors.
  "Here he is!" said the Princess, indicating Vronsky, who, with his
mother on his arm walked by, wearing a long overcoat and
wide-brimmed black hat. Oblonsky was walking beside him, talking
eagerly of something.
  Vronsky was frowning and looking straight before him, as though he
did not hear what Stepan Arkadyevich was saying.
  Probably on Oblonsky's pointing them out, he looked round in the
direction where the Princess and Sergei Ivanovich were standing,
and, without speaking, lifted his hat. His face, aged and worn by
suffering, looked stony.
  Going onto the platform, Vronsky left his mother and disappeared
into a compartment.
  On the platform there rang out "God save the Czar," then shouts of
"Hurrah!" and "Jivio!" One of the volunteers, a tall, very young man
with a hollow chest, was particularly conspicuous, bowing and waving
his felt hat and a nosegay over his head. Then two officers emerged,
bowing too, and a stout man with a big beard, wearing a greasy
forage cap.
                             III.

  Having said good-by to the Princess, Sergei Ivanovich was joined
by Katavassov; together they got into a carriage full to
overflowing, and the train started.
  At Czaritsino station the train was met by a chorus of young men
singing "Hail to Thee!" Again the volunteers bowed and poked their
heads out, but Sergei Ivanovich paid no attention to them. He had
had so much to do with the volunteers that the type was familiar to
him and did not interest him. Katavassov, whose scientific work had
prevented his having a chance of observing them hitherto, was very
much interested in them and questioned Sergei Ivanovich.
  Sergei Ivanovich advised him to go into the second class and talk to
them himself. At the next station Katavassov acted on this suggestion.
  At the first stop he moved into the second class and made the
acquaintance of the volunteers. They were sitting in a corner of the
carriage, talking loudly and obviously aware that the attention of the
passengers, and of Katavassov, as he got in, was concentrated upon
them. More loudly than all talked the tall, hollow-chested young
man. He was unmistakably tipsy, and was relating some story that had
occurred at his school. Facing him sat a middle-aged officer in the
Austrian military jacket of the Guards' uniform. He was listening with
a smile to the hollow-chested youth, and occasionally pulling him
up. The third, in an artillery uniform, was sitting on a portmanteau
beside them. A fourth was asleep.
  Entering into conversation with the youth, Katavassov learned that
he was a wealthy Moscow merchant who had run through a large fortune
before he was two-and-twenty. Katavassov did not like him, because
he was unmanly and effeminate and sickly. He was obviously
convinced, especially now after drinking, that he was performing a
heroic action, and he bragged of it in the most unpleasant way.
  The second, the retired officer, made an unpleasant impression too
upon Katavassov. He was, it seemed, a man who had tried everything. He
had been on a railway, had been a land steward, and had started
factories, and he talked, quite without necessity, of everything,
and used learned expressions quite inappropriately.
  The third, the artilleryman, on the contrary, struck Katavassov very
favorably. He was a quiet, modest fellow, unmistakably impressed by
the knowledge of the officer and the heroic self-sacrifice of the
merchant, and saying nothing about himself. When Katavassov asked
him what had impelled him to go to Servia, he answered modestly:
  "Oh, well, everyone's going. The Servians want help, too. I'm
sorry for them."
  "Yes, you artillerymen are especially scarce there," said
Katavassov.
  "Oh, I wasn't long in the artillery; maybe they'll put me into the
infantry or the cavalry."
  "Into the infantry, when they need artillery more than anything?"
said Katavassov, fancying from the artilleryman's apparent age that he
must have reached a fairly high grade.
  "I wasn't long in the artillery; I'm a junker, in reserve," he said,
and he began to explain how he had failed in his examination.
  All of this together made a disagreeable impression on Katavassov,
and when the volunteers got out at a station for a drink, Katavassov
would have liked to compare his unfavorable impression in conversation
with someone. There was an old man in the carriage, wearing a military
overcoat, who had been listening all the while to Katavassov's
conversation with the volunteers. When they were left alone,
Katavassov addressed him.
  "What different positions they come from, all those fellows who
are going off there," Katavassov said vaguely, not wishing to
express his own opinion, and at the same time anxious to find out
the old man's views.
  The old man was an officer who had served in two campaigns. He
knew what makes a soldier, and, judging by the appearance and the talk
of those persons, by the swagger with which they had recourse to the
bottle on the journey, he considered them poor soldiers. Moreover,
he lived in a district town, and he was longing to tell how one
soldier had volunteered from his town, a drunkard and a thief whom
no one would employ as a laborer. But knowing by experience that in
the present condition of the public temper it was dangerous to express
an opinion opposed to the general one, and especially to criticize the
volunteers unfavorably, he too watched Katavassov without committing
himself.
  "Well, men are wanted there," he said, laughing with his eyes. And
they fell to talking of the last war news, and each concealed from the
other his perplexity as to the engagement expected next day, since the
Turks had been beaten, according to the latest news, all along the
line. And so they parted, neither giving expression to his opinion.
  Katavassov went back to his own carriage, and with reluctant
hypocrisy reported to Sergei Ivanovich his observations of the
volunteers, from which it would appear that they were capital fellows.
  At a big station at a town the volunteers were again greeted with
shouts and singing, again men and women with collection boxes
appeared, and provincial ladies brought bouquets to the volunteers and
followed them into the refreshment room; but all this was on a much
smaller and feebler scale than in Moscow.
                             IV.

  While the train was stopping at the provincial town, Sergei
Ivanovich did not go to the refreshment room, but walked up and down
the platform.
  The first time he passed Vronsky's compartment he noticed that the
curtain was drawn over the window; but as he passed it the second time
he saw the old Countess at the window. She beckoned to Koznishev.
  "I'm going, you see- taking him as far as Kursk," she said.
  "Yes, so I heard," said Sergei Ivanovich, standing at her window and
peeping in. "What a noble act on his part!" he added, noticing that
Vronsky was not in the compartment.
  "Yes, after his misfortune, what was there for him to do?"
  "What a terrible thing it was!" said Sergei Ivanovich.
  "Ah, what I have been through! But do get in.... Ah, what I have
been through!" she repeated, when Sergei Ivanovich had got in and
sat down beside her. "You can't conceive it! For six weeks he did
not speak to anyone, and would not touch food except when I implored
him. And not for one minute could we leave him alone. We took away
everything he could have used against himself. We lived on the
ground floor, but there was no reckoning on anything. You know, of
course, that he had shot himself once already on her account," she
said, and the old lady's brows contracted at the recollection. "Yes,
hers was the fitting end for such a woman. Even the death she chose
was low and vulgar."
  "It's not for us to judge, Countess," said Sergei Ivanovich sighing;
"but I can understand that it has been very hard for you."
  "Ah, don't speak of it! I was staying on my estate, and he was
with me. A note was brought him. He wrote an answer and sent it off.
We hadn't an idea that she was close by at the station. In the evening
I had only just gone to my room, when my Mary told me a lady had
thrown herself under the train. Something seemed to strike me at once.
I knew it was she. The first thing I said was that he was not to be
told. But they'd told him already. His coachman was there and saw it
all. When I ran into his room, he was beside himself- it was frightful
to see him. He didn't say a word, but galloped off there. I don't know
to this day what happened there, but he was brought back at death's
door. I shouldn't have known him. Prostration complete, the doctor
said. And that was followed almost by madness. Oh, why talk of it!"
said the Countess with a wave of her hand. "It was an awful time!
No, say what you will, she was a bad woman. Why, what is the meaning
of such desperate passions? It was all to show herself something out
of the ordinary. Well, and that she did do. She brought herself to
ruin and two good men- her husband, and my unhappy son."
  "And what did her husband do?" asked Sergei Ivanovich.
  "He has taken her daughter. Aliosha was ready to agree to anything
at first. Now it worries him terribly that he should have given his
own child away to another man. But he can't take back his word.
Karenin came to the funeral. But we tried to prevent his meeting
Aliosha. For him, for her husband, it was easier, anyway. She had
set him free. But my poor son was utterly given up to her. He had
thrown up everything, his career, me, and even then she had no mercy
on him, but of set purpose she made his ruin complete. No, say what
you will, her very death was the death of a vile woman, of no
religious feeling. God forgive me, but I can't help hating the
memory of her, when I look at my son's misery!"
  "But how is he now?"
  "It was a blessing from Providence for us- this Servian war. I'm
old, and I don't understand the rights and wrongs of it, but it's come
as a providential blessing to him. Of course for me, as his mother,
it's terrible; and what's worse, they say, ce n'est pas tres bien vu a
Petersbourg. But it can't be helped! It was the one thing that could
rouse him. Iashvin- a friend of his- he had lost all he had at cards
and he was going to Servia. He came to see him and persuaded him to
go. Now it's an interest for him. Do please talk to him a little. I
want to distract his mind. He's so low-spirited. And, as bad luck
would have it, he has toothache too. But he'll be delighted to see
you. Please do talk to him; he's walking up and down on that side."
  Sergei Ivanovich said he would be very glad to, and crossed over
to the other side of the station.
                             V.

  In the slanting evening shadows cast by the baggage piled up on
the platform, Vronsky in his long overcoat and slouch hat, with his
hands in his pockets, strode up and down, like a wild beast in a cage,
turning sharply every twenty paces. Sergei Ivanovich fancied, as he
approached him, that Vronsky saw him but was pretending not to see.
This did not affect Sergei Ivanovich in the slightest. He was above
all personal considerations with Vronsky.
  At that moment Sergei Ivanovich looked upon Vronsky as a man
taking an important part in a great cause, and Koznishev thought it
his duty to encourage him and express his approval. He went up to him.
  Vronsky stood still, looked intently at him, recognized him, and
going a few steps forward to meet him, shook hands with him very
warmly.
  "Possibly you didn't wish to see me," said Sergei Ivanovich, "but
couldn't I be of use to you?"
  "There's no one I should less dislike seeing than you," said
Vronsky. "Forgive me. There's nothing in life for me to like."
  "I quite understand, and I merely meant to offer you my services,"
said Sergei Ivanovich, scanning Vronsky's face, full of unmistakable
suffering. "Wouldn't it be of use to you to have a letter to
Ristich, to Milan?"
  "Oh, no!" Vronsky said, seeming to understand him with difficulty.
"If you don't mind, let's walk on. It's so stuffy among the cars. A
letter? No, thank you; to meet death one needs no letters of
introduction. The Turks take..." he said, with a smile that was merely
of the lips. His eyes still kept their look of angry suffering.
  "Yes; but you might find it easier to get into relations, which
are after all essential, with anyone prepared to see you. But that's
as you like. I was very glad to hear of your intention. There have
been so many attacks made on the volunteers, and a man like you raises
them in public estimation."
  "My use as a man," said Vronsky, "is that life's worth nothing to
me. And that I've enough bodily energy to cut my way into their ranks,
and to trample on them or fall- I know that. I'm glad there's
something to give my life for, for it's not simply useless but
loathsome to me. Anyone's welcome to it." And his jaw twitched
impatiently from the incessant nagging toothache, that prevented him
from even speaking with a natural expression.
  "You will become another man, I predict," said Sergei Ivanovich,
feeling touched. "To deliver one's brethren from bondage is an aim
worth death and life. God grant you success outwardly- and inwardly
peace," he added, and he held out his hand.
  Vronsky warmly squeezed his outstretched hand.
  "Yes, as a weapon I may be of some use. But as a man, I'm a
wreck," he jerked out.
  He could hardly speak for the throbbing ache in his strong tooth,
his mouth being filled up with saliva. He was silent, and his eyes
rested on the wheels of the tender, slowly and smoothly rolling
along the rails.
  And all at once a different pain, not an ache, but an inner trouble,
that set his whole being in anguish, made him for an instant forget
his toothache. As he glanced at the tender and the rails, under the
influence of the conversation with a friend he had not met since his
misfortune, he suddenly recalled her- that is, what was left of her
when he had run like one distraught into the barrack of the railway
station: on the table, shamelessly sprawling out among strangers,
the bloodstained body so lately full of life; the head unhurt dropping
back with its weight of hair, and the curling tresses about the
temples, and the exquisite face, with red, half-opened mouth, the
strange, fixed expression, piteous on the lips and awful in the
still open eyes, that seemed to utter that fearful phrase- that he
would be sorry for it- which she had said when they were quarreling.
  And he tried to think of her as she was when he met her the first
time, at a railway station too, mysterious, exquisite, loving, seeking
and giving happiness, and not cruelly revengeful as he remembered
her at that last moment. He tried to recall his best moments with her,
but those moments were poisoned forever. He could only think of her as
triumphant, successful in her menace of a wholly useless remorse,
never to be effaced. He lost all consciousness of toothache, and his
face worked with sobs.
  Passing twice up and down beside the baggage in silence and
regaining his self-possession, he addressed Sergei Ivanovich calmly:
  "You have had no telegrams since yesterday's? Yes, driven back for a
third time, but a decisive engagement expected for tomorrow."
  And after talking a little more of the proclaiming of Milan as King,
and the immense effect this might have, they parted, going to their
cars on hearing the second bell.
                             VI.

  Sergei Ivanovich had not telegraphed to his brother to send to
meet him, as he did not know when he should be able to leave Moscow.
Levin was not at home when Katavassov and Sergei Ivanovich, in a
wagonette hired at the station, drove up to the steps of the
Pokrovskoe house, as black as Negroes from the dust of the road.
Kitty, sitting on the balcony with her father and sister, recognized
her brother-in-law, and ran down to meet him.
  "What a shame not to have let us know," she said, giving her hand to
Sergei Ivanovich, and putting her forehead up for him to kiss.
  "We drove here capitally, and have not put you out," answered Sergei
Ivanovich. "I'm so dirty. I'm afraid to touch you. I've been so
busy, I didn't know when I should be able to tear myself away. And
so you're still as ever enjoying your peaceful, quiet happiness," he
said, smiling, "out of the reach of the current in your peaceful
backwater. Here's our friend Fiodor Vassilievich, successful in
getting here at last."
  "But I'm not a Negro; I shall look like a human being when I
wash," said Katavassov in his jesting fashion, and he shook hands
and smiled, his teeth flashing white in his black face.
  "Kostia will be delighted. He has gone to his grange. It's time he
should be home."
  "Busy as ever with his farming. It really is a peaceful
backwater," said Katavassov; "while we in town think of nothing but
the Servian war. Well, how does our friend look at it? He's sure not
to think like other people."
  "Oh, I don't know, he's like everybody else," Kitty answered, a
little embarrassed, looking round at Sergei Ivanovich. "I'll send to
fetch him. Papa's staying with us. He's only just come home from
abroad."
  And making arrangements to send for Levin and for the guests to
wash, one in his room and the other in what had been Dolly's, and
giving orders for their luncheon, Kitty ran out on the balcony,
enjoying the freedom and rapidity of movement, of which she had been
deprived during the months of her pregnancy.
  "It's Sergei Ivanovich and Katavassov, a professor," she said.
  "Oh, it's hard in such a heat," said the Prince.
  "No, papa, he's very nice, and Kostia's very fond of him," Kitty
said, with a deprecating smile, noticing the irony on her father's
face.
  "Oh, I didn't say anything."
  "You go to them, darling," said Kitty to her sister, "and
entertain them. They saw Stiva at the station; he was quite well.
And I must run to Mitia. As ill luck would have it, I haven't fed
him since tea. He's awake now, and sure to be screaming." And, feeling
a rush of milk, she hurried to the nursery.
  This was not a mere guess; her connection with the child was still
so close that she could gauge by the flow of her milk his need of
food, and knew for certain he was hungry.
  She knew he was crying before she reached the nursery. And he was
indeed crying. She heard him and hastened. But the faster she went the
louder he screamed. It was a fine healthy scream, hungry and
impatient.
  "Has he been screaming long, nurse- very long?" said Kitty,
hurriedly seating herself on a chair, and preparing to give the baby
the breast. "But give me him quickly. Oh, nurse, how tiresome you are!
There, tie the cap afterward, do!"
  The baby's greedy scream was passing into sobs.
  "But you can't manage so, ma'am," said Agathya Mikhailovna, who
was almost always to be found in the nursery. "He must be put
straight. A-oo! A-oo!" she chanted over him, paying no attention to
the mother.
  The nurse brought the baby to his mother. Agathya Mikhailovna
followed him with a face melting with tenderness.
  "He knows me, he knows me. In God's faith, Katerina Alexandrovna,
ma'am, he recognized me!" Agathya Mikhailovna cried above the baby's
screams.
  But Kitty did not hear her words. Her impatience kept growing,
like the baby's.
  Their impatience hindered things for a while. The baby could not get
hold of the breast right, and was furious.
  At last, after despairing, breathless screaming, and vain sucking,
things went right, and mother and child felt simultaneously soothed,
and both subsided into calm.
  "But poor darling, he's all in perspiration!" said Kitty in a
whisper, touching the baby. "What makes you think he knows you?" she
added, with a sidelong glance at the baby's eyes, that peered
roguishly, as she fancied, from under his cap, at his rhythmically
puffing cheeks, and the little red-palmed hand he was waving.
  "Impossible! If he knew anyone, he would have known me," said Kitty,
in response to Agathya Mikhailovna's statement, and she smiled.
  She smiled because, though she said he could not know her, in her
heart she was sure that he knew not merely Agathya Mikhailovna, but
that he knew and understood everything, and knew and understood a
great deal too that no one else knew, and that she, his mother, had
learned and come to understand only through him. To Agathya
Mikhailovna, to the nurse, to his grandfather, to his father even,
Mitia was a living being, requiring only material care, but for his
mother he had long been a moral being, with whom there had been a
whole series of spiritual relations already.
  "When he wakes up, please God, you shall see for yourself. Then when
I do like this, he simply beams on me, the darling! Simply beams
like a sunny day!" said Agathya Mikhailovna.
  "Well, well; then we shall see," whispered Kitty. "But now go
away, he's going to sleep."
                             VII.

  Agathya Mikhailovna went out on tiptoe; the nurse let down the
blind, chased flies out from under the muslin canopy of the crib,
and a hornet struggling on the window frame, and sat down waving a
faded branch of birch over the mother and the baby.
  "How hot it is! If God would send a drop of rain," she said.
  "Yes, yes, sh- sh- sh-" was all Kitty answered, rocking a little,
and tenderly squeezing the plump little arm, with rolls of fat at
the wrist, which Mitia still waved feebly as he opened and shut his
eyes. That hand worried Kitty; she longed to kiss the little hand, but
was afraid to for fear of waking the baby. At last the little hand
ceased waving, and the eyes closed. Only from time to time, as he went
on sucking, the baby raised his long, curly eyelashes and peeped at
his mother with humid eyes, that looked black in the twilight. The
nurse had left off fanning, and was dozing. From above came the
peals of the old Prince's voice, and the chuckle of Katavassov.
  "They have got into talk, without me," thought Kitty, "but still
it's vexing that Kostia's out. He's sure to have gone to the
beehouse again. Though, it's a pity he's there so often, still I'm
glad. It distracts his mind. He's become altogether happier and better
now than in the spring. He used to be so gloomy and worried that I
felt frightened for him. And how absurd he is!" she whispered,
smiling.
  She knew what worried her husband. It was his unbelief. Although, if
she had been asked whether she supposed that in the future life, if he
did not believe, he would be damned, she would have had to admit
that he would be damned, his unbelief did not cause her unhappiness.
And she, confessing that for an unbeliever there can be no
salvation, and loving her husband's soul more than anything in the
world, thought with a smile of his unbelief, and told herself that
he was absurd.
  "What does he keep reading philosophy of some sort for all this
year?" she wondered. "If it's all written in those books, he can
understand them. If it's all wrong, why does he read them? He says
himself that he would like to believe. Then why is it he doesn't
believe? Surely from his thinking so much? And he thinks so much
from being solitary. He's always alone, alone. He can't talk about
it all to us. I fancy he'll be glad of these visitors, especially
Katavassov. He likes discussions with them," she thought, and passed
instantly to the consideration of where it would be more convenient to
put Katavassov, to sleep alone or to share Sergei Ivanovich's room.
And then an idea suddenly struck her, which made her shudder and
even disturb Mitia, who glanced severely at her. "I do believe the
laundress hasn't sent the washing yet, and all the guests' sheets
are in use. If I don't see to it, Agathya Mikhailovna will give Sergei
Ivanovich the used sheets," and at the very idea of this the blood
rushed to Kitty's face.
  "Yes, I will arrange it," she decided, and going back to her
former thoughts, she remembered that some spiritual question of
importance had been interrupted, and she began to recall what. "Yes,
Kostia, an unbeliever," she thought again with a smile.
  "Well, an unbeliever then! Better let him always be one than like
Madame Stahl, or what I tried to be in those days abroad. No, he won't
ever sham anything."
  And a recent instance of his goodness rose vividly to her mind. A
fortnight ago a penitent letter had come from Stepan Arkadyevich to
Dolly. He besought her to save his honor, to sell her estate to pay
his debts. Dolly was in despair, she detested her husband, despised
him, pitied him, resolved on a separation, resolved to refuse, but
ended by agreeing to sell part of her property. After that, with an
irrepressible smile of tenderness, Kitty recalled her husband's
shamefaced embarrassment, his repeated awkward efforts to approach the
subject, and how at last, having thought of the one means of helping
Dolly without wounding her pride, he had suggested to Kitty- what
had not occurred to her before- that she should give up her share of
the property.
  "He an unbeliever indeed! With his heart, his dread of offending
anyone, even a child! Everything for others, nothing for himself.
Sergei Ivanovich simply considers it as Kostia's duty to be his
bailiff. And it's the same with his sister. Now Dolly and her children
are under his guardianship; all these peasants who come to him every
day, as though he were bound to be at their service."
  "Yes, only be like your father- only like him," she said, handing
Mitia over to the nurse, and putting her lips to his cheek.
                             VIII.

  Ever since, by his beloved brother's deathbed, Levin had first
glanced into the questions of life and death in the light of these new
convictions, as he called them, which had during the period from his
twentieth to his thirty-fourth year imperceptibly replaced his
childish and youthful beliefs- he had been stricken with horror, not
so much of death, as of life, without any knowledge of whence, and
why, and how, and what it was. The physical organization, its decay,
the Indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of
energy, evolution, were the words which usurped the place of his old
belief. These words and the ideas associated with them were very
well for intellectual purposes. But for life they yielded nothing, and
Levin felt suddenly like a man who has changed his warm fur cloak
for a muslin garment, and going for the first time into the frost is
immediately convinced, not by reason, but by his whole nature, that he
is as good as naked, and that he must infallibly perish miserably.
  From that moment, though he did not distinctly face it, and still
went on living as before, Levin had never lost this sense of terror at
his lack of knowledge.
  He vaguely felt, too, that what he called his new convictions were
not merely lack of knowledge, but that they were part of a whole order
of ideas, in which no knowledge of what he needed was possible.
  At first, marriage, with the new joys and duties bound up with it,
had completely crowded out these thoughts. But of late, while he was
staying in Moscow after his wife's confinement, with nothing to do,
the question that clamored for solution had more and more often,
more and more insistently, haunted Levin's mind.
  The question was summed up for him thus: "If I do not accept the
answers Christianity gives to the problems of my life, what answers do
I accept?" And in the whole arsenal of his convictions, so far from
finding any satisfactory answers, he was utterly unable to find
anything at all like an answer.
  He was in the position of a man seeking food in toyshops and firearm
shops.
  Instinctively, unconsciously, with every book, with every
conversation, with every man he met, he was on the lookout for light
on these questions and their solution.
  What puzzled and distracted him above everything was that the
majority of men of his age and circle had, like him, exchanged their
old beliefs for the same new convictions, and yet saw nothing to
lament in this, and were perfectly satisfied and serene. So that,
apart from the principal question, Levin was tortured by other
questions too: were these people sincere? or were they playing a part?
or was it that they understood the answers science gave to these
problems in some different, clearer sense than he did? And he
assiduously studied both these men's opinions and the books which
treated of these scientific explanations.
  One fact he had found out since these questions had engrossed his
mind- that he had been quite wrong in supposing, from the
recollections of the university circle of his young days, that
religion had outlived its day, and that it was now practically
nonexistent. All the people nearest to him who were good in their
lives were believers. The old Prince, and Lvov, whom he liked so much,
and Sergei Ivanovich; and all the women believed; and his wife
believed as simply as he had believed in his earliest childhood; and
ninety-nine hundredths of the Russian people, all the people for whose
life he felt the deepest respect, believed.
  Another fact of which he became convinced, after reading many books,
was that the men who shared his views had no other construction to put
on them, and that they gave no explanation of the questions which he
felt he could not live without answering, but simply ignored their
existence and attempted to explain other questions of no possible
interest to him, such as the evolution of organisms, the mechanistic
theory of the soul, etc.
  Moreover, during his wife's confinement, something had happened that
seemed extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into
praying, and at the moment he prayed, he believed. But that moment had
passed, and he could not make his state of mind at that moment fit
into the rest of his life.
  He could not admit that at that moment he knew the truth, and that
now he was wrong; for as soon as he began thinking calmly about it, it
all fell to pieces. He could not admit that he was mistaken then,
for his spiritual condition then was precious to him, and to admit
that it was a proof of weakness would have been to desecrate those
moments. He was miserably divided against himself, and strained all
his spiritual forces to the utmost to escape from this condition.
                             IX.

  These doubts fretted and harassed him, growing weaker or stronger
from time to time, but never leaving him. He read and thought, and the
more he read and the more he thought, the further he felt from the aim
he was pursuing.
  Of late in Moscow and in the country, since he had become
convinced that he would find no solution in the materialists, he had
read and reread thoroughly Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and
Schopenhauer- those philosophers who gave a nonmaterialistic
explanation of life.
  Their ideas seemed to him fruitful when he was reading or was
himself seeking arguments to refute other theories, especially those
of the materialists; but as soon as he began to read or sought for
himself a solution of problems, the same thing always happened. As
long as he followed the fixed definition of vague words such as
spirit, will, freedom, substance, purposely letting himself go into
the snare of words the philosophers, or he himself, set for him, he
seemed to comprehend something. But he had only to forget the
artificial train of reasoning, and to turn from life itself to what
had satisfied him while thinking in accordance with the fixed
definitions, and all this artificial edifice fell to pieces at once
like a house of cards, and it became clear that the edifice had been
built up out of those transposed words, apart from a something in life
that was more important than reason.
  At one time, reading Schopenhauer, he put in place of his will the
word love, and for a couple of days this new philosophy consoled
him, till he removed away from it. But then, when he turned from
life itself to glance at it again, it fell away too, and proved to
be the same muslin garment with no warmth in it.
  His brother Sergei Ivanovich advised him to read the theological
works of Khomiakov. Levin read the second volume of Khomiakov's works,
and in spite of the elegant, epigrammatic, polemic style which at
first repelled him, he was impressed by the doctrine of the church
he found in them. He was struck at first by the idea that the
apprehension of divine truths had not been vouchsafed to man, but to a
corporation of men bound together by love- to Church. What delighted
him was the thought how much easier it was to believe in a still
existing living Church, embracing all the beliefs of men, and having
God at its head, and therefore holy and infallible, and from it to
accept the faith in God, in the creation, the fall, the redemption,
than to begin with God, a mysterious, faraway God, the creation,
etc. But afterward, on reading a Catholic writer's history of the
Church, and then a Greek orthodox writer's history of the Church,
and seeing that the two Churches, in their very conception infallible,
each deny the authority of the other, Khomiakov's doctrine of the
Church lost all its charm for him, and this edifice crumbled into dust
like the philosophers' edifices.
  All that spring he was not himself, and went through fearful moments
of horror.
  "Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life's impossible; and
that I can't know, and so I can't live," Levin said to himself.
  "In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is
formed a bubble organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts,
and that bubble is Me."
  It was an agonizing error, but it was the sole logical result of
ages of human thought in that direction.
  This was the ultimate belief on which all the systems elaborated
by human thought, in almost all their ramifications, rested. It was
the prevalent conviction, and of all other explanations Levin had
unconsciously, not knowing when or how, chosen it, as the clearest
at any rate, and made it his own.
  But it was not merely a falsehood, it was the cruel jeer of some
wicked power, some evil, hateful power, to whom one could not submit.
  He must escape from this power. And the means of escape every man
had in his own hands. He had but to cut short this dependence on evil.
And there was one means- death.
  And Levin, a happy father and a man in perfect health, was several
times so near suicide that he hid the cord, lest he be tempted to hang
himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun, for fear of shooting
himself.
  But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went
on living.
                             X.

  When Levin thought what he was and what he was living for, he
could find no answer to the questions and was reduced to despair;
but when he left off questioning himself about it, it seemed as though
he knew both what he was and what he was living for, acting and living
resolutely and without hesitation; even in these latter days he was
far more decided and unhesitating in life than he had ever been.
  When he went back to the country at the beginning of June, he went
back also to his usual pursuits. His agriculture, his relations with
the peasants and the neighbors, the care of his household, the
management of his sister's and brother's property, of which he had the
direction, his relations with his wife and kindred, the care of his
child, and the new beekeeping hobby he had taken up that spring,
filled all his time.
  These things occupied him now, not because he justified them to
himself by any sort of general principles, as he had done in former
days; on the contrary, disappointed by the failure of his former
efforts for the general welfare, and too much occupied with his own
thought and the mass of business with which he was burdened from all
sides, he had completely given up thinking of the general good, and he
busied himself with all this work simply because it seemed to him that
he must do what he was doing- that he could not do otherwise.
  In former days- almost from childhood, and increasingly up to full
manhood- when he had tried to do anything that would be good for
all, for humanity, for Russia, for the whole village, he had noticed
that the idea of it had been pleasant, but the work itself had
always been incoherent, that then he had never had a full conviction
of its absolute necessity, and that the work that had begun by seeming
so great, had grown less and less, till it vanished into nothing.
But now, since his marriage, when he had begun to confine himself more
and more to living for himself, though he experienced no delight at
all at the thought of the work he was doing, he felt a complete
conviction of its necessity, saw that it succeeded far better than
in old days, and that it kept on growing more and more.
  Now, involuntarily it seemed, he cut more and more deeply into the
soil like a plough, so that he could not be drawn out without
turning aside the furrow.
  To live the same family life as his father and forefathers- that is,
in the same condition of culture- and to bring up his children in
the same, was incontestably necessary. It was as necessary as dining
when one was hungry; and to do this, just as it was necessary to
cook dinner, it was necessary to keep the mechanism of agriculture
at Pokrovskoe going so as to yield an income. Just as incontestably as
it was necessary to repay a debt was it necessary to keep the
patrimonial estate in such a condition that his son, when he
received it as a heritage, would say "Thank you" to his father as
Levin had said "Thank you" to the grandfather for all he had built and
planted. And to do this it was necessary to look after the land
himself, not to let it, and to breed cattle, manure the fields, and
plant timber.
  It was impossible not to look after the affairs of Sergei Ivanovich,
of his sister, of all the peasants who came to him for advice and were
accustomed to do so- as impossible as to fling down a child one is
carrying in one's arms. It was necessary to look after the comfort
of his sister-in-law and her children, and of his wife and baby, and
it was impossible not to spend with them at least a short time each
day.
  And all this, together with shooting and his new beekeeping,
filled up the whole of Levin's life, which had no meaning at all for
him, when he began to think.
  But besides knowing thoroughly what he had to do, Levin knew in just
the same way how he had to do it all, and what was of more
importance than the rest.
  He knew he must hire laborers as cheaply as possible; but to hire
men under bond, paying them in advance at less than the current rate
of wages, was what he must not do, even though it was very profitable.
Selling straw to the peasants in times of scarcity of provender was
what he might do, even though he felt sorry for them; but the tavern
and the pothouse must be put down, though they were a source of
income. Felling timber must be punished as severely as possible, but
he could not exact forfeits for cattle being driven into his fields;
and though it annoyed the keeper and made the peasants not afraid to
graze their cattle on his land, he could not keep their cattle as a
punishment.
  To Piotr, who was paying a moneylender ten per cent a month, he must
lend a sum of money to set him free; but he could not let off peasants
who did not pay their rent, nor let them fall into arrears. It was
impossible to overlook the bailiff's not having mown the meadows and
letting the hay spoil; and it was equally impossible to mow eighty
dessiatinas where a young copse had been planted. It was impossible to
excuse a laborer who had gone home in the busy season because his
father was dying, however sorry he might feel for him, and he must
subtract from his pay those costly months of idleness, but it was
impossible not to allow monthly rations to the old servants who were
of absolutely no use.
  Levin knew also that when he got home he must first of all go to his
wife, who was unwell, and that the peasants who had been waiting for
three hours to see him could wait a little longer. He knew too that,
regardless of all the pleasure he felt in taking a swarm, he must
forego that pleasure, and leave the old man to see to the bees
alone, while he talked to the peasants who had come after him to the
beehouse.
  Whether he were acting rightly or wrongly he did not know, and far
from trying to prove which it was nowadays he avoided all thought or
talk about it.
  Reasoning had brought him to doubt, and prevented him from seeing
what he ought to do and what he ought not. When he did not think,
but simply lived, he was continually aware of the presence of an
infallible judge in his soul, determining which of two possible
courses of action was the better and which was the worse; and as
soon as he did not act rightly, he was at once aware of it.
  So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what
he was and what he was living for, and harassed at this lack of
knowledge to such a point that he was afraid of suicide, and yet
firmly laying down his own individual definite path in life.
                             XI.

  The day on which Sergei Ivanovich came to Pokrovskoe was one of
Levin's most painful days.
  It was the very busiest working time, when all the peasantry show an
extraordinary intensity of self-sacrifice in labor, such as is not
to be found in any other conditions of life and would be highly
esteemed if the men who showed these qualities themselves thought
highly of them, and if it were not repeated every year, and if the
results of this intense labor were not so simple.
  To reap and bind and cart off the rye and oats; to mow the
meadows, turn over the fallows, thresh the seed and sow the winter
corn- all this seems so simple and ordinary; but to succeed in getting
through it all everyone in the village, from the old man to the
young child, must toil incessantly for three or four weeks, three
times as hard as usual, living on kvass, onions, and black bread,
threshing and carrying the sheaves at night, and not giving more
than two or three hours in the twenty-four to sleep. And every year
this is done all over Russia.
  Having lived the greater part of his life in the country and in
the closest relations with the peasants, Levin always felt in this
busy time that he was infected by this general quickening of energy in
the people.
  In the early morning he rode over to the first sowing of the rye,
and to the oats, which were being carried to the stacks, and,
returning home at the time his wife and sister-in-law were getting up,
he drank coffee with them and walked to the grange, where a new
threshing machine was to be set working to get ready the seed.
  All this day Levin, while talking with the bailiff and the peasants,
and, at home, with his wife, and Dolly, and her children, and his
father-in-law, kept on thinking of one thing, and one thing only- that
which at this time engrossed him most outside of the cares of his
estate; and in everything he sought a relation to his questioning:
"What am I, then? And where am I? And why am I here?"
  He was standing in the cool threshing barn, still fragrant with
the leaves of the hazel branches interlaced on the freshly peeled
aspen beams of the new thatch roof. He gazed through the open door
in which the dry bitter chaff dust swirled and played; at the grass of
the threshing floor in the sunlight and the fresh straw that had
been brought in from the barn; then at the speckly-headed,
white-breasted swallows that flew chirping in under the roof and,
fluttering their wings, settled in the crevices of the doorway; then
at the peasants bustling in the dark, dusty barn, and he thought
strange thoughts.
  "Why is all this being done?" he thought. "Why am I standing here,
making them work? What are they all so busy for, trying to show
their zeal before me? For what reason is old Matriona, my old
friend, toiling? (I doctored her, when the beam fell on her in the
fire)," he thought, looking at a thin old woman who was raking up
the grain, moving painfully with her bare, sun-blackened feet over the
uneven, rough floor. "Then she recovered, but today or tomorrow or
in ten years she won't; they'll bury her, and nothing will be left
either of her or of that dashing woman in the red skirt, who with that
skillful, gentle action is shaking the ears out of their husks.
They'll bury her, as well as this piebald gelding, and very soon too,"
he thought, gazing at the heavily moving, panting horse that kept
walking up the treadwheel that turned under him. "And they will bury
her, and Fiodor the thresher with his curly beard full of chaff, and
his shirt torn on his white shoulders- they will bury him. He's
untying the sheaves, and giving orders, and shouting to the women, and
quickly setting straight the strap on the moving wheel. And what's
more, it's not them alone- they'll bury me too, and nothing will be
left. What for? "
  He thought this, and at the same time looked at his watch to
reckon how much they threshed in an hour. He wanted to know this so as
to judge by it the task to set for the day.
  "It'll soon be one, and they're only beginning the third sheaf,"
thought Levin. He went up to the man who was feeding the machine,
and shouting over the roar of the machine, he told him to feed it more
slowly.
  "You put in too much at a time, Fiodor. Do you see- it gets
choked, that's why it isn't getting on. Do it evenly."
  Fiodor, black with the dust that clung to his moist face, shouted
something in response, but still went on doing as Levin did not want
him to.
  Levin, going up to the machine, moved Fiodor aside, and began
feeding the machine himself.
  Working on till the peasants' dinner hour, which was not long in
coming, he went out of the barn with Fiodor and fell into talk with
him, stopping beside a neat yellow sheaf of rye laid on the
threshing floor for seed.
  Fiodor came from a village at some distance from the one in which
Levin had once allotted land to his co-operative association. Now it
had been let to the innkeeper.
  Levin talked to Fiodor about this land and asked whether Platon, a
well-to-do peasant of good character belonging to the same village,
would not take the land for the coming year.
  "It's a high rent; it wouldn't pay Platon, Konstantin Dmitrich,"
answered the peasant, picking the ears off his sweat-drenched shirt.
  "But how does Kirillov make it pay?"
  "Mitukha!" (So the peasant called the innkeeper in a tone of
contempt.) "You may be sure he'll make it pay, Konstantin Dmitrich!
He'll get his share, however he has to squeeze to get it! He's no
mercy on a peasant. But Uncle Fokanich" (so he called the old
peasant Platon)- "do you suppose he'd flay the skin off a man? Where
there's debt, he'll let anyone off. And he'll suffer losses. He's
human, too."
  "But why will he let anyone off?"
  "Oh, well, of course, folks are different. One man lives for his own
wants and nothing else, like Mitukha, thinking only of filling his
belly; but Fokanich is a righteous old man. He lives for his soul.
He does not forget God."
  "How does he think of God? How does he live for his soul?" Levin
almost shouted.
  "Why, to be sure, in truth, in God's way. Folks are different.
Take you, now- you wouldn't wrong a man..."
  "Yes, yes- good-by!" said Levin, breathless with excitement, and
turning round he took his stick and walked quickly away toward home.
At the peasant's words that Fokanich lived for his soul, in truth,
in God's way, undefined but significant ideas seemed to burst forth,
as though they had been locked up, and, all of them striving toward
one goal, they thronged whirling through his head, blinding him with
their light.
                             XII.

  Levin strode along the highroad, absorbed not so much in his
thoughts (he could not yet disentangle them), as in his spiritual
condition, unlike anything he had experienced before.
  The words uttered by the peasant had acted on his soul like an
electric shock, suddenly transforming and combining into a single
whole the whole swarm of disjointed, impotent, separate thoughts
that incessantly occupied his mind. These thoughts had unconsciously
been in his mind even when he was talking about the land.
  He was aware of something new in his soul, and joyfully tested
this new thing, not yet knowing what it was.
  "Not living for his own wants, but for God? For what God? And
could one say anything more senseless than what he said? He said
that one must not live for one's own wants, that is, that one must not
live for what we understand, what we are attracted by, what we desire-
but must live for something incomprehensible, for God, whom no one can
understand nor even define. What of it? Didn't I understand those
senseless words of Fiodor's? And understanding them, did I doubt their
truth? Did I think them stupid, obscure, inexact?
  "No, I understood him, and exactly as he understands the words. I
understood them more fully and clearly than I understand anything in
life, and never in my life have I doubted nor can I doubt about
them. And not only I, but everyone, the whole world, understands
nothing fully but this, and about this only they have no doubt, and
are always agreed.
  "Fiodor says that Kirillov, the innkeeper, lives for his belly.
That's comprehensible and rational. All of us as rational beings can't
do anything else but live for our belly. And all of a sudden the
same Fiodor says that one mustn't live for one's belly, but must
live for truth, for God, and, at a hint, I understand him! And I and
millions of men, men who lived ages ago and men living now-
peasants, the poor in spirit and the sages, who have thought and
written about it, in their obscure words saying the same thing- we are
all agreed about this one thing: what we must live for and what is
good. I and all men have only one firm, incontestable, clear
knowledge, and that knowledge cannot be explained by reason- it is
outside it, and has no causes, and can have no effects.
  "If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects- a
reward- it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of
cause and effect.
  "And yet I know it, and we all know it.
  "And I sought miracles, complained that I did not see a miracle
which would convince me. And here is a miracle, the sole miracle
possible, continually existing, surrounding me on all sides, and I
never noticed it!
   "What could be a greater miracle than that?
  "Can I have found the solution of it all? Can my sufferings be
over?" thought Levin, striding along the dusty road, not noticing
the heat nor his weariness, and experiencing a sense of relief from
prolonged suffering. This feeling was so delicious that it seemed to
him incredible. He was breathless with emotion and incapable of
going farther; he turned off the road into the forest and lay down
in the shade of an aspen on the uncut grass. He took his hat off his
hot head and lay propped on his elbow in the lush, feathery,
woodland grass.
  "Yes, I must make it clear to myself and understand," he thought,
looking intently at the untrampled grass before him, and following the
movements of a green beetle, advancing along a blade of couch grass
and lifting up in its progress a leaf of goatweed. "Everything from
beginning?" he asked himself, bending aside the leaf of goatweed out
of the beetle's way and twisting another blade of grass above for
the beetle to cross over to. "What is it makes me glad? What have I
discovered?
  "Of old I used to say that in my body, that in the body of this
grass and of this beetle (there, she didn't care for the grass,
she's opened her wings and flown away), there was going on a
transformation of matter in accordance with physical, chemical, and
physiological laws. And in all of us, as well as in the aspens and
clouds and nebulae, there was a process of evolution. Evolution from
what? Into what?- Eternal evolution and struggle... As though there
could be any sort of tendency and struggle in the eternal! And I was
astonished that in spite of utmost effort of thought in this direction
I could not discover the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses
and yearnings. And the meaning of my impulses is so clear within me,
that I was living according to them all the time, and I was astonished
and rejoiced, when the peasant expressed it to me: to live for God,
for my soul.
  "I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I
understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too
gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found the
Master."
  And he briefly went through, mentally, the whole course of his ideas
during the last two years, the beginning of which was the clear
confronting of death at the sight of his dear brother hopelessly ill.
  Then, for the first time, grasping that for every man, and himself
too, there was nothing in store but suffering, death and eternal
oblivion, he had made up his mind that life was impossible like
that, and that he must either interpret life so that it would not
present itself to him as the evil jest of some devil, or else shoot
himself.
  But he had not done either, but had gone on living, thinking, and
feeling, and had even at that very time married, and had had many
joys, and had been happy, when he was not thinking of the meaning of
his life.
  What did this mean? It meant that he had been living rightly, but
thinking wrongly.
  He had lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritual truths
that he had sucked in with his mother's milk, but he had thought,
not merely without recognition of these truths, but studiously
ignoring them.
  Now it was clear to him that he could live only by virtue of the
beliefs in which he had been brought up.
  "What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, if
I had not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must live for
God and not for my own wants? I should have robbed and lied and
killed. Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my life would
have existed for me." And with the utmost stretch of imagination he
could not conceive the brutal creature he would have been himself,
if he had not known what he was living for.
  "I looked for an answer to my question. And thought could not give
an answer to my question- it is incommensurable with my question.
The answer has been given me by life itself, in my knowledge of what
is right and what is wrong. And that knowledge I did not arrive at
in any way, it was given to me as to all men, given, because I could
not have got it from anywhere.
  "Where could I have got it? Could I have arrived through reason at
knowing that I must love my neighbor and not oppress him? I was told
that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me
what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason
discovered the struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to
oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the
deduction of reason. But loving one's neighbor reason could never
discover, because that is unreasonable.
  "Yes, pride," he said to himself, turning over on his abdomen and
beginning to tie a noose of blades of grass, trying not to break them.
  "And not merely pride of intellect, but dullness of intellect. And
most of all, its knavishness; yes, the knavishness of intellect. The
cheating knavishness of intellect- that's it," he repeated.
                             XIII.

  And Levin remembered a scene he had lately witnessed between Dolly
and her children. The children, left to themselves, had begun
cooking raspberries over the candles and squirting milk into each
other's mouths with a syringe. Their mother, catching them at these
pranks, began reminding them in Levin's presence of the trouble
their mischief gave to the grown-up people, and that this trouble
was all for their sake, and that if they smashed the cups they would
have nothing to drink their tea out of, and that if they wasted the
milk, they would have nothing to eat, and die of hunger.
  And Levin had been struck by the passive, weary incredulity with
which the children heard what their mother said to them. They were
simply annoyed that their amusing play had been interrupted, and did
not believe a word of what their mother was saying. They could not
believe it indeed, for they could not take in the immensity of all
they habitually enjoyed, and so could not conceive that what they were
destroying was the very thing they lived by.
  "That all comes of itself," they thought, "and there's nothing
interesting or important about it, because it has always been so,
and always will be so. And it's all always the same. We've no need
to think about that, it's all ready; but we want to invent something
of our own, and new. So we thought of putting raspberries in a cup,
and cooking them over a candle, and squirting milk straight into
each other's mouths. That's fun, and something new, and not a bit
worse than drinking out of cups."
  "Isn't it just the same that we do, that I did, searching by the aid
of reason for the significance of the forces of nature and the meaning
of the life of man?" he thought.
  "And don't all the theories of philosophy do the same, trying by the
path of thought, which is strange and not natural to man, to bring him
to a knowledge of what he has known long ago, and knows so certainly
that he could not live at all without it? Isn't it distinctly to be
seen in the development of each philosopher's theory, that he knows
what is the chief significance of life beforehand, just as
positively as the peasant Fiodor, and not a bit more clearly than
he, and is simply trying by a dubious intellectual path to come back
to what everyone knows?
  "Now then, leave the children to themselves to get things alone
and make their crockery, get the milk from the cows, and so on.
Would they be naughty then? Why, they'd die of hunger! Well, then,
leave us with our passions and thoughts, without any idea of the one
God, of the Creator, or without any idea of what is right, without any
idea of moral evil.
  "Just try and build up anything without those ideas!
  "We destroy them only because we're spiritually provided for.
Exactly like the children!
  "Whence have I that joyful knowledge, shared with the peasant,
that alone gives peace to my soul? Whence did I get it?
  "Brought up with an idea of God, a Christian, my whole life filled
with the spiritual blessings Christianity has given me, full of
them, and living on these blessings, like the children I did not
understand them, and destroy- that is, try to destroy- what I live by.
And as soon as an important moment of life comes, like the children
when they are cold and hungry, I turn to Him, and even less than the
children when their mother's scold them for their childish mischief,
do I feel that my childish efforts at wanton madness are reckoned
against me.
  "Yes, what I know, I know not by reason- but it has been given to
me, revealed to me, and I know it with my heart, by faith in the chief
thing taught by the Church.
  "The Church? The Church!" Levin repeated to himself. He turned
over on the other side, and, leaning on his elbow, fell to gazing into
the distance at a herd of cattle crossing over to the river.
  "But can I believe in all the Church teaches?" he thought, putting
himself to the test, and thinking of everything that could destroy his
present peace of mind. Intentionally he recalled all those doctrines
of the Church which had always seemed most strange and had always been
a stumbling block to him. The Creation? But how did I explain
existence? By existence? By nothing? The devil and sin. But how do I
explain evil?... The Redeemer?...
  "But I know nothing, nothing, and I can know nothing but what has
been told to me and all men."
  And it seemed to him now that there was not a single article of
faith of the Church which could destroy the chief thing- faith in God,
in goodness, as the one goal of man's destiny.
  Under every article of faith of the Church could be put the faith in
the service of truth instead of one's wants. And each doctrine did not
simply leave that faith unshaken- each doctrine seemed essential to
complete that great miracle, continually manifest upon earth, that
made it possible for each man, and millions of different sorts of men-
wise men and imbeciles, old men and children- all men, peasants, Lvov,
Kitty, beggars and kings, to understand perfectly the same one
thing, and to build up thereby that life of the soul which alone is
worth living, and which alone is precious to us.
  Lying on his back, he gazed up now into the high, cloudless sky. "Do
I not know that that is infinite space, and that it is not a round
arch? But, however I screw up my eyes and strain my sight, I cannot
see it as not round and not bounded, and, in spite of my knowing about
infinite space, I am incontestably right when I see a solid blue dome,
and more right than when I strain my eyes to see beyond it."
  Levin ceased thinking, and only, as it were, listened to
mysterious voices that seemed talking joyfully and earnestly with each
other.
  "Can this be faith?" he thought, afraid to believe in his happiness.
"My God, I thank Thee!" he said, gulping down his sobs, and with
both hands brushing away the tears that filled his eyes.
                             XIV.

  Levin looked before him and saw a herd of cattle, then he caught
sight of his wagonette with Black in the shafts, and the coachman,
who, driving up to the herd, said something to the herdsman. Then he
heard the rattle of the wheels and the snort of the sleek horse
close by him. But he was so buried in his thoughts that he did not
even wonder why the coachman had come for him.
  He only thought of that when the coachman had driven quite up to him
and shouted to him.
  "The mistress sent me. Your brother has come, and some gentleman
with him."
  Levin got into the wagonette and took the reins.
  As though just roused out of sleep, for a long while Levin could not
collect his faculties. He stared at the sleek horse flecked with
lather between his haunches and on his neck, where the harness rubbed,
stared at Ivan the coachman, sitting beside him, and remembered that
he was expecting his brother, thought that his wife was most likely
uneasy at his long absence, and tried to guess who was the visitor who
had come with his brother. And his brother and his wife and the
unknown guest seemed to him now quite different from before. He
fancied that now his relations with all men would be different.
  "With my brother there will be none of that aloofness there always
used to be between us, there will be no disputes; with Kitty there
shall never be quarrels; with the visitor, whoever he may be, I will
be friendly and amiable; and with the servants, with Ivan- it will all
be different."
  Pulling the stiff rein and holding in the good horse that snorted
with impatience and begged to be let go, Levin looked round at Ivan
sitting beside him, not knowing what to do with his unoccupied
hands, continually pressing down his shirt as it puffed out, and he
tried to find something to start a conversation about with him. He
would have said that Ivan had pulled the saddle girth up too high, but
that was like blame, and he longed for friendly, warm talk. Nothing
else occurred to him.
  "Your Honor must keep to the right and mind that stump," said the
coachman, pulling the rein Levin held.
  "Please don't touch anything and don't teach me!" said Levin,
angered by this interference. Now, as always, interference made him
angry, and he felt sorrowfully at once how mistaken had been his
supposition that his spiritual condition could immediately change
him in contact with reality.
  He was not a quarter of a versta from home when he saw Grisha and
Tania running to meet him.
  "Uncle Kostia! Mamma's coming, and grandfather, and Sergei
Ivanovich, and someone else," they said, clambering up into the
wagonette.
  "Who is he?"
  "An awfully terrible person! And he does like this with his arms,"
said Tania, getting up in the wagonette and mimicking Katavassov.
  "Old or young?" asked Levin, laughing, reminded of someone, he did
not know whom, by Tania's performance.
  "Oh, I hope it's not a tiresome person!" thought Levin.
  As soon as he turned, at a bend in the road, and saw the party
coming, Levin recognized Katavassov in a straw hat, walking along
swinging his arms just as Tania had shown him.
  Katavassov was very fond of discussing metaphysics, having derived
his notions from natural science writers who had never studied
metaphysics, and in Moscow Levin had had many arguments with him of
late.
  And one of these arguments, in which Katavassov had obviously
considered that he came off victorious, was the first thing Levin
thought of as he recognized him.
  "No, whatever I do, I won't argue and give utterance to my ideas
lightly," he thought.
  Getting out of the wagonette and greeting his brother and
Katavassov, Levin asked about his wife.
  "She has taken Mitia to Kolok" (a copse near the house). "She
meant to have him out there because it's so hot indoors," said
Dolly. Levin had always advised his wife not to take the baby to the
wood, thinking it unsafe, and he was not pleased to hear this.
  "She rushes about from place to place with him," said the Prince,
smiling. "I advised her to try putting him in the icehouse."
  "She meant to come to the apiary. She thought you would be there. We
are going there," said Dolly.
  "Well, and what are you doing?" said Sergei Ivanovich, falling
back from the rest and walking beside him.
  "Oh, nothing special. Busy as usual with the land," answered
Levin. "Well, and what about you? Come for long? We have been
expecting you for such a long time."
  "Only for a fortnight. I've a great deal to do in Moscow."
  At these words the brothers' eyes met, and Levin, in spite of the
desire he always had, stronger than ever just now, to be on
affectionate and still more open terms with his brother, felt an
awkwardness in looking at him. He dropped his eyes and did not know
what to say.
  Casting over the subjects of conversation that would be pleasant
to Sergei Ivanovich, and would keep him off the subject of the Servian
war and the Slavonic question, at which he had hinted by alluding to
what he had to do in Moscow, Levin began to talk of Sergei Ivanovich's
book.
  "Well, have there been any reviews of your book?" he asked.
  Sergei Ivanovich smiled at the intentional character of the
question.
  "No one is interested in that now, and I least of all," he said.
"Just look, Darya Alexandrovna, we shall have a shower," he added,
pointing with a sunshade at the white rain clouds that showed above
the aspen treetops.
  And these words were enough to reestablish again between the
brothers that tone- hardly hostile, but chilly- which Levin had been
so longing to avoid.
  Levin went up to Katavassov.
  "It was jolly of you to make up your mind to come," he said to him.
  "I've been intending to a long while. Now we shall have some
discussion- we'll see to that. Have you been reading Spencer?"
  "No, I've not finished reading him," said Levin. "But I don't need
him now."
  "How's that? That's interesting. Why so?"
  "I mean that I'm fully convinced that the solution of the problems
that interest me I shall never find in him and his like. Now..."
  But Katavassov's serene and good-humored expression suddenly
struck him, and he felt such tenderness for his own happy mood,
which he was unmistakably disturbing by this conversation, that he
remembered his resolution and stopped short.
  "But we'll talk later on," he added. "If we're going to the
apiary, it's this way, along this little path," he said, addressing
them all.
  Going along the narrow path to a little uncut meadow covered on
one side with thick clumps of brilliant heartsease, among which
stood up here and there tall, dark green tufts of hellebore, Levin
settled his guests in the dense, cool shade of the young aspens on a
bench and some stumps purposely put there for visitors to the apiary
who might be afraid of the bees, and he went off himself to the hut to
get bread, cucumbers, and fresh honey, to regale them with.
  Trying to make his movements as deliberate as possible, and
listening to the bees that buzzed more and more frequently past him,
he walked along the little path to the hut. In the very entry one
bee hummed angrily, caught in his beard, but he carefully extricated
it. Going into the shady outer room, he took down from the wall his
veil, that hung on a peg, and putting it on, and thrusting his hands
into his pockets, he went into the fenced-in bee garden, where there
stood in the midst of a closely mown space in regular rows, fastened
with bast on posts, all the hives he knew so well, the old stocks,
each with its own history, and along the fences the younger swarms
hived that year. In front of the openings of the hives, it made his
eyes giddy to watch the bees and drones whirling round and round about
the same spot, while among them the worker bees flew in and out with
spoils, or in search of them, always in the same direction, into the
wood, to the flowering linden trees, and back to the hives.
  His ears were filled with the incessant hum in various notes- now
the busy hum of the worker bee flying quickly off, then the blaring of
the lazy drone, and the excited buzz of the bees on guard,
protecting their property from the enemy and preparing to sting. On
the farther side of the fence the old beekeeper was shaving a hoop for
a tub, and he did not see Levin. Levin stood still in the midst of the
apiary and did not call him.
  He was glad of a chance to be alone to recover from the influence of
ordinary actual life, which had already depressed his happy mood.
  He thought that he had already had time to lose his temper with
Ivan, to show coolness to his brother, and to talk flippantly with
Katavassov.
  "Can it have been only a momentary mood, and will it pass and
leave no trace?" he thought.
  But the same instant, going back to his mood, he felt with delight
that something new and important had happened to him. Real life had
only for a time overcast the spiritual peace he had found, but it
was still untouched within him.
  Just as the bees, whirling round him, now menacing him and
distracting his attention, prevented him from enjoying complete
physical peace, forced him to restrain his movements to avoid them, so
had the petty cares that had swarmed about him from the moment he
got into the trap, restricted his spiritual freedom; but that lasted
only so long as he was among them. Just as his bodily strength was
still unaffected, in spite of the bees, so too was the spiritual
strength that he had just become aware of.
                             XV.

  "Do you know, Kostia, with whom Sergei Ivanovich traveled on his way
here?" said Dolly, doling out cucumbers and honey to the children.
"With Vronsky! He's going to Servia."
  "And not alone; he's taking a squadron out with him at his own
expense," said Katavassov.
  "That's the right thing for him," said Levin. "Are volunteers
still going out then?" he added, glancing at Sergei Ivanovich.
  Sergei Ivanovich did not answer. He was carefully, with a blunt
knife, getting a live bee covered with sticky honey out of a cup
full of white honeycomb.
  "I should think so! You should have seen what was going on at the
station yesterday!" said Katavassov, biting with a succulent sound
into a cucumber.
  "Well, what is one to make of it? In Christ's name, do explain to
me, Sergei Ivanovich, where are all those volunteers going, whom are
they fighting with," asked the old Prince, unmistakably taking up a
conversation that had sprung up in Levin's absence.
  "With the Turks," Sergei Ivanovich answered, smiling serenely, as he
extricated the bee, dark with honey and helplessly kicking, and
transferred it with the knife to a stout aspen leaf.
  "But who has declared war on the Turks?- Ivan Ivanovich Ragozov
and Countess Lidia Ivanovna, assisted by Madame Stahl?"
  "No one has declared war, but people sympathize with their
neighbors' suffering, and are eager to help them," said Sergei
Ivanovich.
  "But the Prince is not speaking of help," said Levin, coming to
the assistance of his father-in-law, "but of war. The Prince says that
private persons cannot take part in war without the permission of
the government."
  "Kostia, mind, that's a bee! Really, they'll sting us!" said
Dolly, waving away a wasp.
  "But that's not a bee- it's a wasp," said Levin.
  "Well now, well- what's your own theory?" Katavassov said to Levin
with a smile, distinctly challenging him to a discussion. "Why haven't
private persons the right to do so?"
  "Oh, my theory's this: war is on one side such a beastly, cruel
and awful thing, that no one man, not to speak of a Christian, can
individually take upon himself the responsibility of beginning wars;
that can only be done by a government, which is called upon to do
this, and is driven inevitably into war. On the other hand, both
political science and common sense teach us that in matters of
state, and especially in the matter of war, private citizens must
forego their personal individual will."
  Sergei Ivanovich and Katavassov had their replies ready, and both
began speaking at the same time.
  "But the point is, my dear fellow, that there may be cases when
the government does not carry out the will of the citizens, and then
the public asserts its will," said Katavassov.
  But evidently Sergei Ivanovich did not approve of this answer. His
brows contracted at Katavassov's words, and he said something else.
  "You don't put the matter in its true light. There is no question
here of a declaration of war, but simply the expression of a human
Christian feeling. Our brothers, one with us in religion and in
race, are being massacred. Even supposing they were not our
brothers, nor fellow Christians, but simply children, women, old
people, feeling is aroused and Russians go eagerly to help in stopping
these atrocities. Fancy, if you were going along the street and saw
drunken men beating a woman or a child- I imagine you would not stop
to inquire whether war had been declared on the men, but would throw
yourself on them, and protect the victim."
  "But I should not kill them," said Levin.
  "Yes, you would kill them."
  "I don't know. If I saw that, I might give way to my impulse of
the moment, but I can't say beforehand. And such a momentary impulse
there is not, and there cannot be, in the case of the oppression of
the Slavonic peoples."
  "Possibly for you there is not; but for others there is," said
Sergei Ivanovich, frowning with displeasure. "There are traditions
still extant among our people about orthodox men, suffering under
the yoke of the 'impious Hagarites.' The people have heard of the
sufferings of their brethren, and have spoken."
  "Perhaps so," said Levin evasively; "but I don't see it. I'm one
of the people myself, and I don't feel it."
  "Here am I, too," said the old Prince. "I've been staying abroad and
reading the papers, and I must own, up to the time of the Bulgarian
atrocities, I couldn't make out why it was all the Russians were all
of a sudden so fond of their Slavonic brethren, while I didn't feel
the slightest affection for them. I was very much upset, thought I was
a monster, or that it was the influence of Carlsbad on me. But since I
have been here, my mind's been set at rest. I see that there are
people besides me who're only interested in Russia, and not in their
Slavonic brethren. Here's Konstantin, too."
  "Personal opinions mean nothing in such a case," said Sergei
Ivanovich; "it's not a matter of personal opinions when all Russia-
the whole people- has expressed its will."
  "But excuse me, I don't see that. The people don't know anything
about it, if you come to that," said the old Prince.
  "Oh, papa!... How can you say that? And last Sunday in church?..."
said Dolly, listening to the conversation. "Please give me a towel,"
she said to the old man, who was looking at the children with a smile.
"Why, it's not possible that all..."
  "But what was it in church on Sunday? The priest had been told to
read that. He read it. They didn't understand a word of it, sighed
as they do at every sermon," pursued the old Prince. "Then they were
told that there was to be a collection for a pious object in church;
well, they pulled out their coppers and gave them, but what for they
couldn't say."
  "The people cannot help knowing; the sense of their own destinies is
always in the people, and at such moments as the present that sense
finds utterance," said Sergei Ivanovich with conviction, glancing at
the old beekeeper.
  The handsome old man, with black grizzled beard and thick silvery
hair, stood motionless, holding a cup of honey, looking down from
the height of his tall figure with friendly serenity at the
gentlefolk, obviously understanding nothing of their conversation
and not caring to understand it.
  "That's so, no doubt," he said, with a significant shake of his head
at Sergei Ivanovich's words.
  "Here, then, ask him. He knows nothing about it and thinks nothing,"
said Levin. "Have you heard about the war, Mikhailich?" he said,
turning to him. "What they read in the church? What do you think about
it? Ought we to fight for the Christians?"
  "What should we think? Alexander Nikolaevich our Emperor has thought
for us; he thinks for us indeed in all things. It's clearer for him to
see. Shall I bring a bit more bread? Give the little lad some more?"
he said, addressing Darya Alexandrovna and pointing to Grisha, who was
finishing his crust.
  "I don't need to ask," said Sergei Ivanovich, "we have seen and
are seeing hundreds and hundreds of people who give up everything to
serve a just cause, come from every part of Russia, and directly and
clearly express their thought and aim. They bring their coppers, or go
themselves and say directly what's what. What does it mean?"
  "It means, to my thinking," said Levin, who was beginning to get
warm, "that among eighty millions of people there can always be
found not hundreds, as now, but tens of thousands of people who have
lost caste, ne'er-do-wells, who are always ready to go anywhere- to
Pugachiov's bands, to Khiva, to Servia..."
  "I tell you that it's not a case of hundreds or of ne'er-do-wells,
but the best representatives of the people!" said Sergei Ivanovich,
with as much irritation as if he were defending the last penny of
his fortune. "And what of the subscriptions? In this case it is a
whole people directly expressing their will."
  "That word 'people' is so vague," said Levin. "Parish clerks,
schoolmasters, and one in a thousand of the peasants, maybe, know what
it's all about. The rest of the eighty millions, like Mikhailich,
far from expressing their will, haven't the faintest idea what there
is for them to express their will about. What right have we to say
that this is the people's will?"
                             XVI.

  Sergei Ivanovich, being practiced in dialectics, did not reply,
but at once turned the conversation to another aspect of the subject.
  "Oh, if you want to learn the spirit of the people by arithmetical
computation, of course it's very difficult to arrive at it. And voting
has not been introduced among us, and cannot be introduced, for it
does not express the will of the people; but there are other ways of
reaching that. It is felt in the air, it is felt by the heart. I won't
speak of those deep currents which are astir in the still ocean of the
people, and which are evident to every unprejudiced man- let us look
at society in the narrow sense. All the most diverse sections of the
intelligent people, hostile before, are merged in one. Every
division is at an end, all the public organs say the same thing over
and over again, all feel the mighty torrent that has overtaken them
and is carrying them in one direction."
  "Yes, all the newspapers do say the same thing," said the Prince.
"That's true. But so it is the same thing that all the frogs croak
before storm. One can hear nothing for them."
  "Frogs or no frogs, I'm not the publisher of newspapers and I
don't want to defend them; but I am speaking of the unanimity in the
intellectual world," said Sergei Ivanovich, addressing his brother.
Levin would have answered, but the old Prince interrupted him.
  "Well, about that unanimity, that's another thing, one may say,"
said the Prince. "There's my son-in-law, Stepan Arkadyevich- you
know him. He's got a place now on the committee of a commission and
something or other, I don't remember. Only there's nothing to do in
it- why, Dolly, it's no secret- and a salary of eight thousand! You
try asking him whether his post is of any use- he'll prove to you that
it's most necessary. And he's a truthful man, too, but one can't
help but believe in the utility of eight thousand roubles."
  "Yes- he asked me to give a message to Darya Alexandrovna about
the post," said Sergei Ivanovich reluctantly, feeling the Prince's
remark to be ill-timed.
  "So it is with the unanimity of the press. That's been explained
to me: as soon as there's war their incomes are doubled. How can
they help believing in the destinies of the people and the Slavonic
races- and all that sort of thing?..."
  "I don't care for many of the papers, but that's unjust," said
Sergei Ivanovich.
  "I would only make one condition," pursued the old Prince. "Alphonse
Karr said a capital thing before the war with Prussia: 'You consider
war to be inevitable? Very good. Let everyone who advocates war be
enrolled in a special regiment of advance guards, for the vanguard
of every assault, of every attack, to lead them all!'"
  "A nice lot the editors would make!" said Katavassov, with a loud
roar, as he pictured the editors he knew in this picked legion.
  "But they'd run," said Dolly. "They'd only be in the way."
  "Oh, if they ran away, then we'd have grapeshot or Cossacks with
whips behind them," said the Prince.
  "But that's a joke, and a poor one too, if you'll excuse me saying
so, Prince," said Sergei Ivanovich.
  "I don't see that it was a joke, that... Levin was beginning, but
Sergei Ivanovich interrupted him.
  "Every member of society is called upon to do his own special work,"
said he. "And men of thought are doing their work when they express
public opinion. And the singlehearted and full expression of public
opinion is the service of the press, and a phenomenon to rejoice us at
the same time. Twenty years ago we should have been silent, but now we
have heard the voice of the Russian people, which is ready to rise
as one man and ready to sacrifice itself for its oppressed brethren;
that is a great step and a proof of strength."
  "But it's not only making a sacrifice, but killing Turks," said
Levin timidly. "The people make sacrifices and are ready to make
sacrifices for their soul, but not for murder," he added,
instinctively connecting the conversation with the ideas that had been
absorbing his mind.
  "For their soul? That, you understand, is a most puzzling expression
for a student of the natural sciences. What sort of thing is the
soul?" said Katavassov, smiling.
  "Oh, you know!"
  "No, by God, I haven't the faintest idea!" said Katavassov with a
loud roar of laughter.
  "'I bring not peace, but a sword,' says Christ," Sergei Ivanovich
rejoined for his part, quoting as simply as though it were the easiest
thing to understand the very passage that had always puzzled Levin
most.
  "That's so, no doubt," the old man repeated again. He was standing
near them and responded to a chance glance turned in his direction.
  "Ah, my dear fellow, you're defeated, utterly defeated!" cried
Katavassov good-humoredly.
  Levin reddened with vexation, not at being defeated, but at having
failed to control himself and being drawn into argument.
  "No, I can't argue with them," he thought; "they wear impenetrable
armor, while I'm naked."
  He saw that it was impossible to convince his brother and
Katavassov, and he saw even less possibility of himself agreeing
with them. What they advocated was the very pride of intellect that
had almost been his ruin. He could not admit that some dozens of
men, among them his brother, had the right, on the ground of what they
were told by some hundreds of glib volunteers swarming to the capital,
to say that they and the newspapers were expressing the will and
feeling of the people, and a feeling which was expressed in
vengeance and murder. He could not admit this, because he neither
saw the expression of such feelings in the people among whom he was
living, nor found them in himself (and he could not but consider
himself one of the persons making up the Russian people), and most
of all because he, like the people, did not know and could not know
what is for the general good, though he knew beyond a doubt that
this general good could be attained only by the strict observance of
that law of right and wrong which has been revealed to every man,
and therefore he could not wish for war or advocate war for any
general objects whatever. He said as Mikhailich did and the people,
who had expressed their feeling in the traditional invitations to
the Variaghi: "Be princes and rule over us. Gladly we promise complete
submission. All the labor, all humiliations, all sacrifices we take
upon ourselves; but we will not judge and decide." And now,
according to Sergei Ivanovich's account, the people had foregone
this privilege they had bought at such a costly price.
  He wanted to say, too, that if public opinion were an infallible
guide, then why were not revolutions and the commune as lawful as
the movement in favor of the Slavonic peoples? But these were merely
thoughts that could settle nothing. One thing could be seen beyond
doubt- that at the actual moment the discussion was irritating
Sergei Ivanovich, and so it was wrong to continue it. And Levin ceased
speaking and then called the attention of his guests to the fact
that the storm clouds were gathering, and that they had better be
going home before it rained.
                             XVII.

  The old Prince and Sergei Ivanovich got into the wagonette and drove
off; the rest of the party hastened homeward on foot.
  But the storm clouds, turning white and then black, moved down so
quickly that they had to quicken their pace to get home before the
rain. The foremost clouds, lowering and black as soot-laden smoke,
rushed with extraordinary swiftness over the sky. They were still
two hundred paces from home and a gust of wind had already blown up,
and every second the downpour might be looked for.
  The children ran ahead with frightened and gleeful shrieks. Darya
Alexandrovna, struggling painfully with her skirts clinging round
her legs, was not walking, but running, her eyes fixed on the
children. The men of the party, holding their hats on, strode with
long steps beside her. They were just at the steps when a big drop
fell splashing on the edge of the iron guttering. The children and
their elders after them ran into the shelter of the house, talking
merrily.
  "Katerina Alexandrovna?" Levin asked of Agathya Mikhailovna, who met
them with shawls and plaids in the hall.
  "We thought she was with you," she said.
  "And Mitia?"
  "In Kolok, he must be, and the nurse with him."
  Levin snatched up the plaids and ran toward the copse.
  In that brief interval of time the storm clouds had moved on,
covering the sun so completely that it was dark as an eclipse.
Stubbornly, as though insisting on its rights, the wind stopped Levin,
and tearing the leaves and flowers off the linden trees and
stripping the white birch branches into strange unseemly nakedness, it
twisted everything to one side- acacias, flowers, burdocks, long
grass, and tall treetops. The peasant girls working in the garden
ran shrieking into shelter in the servants' quarters. The streaming
rain had already flung its white veil over all the distant forest
and half the fields close by, and was rapidly swooping down upon the
copse. The wet of the rain spurting up in tiny drops could be
smelled in the air.
  Holding his head bent down before him, and struggling with the
wind that strove to tear the wraps away from him, Levin was moving
up to the copse and had just caught sight of something white behind
the oak tree, when there was a sudden flash, the whole earth seemed on
fire, and the vault of heaven seemed crashing overhead. Opening his
blinded eyes, Levin gazed through the thick veil of rain that
separated him now from the copse, and to his horror the first thing he
saw was the green crest of the familiar oak tree in the middle of
the copse uncannily changing its position. "Can it have been
struck?" Levin hardly had time to think when, moving more and more
rapidly, the oak tree vanished behind the other trees, and he heard
the crash of the great tree falling upon the others.
  The flash of lightning, the crash of thunder, and the
instantaneous chill that ran through him were all merged for Levin
in one sense of terror.
  "My God! My God! Not on them!" he said.
  And though he thought at once how senseless was his prayer that they
should not have been killed by the oak which had fallen now, he
repeated it, knowing that he could do nothing better than utter this
senseless prayer.
  Running up to the place where they usually went, he did not find
them there.
  They were at the other end of the copse under an old linden tree;
they were calling him. Two figures in dark dresses (they had been
light summer dresses when they started out) were standing bending over
something. It was Kitty with the nurse. The rain was already
ceasing, and it was beginning to get light when Levin reached them.
The nurse was not wet on the lower part of her dress, but Kitty was
drenched through, and her soaked clothes clung to her. Though the rain
was over, they still stood in the same position in which they had been
standing when the storm broke. Both stood bending over a
perambulator with a green umbrella.
  "Alive? Unhurt? Thank God!" he said, splashing with his soaked boots
through the standing water and running up to them.
  Kitty's rosy wet face was turned toward him, and she smiled
timidly under her shapeless sopping hat.
  "Aren't you ashamed of yourself? I can't think how you can be so
reckless!" he said angrily to his wife.
  "It wasn't my fault, really. We were just intending to go, when he
made such a to-do that we had to change him. We were just..." Kitty
began defending herself.
  Mitia was unharmed, dry, and still fast asleep.
  "Well, thank God! I don't know what I'm saying!"
  They gathered up the baby's wet belongings; the nurse picked up
the baby and carried it. Levin walked beside his wife, and, penitent
for having been angry, he squeezed her hand when the nurse was not
looking.
                             XVIII.

  During the whole of that day, in the extremely varied
conversations in which he took part, only as it were with the top
layer of his mind, in spite of the disappointment of not finding the
change he expected in himself, Levin had been all the while joyfully
conscious of the fullness of his heart.
  After the rain it was too wet to go for a walk; besides, the storm
clouds still hung about the horizon, and gathered here and there,
black and thundery, on the rim of the sky. The whole party spent the
rest of the day in the house.
  No more discussions sprang up; on the contrary, after dinner
everyone was in the most amiable frame of mind.
  At first Katavassov amused the ladies by his original jokes, which
always pleased people on their first acquaintance with him. Then
Sergei Ivanovich induced him to tell them about the very interesting
observations he had made on the difference between the female and male
common houseflies in their characters and even physiognomies, and
their frame of life. Sergei Ivanovich, too, was in good spirits, and
at tea his brother drew him on to explain his views of the future of
the Eastern question, and he spoke so simply and so well, that
everyone listened eagerly.
  Kitty was the only one who did not hear it all- she was summoned
to give Mitia his bath.
  A few minutes after Kitty had left the room she sent for Levin to
come to the nursery.
  Leaving his tea, and regretfully interrupting the interesting
conversation, and at the same time uneasily wondering why he had
been sent for, as this only happened on important occasions, Levin
went to the nursery.
  Although he had been much interested by Sergei Ivanovich's views
of the new epoch in history that would be created by the
emancipation of forty millions of men of Slavonic race acting with
Russia- a conception quite new to him- and although he was disturbed
by uneasy wonder at being sent for by Kitty, as soon as he came out of
the drawing room and was alone, his mind reverted at once to the
thoughts of the morning. And all the theories of the significance of
the Slav element in the history of the world seemed to him so
trivial compared with what was passing in his own soul, that he
instantly forgot it all and dropped back into the same frame of mind
that he had been in that morning.
  He did not, as he had done at other times recall the whole train
of thought- that was not necessary for him. He fell back at once
into the feeling which had guided him, which was connected with
those thoughts, and he found that feeling in his soul even stronger
and more definite than before. He did not, as he had had to do with
previous attempts to find comforting arguments, need to revive a whole
chain of thought to find the feeling. Now, on the contrary, the
feeling of joy and peace was keener than ever, and thought could not
keep pace with feeling.
  He walked across the terrace and looked at two stars that had come
out in the darkening sky, and suddenly he remembered. "Yes, looking at
the sky, I thought that the dome that I see is not a deception, and
then I did not think over something to the last- I shirked facing
something," he mused. "But whatever it was, there can be no disproving
it! I have but to think, and all will come clear!"
  Just as he was going into the nursery he remembered what it was he
had shirked facing. It was that if the chief proof of the Divinity was
His revelation of what is right, how is it this revelation is confined
to the Christian Church alone? What relation to this revelation have
the beliefs of the Buddhists, Mohammedans, who preached and did good
too?
  It seemed to him that he had an answer to this question; but he
had not time to formulate it to himself before he went into the
nursery.
  Kitty was standing, with her sleeves tucked up, over the baby in the
bath. Hearing her husband's footstep, she turned toward him, summoning
him to her with her smile. With one hand she was supporting the fat
baby that lay floating and sprawling on its back, while with the other
she squeezed the sponge over him.
  "Come, look, look!" she said, when her husband came up to her.
"Agathya Mikhailovna's right. He knows us!"
  Mitia had on that day given unmistakable, incontestable signs of
recognizing all his friends.
  As soon as Levin approached the bath, the experiment was tried,
and it was completely successful. The cook, sent for with this object,
bent over the baby. He frowned and shook his head disapprovingly.
Kitty bent down to him, he gave her a beaming smile, propped his
little hands on the sponge and chirruped, making such a queer little
contented sound with his lips that Kitty and the nurse were not
alone in their admiration- Levin, too, was surprised and delighted.
  The baby was taken out of the bath, drenched with water, wrapped
in towels, dried, and, after a piercing scream, handed to his mother.
  "Well, I am glad you are beginning to love him," said Kitty to her
husband, when she had settled herself comfortably in her usual
place, with the baby at her breast. "I am so glad! It had begun to
distress me. You said you had no feeling for him."
  "No; did I say that? I only said I was disappointed."
  "What! Disappointed in him?"
  "Not disappointed in him, but in my own feeling; I had expected
more. I had expected a rush of new delightful emotion to come as a
surprise. And then instead of that- disgust, pity..."
  She listened attentively, looking at him over the baby, while she
put back on her slender fingers the rings she had taken off while
giving Mitia his bath.
  "And most of all, at there being far more apprehension and pity than
pleasure. Today, after that fright during the storm, I understand
how I love him."
  Kitty's smile was radiant.
  "Were you very much frightened?" she said. "So was I, too, but I
feel it more now that it's over. I'm going to look at the oak. How
charming Katavassov is! And what a happy day we've had altogether. And
you're so amiable with Sergei Ivanovich, when you care to be...
Well, go back to them. It's always so hot and steamy here after the
bath...."
                             XIX.

  Going out of the nursery and being again alone, Levin went back at
once to the thought, in which there was something not clear.
  Instead of going into the drawing room, where he heard voices, he
stopped on the terrace, and, leaning his elbows on the parapet, he
gazed up at the sky.
  It was quite dark now, and in the south, where he was looking, there
were no clouds. The storm had drifted on to the opposite side of the
sky, and there were flashes of lightning and distant thunder from that
quarter. Levin listened to the monotonous drip from the linden trees
in the garden, and looked at the triangle of stars he knew so well,
and the Milky Way with its branches, that ran through its midst. At
each flash of lightning the Milky Way, and even the bright stars,
vanished, but as soon as the lightning died away, they reappeared in
their places as though some hand had flung them back with careful aim.
  "Well, what is it that perplexes me?" Levin said to himself, feeling
beforehand that the solution of his difficulties was ready in his
soul, though he did not know it yet.
  "Yes, the one unmistakable, incontestable manifestation of the
Divinity is the law of right and wrong, which has come into the
world by revelation, and which I feel within myself, and in the
recognition of which I not so much make myself but, willy-nilly, am
made, one with other men in one body of believers, which is called the
Church. Well, but the Jews, the Mohammedans, the Confucians, the
Buddhists- what of them?" he put to himself the question he had feared
to face. "Can these hundreds of millions of men be deprived of that
highest blessing without which life has no meaning?" He pondered a
moment, but immediately corrected himself. "But what am I
questioning?" he said to himself. "I am questioning the relation to
Divinity of all the different religions of all mankind. I am
questioning the universal manifestation of God to all the world with
all these nebulae. What am I about? To me individually, to my heart
has been revealed a knowledge beyond all doubt, and unattainable by
reason, and here I am obstinately trying to express that knowledge
in reason and words.
  "Don't I know that the stars don't move?" he asked himself, gazing
at the bright planet which had shifted its position up to the
topmost twig of a birch tree. "But looking at the movements of the
stars, I can't picture to myself the rotation of the earth, and I'm
right in saying that the stars move.
  "And could the astronomers have understood and calculated
anything, if they had taken into account all the complicated and
varied motions of the earth?- All the marvelous conclusions they
have reached about the distances, weights, revolutions, and
perturbations of the heavenly bodies, are only founded on the apparent
motions of the heavenly bodies round the stationary earth, on that
very motion I see before me now, which has been so for millions of men
during long ages- has been and always will be alike, and can always be
verified. And just as the conclusions of the astronomers would have
been vain and uncertain if not founded on observations of the
visible heavens, in relation to a single meridian and a single
horizon, so would my conclusions be vain and uncertain if not
founded on that conception of right, which has been and will always be
alike for all men, which has been revealed to me by Christianity,
and which can always be verified in my soul. The question of other
religions and their relations to Divinity I have no right to decide,
and no possibility of deciding."
  "Oh, you haven't gone in then?" he heard Kitty's voice suddenly,
as she came by the same way to the drawing room. "What is it? You're
not worried about anything?" she said, looking intently at his face in
the starlight.
  But she could not have seen his face if a flash of lightning had not
hidden the stars and revealed it. In that flash she saw his face
distinctly, and seeing him calm and happy, she smiled at him.
  "She understands," he thought; "she knows what I'm thinking about.
Shall I tell her or not? Yes, I'll tell her." But at the moment he was
about to speak, she began speaking.
  "Kostia! Do something for me," she said; "go into the corner room
and see if they've made it all ready for Sergei Ivanovich. I can't
very well. See if they've put the new washstand in it."
  "Very well, I'll go directly," said Levin, standing up and kissing
her.
  "No, I'd better not speak of it," he thought, when she had gone in
before him. "It is a secret for me alone, of vital importance for
me, and not to be put into words.
  "This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy and
enlightened all of a sudden, as I had dreamed, just like the feeling
for my child. There was no surprise in this either. Whether it is
faith or not- I don't know what it is- but this feeling has come
just as imperceptibly through suffering, and has taken firm root in my
soul.
  "I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the
coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions
tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of
holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go
on scolding her for my own fright and being remorseful for it; I shall
still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I
shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from
anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more
meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of
goodness, which I have the power to put into it."


                          THE END