APDL Eductation Resources/APDL Eductation Resources.iso/text/authors/tolstoy/annakareni/ANNA_K_5

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                           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.