APDL Eductation Resources/APDL Eductation Resources.iso/text/authors/tolstoy/annakareni/ANNA_K_7

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                           XIII.


The sportsman's saying, that if the first beast or the first bird is
not missed, the shooting will be lucky, turned out correct.

At ten o'clock Levin, weary, hungry, and happy after a tramp of
thirty verstas, returned to his night's lodging with nineteen head
of fine game and one duck, which he tied to his belt, as it would
not go into the gamebag. His companions had long been awake, and had
had time to get hungry and have breakfast.

"Wait a bit, wait a bit, I know there are nineteen," said Levin,
counting a second time over the double snipe and jacksnipe, that
looked so much less important now, bent and dry and bloodstained, with
heads crookedly to one side, than they did when they were flying.

The number was verified, and Stepan Arkadyevich's envy pleased
Levin. He was pleased too on returning to find that the man sent by
Kitty with a note was already here.

"I am perfectly well and happy. If you were uneasy about me, you can
feel easier than ever. I've a new bodyguard, Marya Vlassyevna."
(This was the midwife, a new and important personage in Levin's
domestic life.) "She has come to have a look at me. She found me
perfectly well, and we are holding her till you are back. All are
happy and well, and please, don't be in a hurry to come back, but,
if the sport is good, stay another day."

These two pleasures, his lucky shooting and the letter from his
wife, were so great that two slightly disagreeable incidents passed
lightly over Levin. One was that the chestnut trace horse, who had
been unmistakably overworked on the previous day, was off his feed and
out of sorts. The coachman said the horse was overstrained.

"Overdriven yesterday, Konstantin Dmitrievich!" he said. "Yes,
indeed! Driving ten miles without any sense!"

The other unpleasant incident, which for the first minute
destroyed his good humor, though later he laughed at it a great
deal, was to find that of all the provisions which Kitty had
provided in such abundance, that one would have thought there was
enough for a week, nothing was left. On his way back, tired and
hungry, from shooting, Levin had so distinct a vision of meat pies
that as he approached the hut he seemed to smell and taste them, as
Laska had smelt the game, and he immediately told Philip to give him
some. It appeared that there were no pies left- nor even any chicken.

"Well, this fellow's appetite!" said Stepan Arkadyevich, laughing
and pointing at Vassenka Veslovsky. "I never suffer from loss of
appetite, but he's really marvelous!..."

"Well, it can't be helped," said Levin, looking gloomily at
Veslovsky. "Well, Philip, give me some beef, then."

"The beef's been eaten, and the bones given to the dogs," answered
Philip.

Levin was so hurt that he said, in a tone of vexation: "You might
have left me something!" and he felt ready to cry.

"Then disembowel the game," he said in a shaking voice to Philip,
trying not to look at Vassenka, "and cover them with some nettles. And
you might at least ask for some milk for me."

But when he had drunk some milk, he felt ashamed immediately at
having shown his annoyance to a stranger, and he began to laugh at his
hungry mortification.

In the evening they went shooting again, and Veslovsky, too, had
several successful shots, and in the night they drove home.

Their homeward journey was as lively as their drive out had been.
Veslovsky sang songs and related with enjoyment his adventures with
the peasants, who had regaled him with vodka, and said to him, "Excuse
our homely ways," and his night's adventures with tug of war, and
the servant girl, and the peasant, who had asked him was he married
and on learning that he was not, said to him: "Well, mind you don't
run after other men's wives- you'd better get round your own." These
words had particularly amused Veslovsky.

"Altogether, I've enjoyed our outing awfully. And you, Levin?"

"I have, very much," Levin said quite sincerely. It was particularly
delightful to him to have got rid of the hostility he had been feeling
toward Vassenka Veslovsky at home, and to feel instead the most
friendly disposition to him.

                           XIV.


Next day at ten o'clock Levin, who had already gone his rounds,
knocked at the room where Vassenka had been put for the night.

"Entrez!" Veslovsky called to him. "Excuse me, I've only just
finished my ablutions," he said, smiling, standing before him in his
underclothes only.

"Don't mind me, please," Levin sat down in the window. "Have you
slept well?"

"Like the dead. What sort of day is it for shooting?"

"What will you take, tea or coffee?"

"Neither. I'll wait till lunch. I'm really ashamed. I suppose the
ladies are down? A walk now would be capital. You show me your
horses."

After walking about the garden, visiting the stable, and even
doing some gymnastic exercises together on the parallel bars, Levin
returned to the house with his guest, and went with him into the
drawing room.

"We had splendid shooting, and so many delightful experiences!" said
Veslovsky, going up to Kitty, who was sitting at the samovar. "What
a pity ladies are cut off from these delights!"

"Well, I suppose he must say something to the lady of the house,"
Levin said to himself. Again he fancied something in the smile, in the
all-conquering air with which their guest addressed Kitty...

The Princess, sitting on the other side of the table with Marya
Vlassyevna and Stepan Arkadyevich, called Levin to her side, and began
to talk to him about moving to Moscow for Kitty's confinement, and
getting ready rooms for them. Just as Levin had disliked all the
trivial preparations for his wedding, as derogatory to the grandeur of
the event, now he felt still more offensive the preparations for the
approaching birth, the date of which they reckoned, it seemed, on
their fingers. He tried to turn a deaf ear to these discussions of the
best patterns of long clothes for the coming baby; tried to turn
away and avoid seeing the mysterious, endless strips of knitting,
the triangles of linen, to which Dolly attached special importance,
and so on. The birth of a son (he was certain it would be a son) which
was promised him, but which he still could not believe in- so
marvelous it seemed- presented itself to his mind, on one hand, as a
happiness so immense, and therefore so incredible; on the other, as an
event so mysterious, that this assumption of a definite knowledge of
what would be, and consequent preparation for it, as for something
ordinary that did happen to people, jarred on him as confusing and
humiliating.

But the Princess did not understand his feelings, and put down his
reluctance to think and talk about it to carelessness and
indifference, and so she gave him no peace. She had commissioned
Stepan Arkadyevich to look at an apartment, and now she called Levin
to her.

"I know nothing about it, Princess. Do as you think fit," he said.

"You must decide when you will move."

"I really don't know. I know millions of children are born away from
Moscow, and doctors... Why..."

"But if so..."

"Oh, no, as Kitty wishes."

"We can't talk to Kitty about it! Do you want me to frighten her?
Why, this spring Natalie Golitzina died from having an ignorant
doctor."

"I will do just what you say," he said gloomily.

The Princess began talking to him, but he did not hear her. Though
the conversation with the Princess had indeed jarred upon him, he
was gloomy not on account of that conversation, but from what he saw
at the samovar.

"No, it's impossible," he thought, glancing now and then at Vassenka
bending over Kitty, telling her something with his charming smile, and
at her, flushed and disturbed.

There was something unclean in Vassenka's attitude, in his eyes,
in his smile. Levin even saw something unclean in Kitty's attitude and
look. And again the light died away in his eyes. Again, as before, all
of a sudden, without the slightest transition, he felt cast down
from a pinnacle of happiness, peace, and dignity, into an abyss of
despair, rage, and humiliation. Again everything and everyone had
become hateful to him.

"You do just as you think best, Princess," he said again, looking
round.

"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown!" Stepan Arkadyevich said
playfully, hinting, evidently, not simply at the Princess's
conversation, but at the cause of Levin's agitation, which he had
noticed. "How late you are today, Dolly!"

Everyone got up to greet Darya Alexandrovna. Vassenka only rose
for an instant, and, with the lack of courtesy to ladies
characteristic of the modern young man, he scarcely bowed, and resumed
his conversation again, laughing at something.

"Masha has been almost the end of me. She did not sleep well, and is
dreadfully capricious today," said Dolly.

The conversation Vassenka had started with Kitty was running on
the same lines as on the previous evening- discussing Anna, and
whether love is to be put higher than worldly considerations. Kitty
disliked the conversation, and she was disturbed both by the subject
and the tone in which it was conducted, and especially by the
knowledge of the effect it would have on her husband. But she was
too simple and unsophisticated to know how to cut short this
conversation, or even to conceal the superficial pleasure afforded her
by the young man's very obvious admiration. She wanted to stop this
conversation, but she did not know what to do. Whatever she did, she
knew it would be observed by her husband, and the worst interpretation
put on it. And, in fact, when she asked Dolly what was wrong with
Masha, and Vassenka, waiting till this uninteresting conversation
was over, began to gaze indifferently at Dolly, the question struck
Levin as an unnatural and disgusting piece of hypocrisy.

"What do you say, shall we go and look for mushrooms today?" said
Dolly.

"By all means, please, and I shall come too," said Kitty, and she
blushed. She wanted from politeness to ask Vassenka whether he would
come, and she did not ask him. "Where are you going, Kostia?" she
asked her husband with a guilty face, as he passed by her with a
resolute step. This guilty air confirmed all his suspicions.

"The mechanician came when I was away; I haven't seen him yet," he
said, not looking at her.

He went downstairs, but before he had time to leave his study he
heard his wife's familiar footsteps running with reckless speed to
him.

"What do you want?" he said to her shortly. "We are busy."

"I beg your pardon," she said to the German mechanician; "I want a
few words with my husband."

The German would have left the room, but Levin said to him:

"Don't disturb yourself"

"The train is at three?" queried the German. "I mustn't be late."

Levin did not answer him, but walked out himself with his wife.

"Well, what have you to say to me?" he said to her in French.

He did not look her in the face, and did not care to see that she in
her condition was trembling all over, and had a piteous, crushed look.

"I... I want to say that we can't go on like this; that this is
misery..." she said.

"The servants are here at the buttery," he said angrily; "don't make
a scene."

"Well, let's go in here!"

They were standing in the passage room. Kitty would have gone into
the next room, but there the English governess was giving Tania a
lesson.

"Well, come into the garden."

In the garden they came upon a peasant weeding the path. And no
longer considering that the peasant could see her tear-stained and his
agitated face, that they looked like people fleeing from some
disaster, they went on with rapid steps, feeling that they must
speak out and clear up misunderstandings, must be alone together,
and so get rid of the misery they were both feeling.

"We can't go on like this! It's misery! I am wretched; you are
wretched. What for?" she said, when they had at last reached a
solitary garden seat at a turn in the linden tree avenue.

"But tell me one thing: was there in his tone anything unseemly,
unclean, humiliatingly horrible?" he said, standing before her again
in the same position, with his clenched fists on his chest, as he
had stood before her that night.

"Yes," she said in a shaking voice; "but, Kostia, surely you see I'm
not to blame? All the morning I've been trying to take a tone... But
such people... Why did he come? How happy we were!" she said,
breathless with the sobs that shook her.

Although nothing had been pursuing them, and there was nothing to
run away from, and they could not possibly have found anything very
delightful on that garden seat, the gardener saw with astonishment
that they passed him on their way home with comforted and radiant
faces.

                           XV.


After escorting his wife upstairs, Levin went to Dolly's part of the
house. Darya Alexandrovna, for her part, was also in great distress
that day. She was walking about the room, talking angrily to a
little girl, who stood in the corner bawling.

"And you shall stand all day in the corner, and have your dinner all
alone, and not see one of your dolls, and I won't make you a new
frock," she said, not knowing how to punish her.

"Oh, she is a disgusting child!" she turned to Levin. "Where does
she get such wicked propensities?"

"Why, what has she done?" Levin said without much interest, for he
had wanted to ask her advice, and so was annoyed that he had come at
an unlucky moment.

"Grisha and she went into the raspberries, and there... I can't tell
you really what she did. It's a thousand pities Miss Elliot's not with
us. This one sees to nothing- she's a machine.... Figurez-vous que
la petite?..."

And Darya Alexandrovna described Masha's crime.

"That proves nothing; it's not a question of evil propensities at
all, it's simply mischief," Levin assured her.

"But you are upset about something? What have you come for?" asked
Dolly. "What's going on there?"

And in the tone of her question Levin heard that it would be easy
for him to say what he had meant to say.

"I've not been in there, I've been alone in the garden with Kitty.
We've had a quarrel for the second time since... Stiva came."

Dolly looked at him with her shrewd, comprehending eyes.

"Come, tell me, honor bright, has there been... Not in Kitty, but in
that gentleman's behavior, a tone which might be unpleasant- not
unpleasant, but horrible, offensive to a husband?"

"You mean, how shall I say... Stand there- stand in the corner!" she
said to Masha, who, detecting a faint smile on her mother's face,
had been turning round. "The opinion of the world would be that he
is behaving as young men do behave. Il fait le cour a une jeune et
jolie femme, and a husband who's a man of the world should only be
flattered by it."

"Yes, yes," said Levin gloomily; "but you noticed it?"

"Not only I, but Stiva noticed it. Just after breakfast he said to
me: Je crois que Veslovsky fait un petit brin de cour a Kitty."

"Well, that's all right then; now I'm satisfied. I'll send him
away," said Levin.

"What do you mean! Are you crazy?" Dolly cried in horror. "Nonsense,
Kostia, only think!" she said, laughing. "You can go now to Fanny,"
she said to Masha. "No, if you wish it, I'll speak to Stiva. He'll
take him away. He can say you're expecting visitors. Altogether he
doesn't fit into the house."

"No, no, I'll do it myself."

"But you'll quarrel with him?"

"Not a bit. I shall so enjoy it," Levin said, his eyes flashing with
real enjoyment. "Come, forgive her, Dolly, she won't do it again,"
he said of the little sinner, who had not gone to Fanny, but was
standing irresolutely before her mother, waiting and looking up from
under her brows to catch her mother's eye.

The mother glanced at her. The child broke into sobs, hid her face
on her mother's lap, and Dolly laid her thin, tender hand on her head.

"And what is there in common between us and him?" thought Levin, and
he went off to look for Veslovsky.

As he passed through the hall he gave orders for the carriage to
be got ready to drive to the station.

"The spring was broken yesterday," said the footman.

"Well, the tarantass then, and make haste. Where's the visitor?"

"The gentleman's gone to his room."

Levin came upon Vassenka at the moment when the latter, having
unpacked his things from his trunk, and laid out some new songs, was
putting on his leather gaiters to go out riding.

Whether there was something exceptional in Levin's face, or that
Vassenka was himself conscious that ce petit brin de cour he was
making was out of place in this family; he was somewhat (as much as
a young man in society can be) disconcerted at Levin's entrance.

"You ride in gaiters?"

"Yes, it's much cleaner," said Vassenka, putting his fat leg on a
chair, fastening the bottom hook, and smiling with simplehearted
good humor.

He was undoubtedly a good-natured fellow, and Levin felt sorry for
him and ashamed of himself, as his host, when he saw the shy look on
Vassenka's face.

On the table lay a piece of stick which they had broken together
that morning at gymnastics, trying to raise up the swollen bars. Levin
took the fragment in his hands and began breaking off the split end of
the stick, not knowing how to begin.

"I wanted..." He paused, but suddenly, remembering Kitty and
everything that had happened, he said, looking him resolutely in the
face: "I have ordered the horses to be put to for you."

"How so?" Vassenka began in surprise. "To drive where?"

"For you to drive to the station," Levin said gloomily pinching
off the end of the stick.

"Are you going away, or has something happened?"

"It happens that I expect visitors," said Levin, his strong
fingers more and more rapidly breaking off the ends of the split
stick. "And I'm not expecting visitors, and nothing has happened,
but I beg you to go away. You can explain my rudeness as you like."

Vassenka drew himself up.

"I beg you to explain..." he said with dignity, understanding at
last.

"I can't explain," Levin said softly and deliberately, trying to
control the trembling of his jaw; "and you'd better not ask."

And as the split ends were all broken off, Levin clutched the
thick ends in his finger, split the stick in two, and carefully caught
the end as it fell.

Probably the sight of those tense hands, of the same muscles he
had proved that morning at gymnastics, of the glittering eyes, the
soft voice, and quivering jaws, convinced Vassenka better than any
words. He bowed, shrugging his shoulders, and smiling contemptuously.

"May I not see Oblonsky?"

The shrug and the smile did not irritate Levin. "What else was there
for him to do?" he thought.

"I'll send him to you at once."

"What madness is this?" Stepan Arkadyevich said when, after
hearing from his friend that he was being turned out of the house,
he found Levin in the garden, where he was walking about waiting for
his guest's departure. "Mais c'est ridicule! What flea has bitten you?
Mais c'est du dernier ridicule! What did you think, if a young man..."

But the place where Levin had been bitten was evidently still
sore, for he turned pale again, when Stepan Arkadyevich would have
enlarged on the reason, and he himself cut him short.

"Please don't go into it! I can't help it. I feel ashamed of the way
I'm treating you and him. But it won't be, I imagine, a great grief to
him to go, and his presence was distasteful to me and to my wife."

"But it's insulting to him! Et puis c'est ridicule."

"And to me it's both insulting and distressing! And I'm not in fault
in any way, and there's no need for me to suffer."

"Well, this I didn't expect of you! On peut etre jaloux, mais a ce
point c'est du dernier ridicule!"

Levin turned quickly, and walked away from him into the depths of
the avenue, and he went on walking up and down alone. Soon he heard
the rumble of the tarantass, and saw from behind the trees how
Vassenka, sitting in the hay (unluckily there was no seat in the
tarantass) in his Scotch cap, was driven along the avenue, jolting
up and down over the ruts.

"What's this?" Levin thought, when a footman ran out of the house
and stopped the tarantass. It was the mechanician, whom Levin had
totally forgotten. The mechanician, bowing low, said something to
Veslovsky, then clambered into the tarantass and they drove off
together.

Stepan Arkadyevich and the Princess were much upset by Levin's
action. And he himself felt not only in the highest degree ridicule,
but also utterly guilty and disgraced. But remembering what sufferings
he and his wife had been through, when he asked himself how he
should act another time, he answered that he would do precisely the
same.

In spite of all this, toward the end of that day, everyone, except
the Princess, who could not pardon Levin's action, became
extraordinarily lively and good-humored, like children after a
punishment, or grown-up people after a dreary, ceremonious
reception, so that by the evening Vassenka's dismissal was spoken
of, in the absence of the Princess, as though it were some remote
event. And Dolly, who had inherited her father's gift of humorous
storytelling, made Varenka helpless with laughter as she related for
the third and fourth time, always with fresh humorous additions, how
she had just put on her new ribands for the benefit of the visitor,
and, on going into the drawing room, had suddenly heard the rumble
of the chariot. And who should be in the chariot but Vassenka himself,
with his Scotch cap, and his songs, and his gaiters, and all,
sitting in the hay.

"If only you'd ordered out the carriage! But no! And then I hear:
'Stop!' Oh, I thought they've relented. I look out- and a fat German
is being sat down by him, and they're driving away... And my new
ribands all for nothing!..."

                           XVI.


Darya Alexandrovna carried out her intention and went to see Anna.
She was sorry to annoy her sister and to do anything Levin disliked.
She quite understood how right the Levins were in not wishing to
have anything to do with Vronsky. But she felt she must go and see
Anna, and show her that her feelings could not be changed, in spite of
the change in her position.

That she might be independent of the Levins in this expedition,
Darya Alexandrovna sent to the village to hire horses for the drive;
but Levin learning of it went to her to protest.

"What makes you suppose that I dislike your going? But, even if
did dislike it, I should still more dislike your not taking my
horses," he said. "You never told me that you were going definitely.
Hiring horses in the village is disagreeable to me, and, what's of
more importance, they'll undertake the job and never get you there.
I have horses. And if you don't want to wound me, you'll take mine."

Darya Alexandrovna had to consent, and on the day fixed Levin had
ready for his sister-in-law a set of four horses and relays, getting
them together from the farm and saddle horses- not at all a
smart-looking set, but capable of taking Darya Alexandrovna the
whole distance in a single day. At that moment, when horses were
wanted for the Princess, who was going, and for the midwife, it was
a difficult matter for Levin to make up the number, but the duties
of hospitality would not let him allow Darya Alexandrovna to hire
horses when staying in his house. Moreover, he was well aware that the
twenty roubles that would be asked for the journey were a serious
matter for her; Darya Alexandrovna's pecuniary affairs, which were
in a very unsatisfactory state, were taken to heart by the Levins as
if they were their own.

Darya Alexandrovna, by Levin's advice, started before daybreak.
The road was good, the carriage comfortable, the horses trotted
along merrily, and on the box, beside the coachman, sat the
countinghouse clerk, whom Levin was sending instead of a groom for
greater security. Darya Alexandrovna dozed and waked up only on
reaching the inn where the horses were to be changed.

After drinking tea at the same well-to-do peasant's with whom
Levin had stayed on the way to Sviiazhsky's, and chatting with the
women about their children, and with the old man about Count
Vronsky, whom the latter praised very highly, Darya Alexandrovna, at
ten o'clock, went on again. At home, looking after her children, she
had no time to think. So now, after this journey of four hours, all
the thoughts she had suppressed before rushed swarming into her brain,
and she thought over all her life as she never had before, and from
the most different points of view. Her thoughts seemed strange even to
herself. At first she thought about the children, about whom she was
uneasy, although the Princess and Kitty (she reckoned more upon her)
had promised to look after them. "If only Masha does not begin her
naughty tricks, if Grisha isn't kicked by a horse, and Lily's
stomach isn't upset again!" But these questions of the present were
succeeded by questions of the immediate future. She began thinking how
she had to get a new flat in Moscow for the coming winter, to renew
the drawing-room furniture, and to make her elder girl a cloak. Then
questions of the more remote future occurred to her: how she was to
place her children in the world. "The girls are all right," she
thought; "but the boys?"

"It's all very fine for me to be teaching Grisha, but of course
that's only because I am free myself now, I'm not with child. Stiva,
of course, there's no counting on. And with the help of good-natured
friends I can bring them up; but if there's another baby coming?..."
And the thought struck her how unjustly it was said, that the curse
laid on woman was that in sorrow she should bring forth children. "The
birth itself, that's nothing; but the months of carrying the child-
that's what's so intolerable," she thought, picturing to herself her
last pregnancy, and the death of the last baby. And she recalled the
conversation she had just had with the young woman at the inn. On
being asked whether she had any children, the handsome young woman had
answered cheerfully.

"I had a girl baby, but God set me free; I buried her last Lent."

"Well, did you grieve very much for her?" asked Darya Alexandrovna.

"Why grieve? The old man has grandchildren enough as it is. It was
only a trouble. No working, nor nothing. Only a tie."

This answer had struck Darya Alexandrovna as revolting in spite of
the good-natured and pleasing face of the young woman; but now she
could not help recalling these words. In those cynical words there was
indeed a grain of truth.

"Yes, in general," thought Darya Alexandrovna, looking back over her
whole existence during those fifteen years of her married life,
"pregnancy, sickness, mental incapacity, indifference to everything-
and, most of all, hideousness. Kitty, young and pretty as she is, even
Kitty has lost her looks; and I, when I'm with child, become
hideous, I know it. The birth, the agony, the hideous agonies, that
last moment... Then the nursing, the sleepless nights, the fearful
pains..."

Darya Alexandrovna shuddered at the mere recollection of the pain
from sore breasts which she had suffered with almost every child.
"Then the children's illnesses, that everlasting apprehension; then
bringing them up; evil propensities" (she thought of little Masha's
crime among the raspberries), "education, Latin- it's all so
incomprehensible and difficult. And, on the top of it all, the death
of these children." And there rose again before her imagination the
cruel memory that always tore her mother's heart, of the death of
her last little baby, who had died of croup; his funeral, the
callous indifference of all at the little pink coffin, and her own
torn heart, and her lonely anguish at the sight of the pale little
brow with the curls falling on temples, and the open, wondering little
mouth seen in the coffin at the moment when it was being covered
with the little pink lid with a gallooned cross on it.

"And all this- what's it for? What is to come of it all? This: I'm
wasting my life, never having a moment's peace, either with child,
or nursing a child, forever irritable, peevish, wretched myself and
worrying others, repulsive to my husband, while the children are
growing up unhappy, badly educated and penniless. Even now, if it
weren't for spending the summer at the Levins', I don't know how we
should be managing to live. Of course Kostia and Kitty have so much
tact that we don't feel it; but it can't go on. They'll have children,
they won't be able to keep us; it's a drag on them as it is. How is
papa, who has hardly anything left for himself, to help us? So that
I can't even bring the children up by myself, and may find it hard
with the help of other people, at the cost of humiliation. Why, even
if we suppose the greatest good luck, that the children don't die, and
I bring them up somehow. At the very best they'll simply be decent
people. That's all I can hope for. And to gain simply that- what
agonies, what toil!... One's whole life ruined!" Again she recalled
what the young peasant woman had said, and again she was revolted at
the thought; but she could not help admitting that there was a grain
of brutal truth in the words.

"Is it far now, Mikhaila?" Darya Alexandrovna asked the
countinghouse clerk, to turn her mind from thoughts that were
frightening her.

"From this village, they say, it's seven verstas."

The carriage drove along the village street and onto a bridge. On
the bridge was a crowd of peasant women with coils of ties for the
sheaves on their shoulders, cheerfully chattering. They stood still on
the bridge, staring inquisitively at the carriage. All the faces
turned to Darya Alexandrovna looked to her healthy and happy, making
her envious of their enjoyment of life. "They're all living, they're
all enjoying life," Darya Alexandrovna still mused when she had passed
the peasant women and was driving uphill again at a trot, seated
comfortably on the soft springs of the old carriage, "while I, let
out, as it were from prison, from the world of worries that fret me to
death, am only looking about me now for an instant. They all live;
those peasant women, and my sister Natalie, and Varenka, and Anna,
whom I am going to see- all, but not I."

"And they attack Anna. What for? Am I any better? I have, at any
rate, a husband I love- not as I should like to love him- still, I
do love him; while Anna never loved hers. How is she to blame? She
wants to live. God has put that in our hearts. Very likely I should
have done the same. Even to this day I don't feel sure I did right
in listening to her at that terrible time when she came to me in
Moscow. I ought then to have cast off my husband and have begun my
life anew. I might have loved and have been loved in reality. And is
it any better as it is? I don't respect him. He's necessary to me,"
she thought about her husband, "and I put up with him. Is that any
better? At that time I could still have been admired, I had beauty
left me still," Darya Alexandrovna pursued her thoughts, and she would
have liked to look at herself in the looking glass. She had a
traveling looking glass in her handbag, and she wanted to take it out;
but looking at the backs of the coachman and the swaying countinghouse
clerk, she felt that she would be ashamed if either of them were to
look round, and she did not take out the glass.

But, without looking in the glass, she thought that even now it
was not too late; and she thought of Sergei Ivanovich, who was
always particularly attentive to her, of Stiva's goodhearted friend,
Turovtsin, who had helped her nurse her children through the
scarlatina, and was in love with her. And there was someone else,
quite a young man, who- her husband had told her it as a joke- thought
her more beautiful than either of her sisters. And the most passionate
and impossible romances rose before Darya Alexandrovna's
imagination. "Anna did quite right, and certainly I shall never
reproach her for it. She is happy, she makes another person happy, and
she's not broken down as I am, but most likely just as she always was,
bright, clever, open to every impression," thought Darya Alexandrovna-
and a sly smile curved her lips, for, as she pondered on Anna's love
affair, Darya Alexandrovna constructed on parallel lines an almost
identical love affair for herself, with an imaginary composite figure,
the ideal man who was in love with her. She, like Anna, confessed
the whole affair to her husband. And the amazement and perplexity of
Stepan Arkadyevich at this avowal made her smile.

In such daydreams she reached the turning of the highroad that led
to Vozdivzhenskoe.

                           XVII.


The coachman pulled up his four horses and looked round to the
right, to a field of rye, where some peasants were sitting near a
telega. The countinghouse clerk was just going to jump down, but on
second thought he shouted peremptorily to the peasants instead, and
beckoned to them to come up. The wind, that seemed to blow as they
drove, dropped when the carriage stood still; gadflies settled on
the steaming horses that angrily shook them off. The metallic clank of
a whetstone against a scythe, that came to them from the telega,
ceased. One of the peasants got up and came toward the carriage.

"Well, you are slow!" the countinghouse clerk shouted angrily to the
peasant who was stepping slowly with his bare feet over the ruts of
the unbeaten, sun-baked road. "Come along, do!"

A curly-headed old man with a bit of bast tied round his hair, and
his bent back dark with perspiration, came toward the carriage,
quickening his steps, and took hold of the mudguard with his sunburned
hand.

"Vozdvizhenskoe- the manor house? The Count's?" he repeated. "Go
on to the end of this slope. Then turn to the left. Straight along the
avenue, and you'll come right upon it. But whom do you want? The Count
himself?"

"Well, are they at home, my good man?" Darya Alexandrovna said
vaguely, not knowing how to ask about Anna, even of this peasant.

"At home for sure," said the peasant, shifting from one bare foot to
the other, and leaving a distinct print of five toes and a heel in the
dust. "Sure to be at home," he repeated, evidently eager to talk.
"Only yesterday visitors arrived. There's a sight of visitors come.
What do you want?" He turned round and called to a lad, who was
shouting something to him from the telega. "Oh! They all rode by
here not long since, to look at a reaping machine. They'll be home
by now. And who may you belong to?..."

"We've come a long way," said the coachman, climbing onto the box.
"So it's not far?"

"I tell you, it's just here. As soon as you get out..." he said,
keeping hold all the while of the mudguard of the carriage.

A healthy-looking, broad-shouldered young fellow came up too.

"What, is it laborers they want for the harvest?" he asked.

"I don't know, my boy."

"So you keep to the left, and you'll come right on it," said the
peasant, unmistakably loath to let the travelers go, and eager to
converse.

The coachman started the horses, but they were only just turning off
when the peasant shouted: "Stop! Hi, friend! Stop!" The coachman
stopped.

"They're coming! They're yonder!" shouted the peasant. "See what a
turnout!" he said, pointing to four persons on horseback, and two in a
charabanc, coming along the road.

They were Vronsky with a jockey, Veslovsky, and Anna on horseback,
and Princess Varvara and Sviiazhsky in the charabanc. They had gone
out to look at the working of a new reaping machine.

When the carriage stopped, the party on horseback were coming at a
walking pace. Anna was in front beside Veslovsky. Anna was quietly
walking her horse, a sturdy English cob with cropped mane and short
tail; Anna, with her beautiful head, her black hair straying loose
under her high hat, her full shoulders, her slender waist in her black
riding habit, and all the ease and grace of her deportment,
impressed Dolly.

For the first minute it seemed to her unsuitable for Anna to be on
horseback. The conception of riding on horseback for a lady was, in
Darva Alexandrovna's mind, associated with ideas of youthful
flirtation and frivolity, which, in her opinion, was unbecoming in
Anna's position. But when she had scrutinized her, seeing her
closer, she was at once reconciled to her riding. In spite of her
elegance, everything was so simple, quiet and dignified in the
attitude, the dress and the movements of Anna, that nothing could have
been more natural.

By the side of Anna, on a hot-looking gray cavalry horse, was
Vassenka Veslovsky in his Scotch cap with floating ribbons, his
stout legs stretched out in front, obviously pleased with his own
appearance. Darya Alexandrovna could not suppress a good-humored smile
as she recognized him. Behind rode Vronsky on a dark bay mare,
obviously heated from galloping. He was holding her in, pulling at the
reins.

After him rode a little man in the dress of a jockey. Sviiazhsky and
Princess Varvara in a new charabanc with a big, raven-black trotting
horse, overtook the party on horseback.

Anna's face suddenly beamed with a joyful smile at the instant when,
in the little figure huddled in a corner of the old carriage, she
recognized Dolly. She uttered a cry, started in the saddle, and set
her horse into a gallop. On reaching the carriage she jumped off
without assistance, and, holding up her riding habit, she ran up to
greet Dolly.

"I thought it was you and dared not think it. How delightful! You
can't fancy how glad I am!" she said, at one moment pressing her
face against Dolly and kissing her, and at the next holding her off
and examining her with a smile. "Here's a delightful surprise,
Alexei!" she said, looking round at Vronsky, who had dismounted, and
was walking toward them.

Vronsky, taking off his tall gray hat, went up to Dolly.

"You wouldn't believe how glad we are to see you," he said, giving
peculiar significance to the words, and showing his strong white teeth
in a smile.

Vassenka Veslovsky, without getting off his horse, took off his
cap and greeted the visitor by gleefully waving the ribbons over his
head.

"That's Princess Varvara," Anna said in reply to a glance of inquiry
from Dolly as the charabanc drove up.

"Ah!" said Darya Alexandrovna, and unconsciously her face betrayed
her dissatisfaction.

Princess Varvara was her husband's aunt, and she had long known her,
and did not respect her. She knew that Princess Varvara had passed her
whole life toadying to her rich relations, but that she should now
be sponging on Vronsky, a man who was nothing to her, mortified
Dolly on account of her kinship with her husband. Anna noticed Dolly's
expression, and was disconcerted by it. She blushed, dropped her
riding habit, and stumbled over it.

Darya Alexandrovna went up to the charabanc and coldly greeted
Princess Varvara. Sviiazhsky, too, she knew. He inquired how his queer
friend with the young wife was, and running his eyes over the
ill-matched horses and the carriage with its patched mudguards,
proposed to the ladies that they should get into the charabanc.

"And I'll get in this vehicle," he said. "The horse is quiet, and
the Princess drives capitally."

"No, stay as you were," said Anna, coming up, "and we'll go in the
carriage," and, taking Dolly's arm, she drew her away.

Darya Alexandrovna's eyes were fairly dazzled by the elegant
carriage of a pattern she had never seen before, the splendid
horses, and the elegant and gorgeous people surrounding her. But
what struck her most of all was the change that had taken place in
Anna, whom she knew so well and loved. Any other woman, a less close
observer, not knowing Anna before, and particularly not having thought
as Darya Alexandrovna had been thinking on the road, would not have
noticed anything special in Anna. But now Dolly was struck by that
temporary beauty, which is only found in women during the moments of
love, and which she saw now in Anna's face. Everything in her face,
the clearly marked dimples in her cheeks and chin, the line of her
lips, the smile which, as it were, fluttered about her face, the
brilliance of her eyes, the grace and rapidity of her movements, the
fullness of the notes of her voice, even the manner in which, with a
sort of angry friendliness, she answered Veslovsky when he asked
permission to get on her cob, so as to teach it to gallop with the
right leg foremost- it was all peculiarly fascinating, and it seemed
as if Anna herself were aware of it, and rejoicing in it.

When both the women were seated in the carriage, a sudden
embarrassment came over both of them. Anna was disconcerted by the
intent look of inquiry Dolly fixed upon her. Dolly was embarrassed
because after Sviiazhsky's phrase about "this vehicle," she could
not help feeling ashamed of the dirty old carriage in which Anna was
sitting with her. The coachman Philip and the countinghouse clerk were
experiencing the same sensation. The countinghouse clerk, to conceal
his confusion, busied himself settling the ladies, but Philip the
coachman became sullen, and was bracing himself not to be overawed
in future by this external superiority. He smiled ironically,
looking at the raven horse, and was already deciding in his own mind
that this smart trotter in the charabanc was only good for
promenade, and wouldn't do forty verstas straight off in the heat.

The peasants had all got up from the telega and were inquisitively
and mirthfully staring at the meeting of the friends, making their
comments on it.

"They're pleased, too; haven't seen each other for a long while,"
said the curly-headed old man with the bast round his hair.

"I say, Uncle Gherasim, if we could take that raven horse now, to
cart the corn, that 'ud be quick work!"

"Look-ee! Is that a woman in breeches?" said one of them, pointing
to Vassenka Veslovsky sitting in a sidesaddle.

"Nay, a man! See how smartly he's going it!"

"Eh, lads! Seems we're not going to sleep, then?"

"What chance of sleep today!" said the old man, with a sidelong look
at the sun. "Midday's past, look-ee! Get your hooks, and come along!"

                           XVIII.


Anna looked at Dolly's thin, careworn face, with its wrinkles filled
with dust from the road, and she was on the point of saying what she
was thinking- that is, that Dolly had grown thinner. But, conscious
that she herself had grown handsomer, and that Dolly's eyes were
telling her so, she sighed and began to speak about herself.

"You are looking at me," she said, "and wondering how I can be happy
in my position? Well! It's shameful to confess, but I... I'm
inexcusably happy. Something magical has happened to me, like a dream,
when you're frightened, panic-stricken, and all of a sudden you wake
up and all the horrors are no more. I have waked up. I have lived
through the misery, the dread, and now for a long while past,
especially since we've been here, I've been so happy!..." she said,
with a timid smile of inquiry looking at Dolly.

"How glad I am!" said Dolly smiling, involuntarily speaking more
coldly than she wanted to. "I'm very glad for you. Why haven't you
written to me?"

"Why?... Because I hadn't the courage.... You forget my
position...."

"To me? Hadn't the courage? If you knew how I... I look at..."

Darya Alexandrovna wanted to express her thoughts of the morning,
but for some reason it seemed to her now out of place to do so.

"But of that we'll talk later. What's this- what are all these
buildings?" she asked, wanting to change the conversation and pointing
to the red and green roofs that came into view behind the green hedges
of acacia and lilac. "Quite a little town."

But Anna did not answer.

"No, no! How do you look at my position, what do you think of it?"
she asked.

"I consider..." Darya Alexandrovna was beginning, but at that
instant Vassenka Veslovsky, having brought the cob to gallop with
the right leg foremost, galloped past them, bumping heavily up and
down in his short jacket on the chamois leather of the sidesaddle.
"He's doing it, Anna Arkadyevna!" he shouted. Anna did not even glance
at him; but again it seemed to Darya Alexandrovna out of place to
enter upon such a long conversation in the carriage, and so she cut
short her thought.

"I don't think anything," she said, "but I always loved you, and
if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as that person
is, and not as one would like her or him to be...."

Anna, taking her eyes off her friend's face and dropping her eyelids
(this was a new habit Dolly had not seen in her before), pondered,
trying to penetrate the full significance of the words. And
obviously interpreting them as she would have wished, she glanced at
Dolly.

"If you had any sins," she said, "they would all be forgiven you for
your coming to see me, and these words."

And Dolly saw that the tears stood in her eyes. She pressed Anna's
hand in silence.

"Well, what are these buildings? How many there are of them!"
After a moment's silence she repeated her question.

"These are the servant's houses, stud farm, and stables," answered
Anna. "And there the park begins. It had all gone to ruin, but
Alexei had everything renewed. He is very fond of this place, and,
what I never expected, he has become intensely interested in looking
after it. But his is such a rich nature! Whatever he takes up, he does
splendidly. So far from being bored by it, he works with passionate
interest. He- with his temperament as I know it- he has become careful
and businesslike, a first-rate manager, he positively reckons every
penny in his management of the land. But only in that. When it's a
question of tens of thousands, he doesn't think of money." She spoke
with that gleefully sly smile with which women often talk of the
secret characteristics- only known to them- of those they love. "Do
you see that big building? That's the new hospital. I believe it
will cost over a hundred thousand; that's his dada just now. And do
you know how it all came about? The peasants asked him for some
meadowland, I think it was, at a cheaper rate, and he refused, and I
accused him of being miserly. Of course it was not really because of
that, but because of everything together- he began this hospital to
prove, do you see, that he was not miserly about money. C'est une
petitesse, if you like, but I love him all the more for it. And now
you'll see the house in a moment. It was his grandfather's house,
and he has had nothing changed outside."

"How beautiful!" said Dolly, looking with involuntary admiration
at the handsome house with columns, standing out among the
different-colored greens of the old trees in the garden.

"Isn't it fine? And from the house, from the top, the view is
wonderful."

They drove into a courtyard strewn with gravel and bright with
flowers, in which two laborers were at work putting an edging of
stones round the light mold of a flower bed, and drew up in a
covered entry.

"Ah, they're here already!" said Anna, looking at the saddle horses,
which were just being led away from the steps. "It is a good horse,
isn't it? It's my cob; my favorite. Lead him here and bring me some
sugar. Where is the Count?" she inquired of two smart footmen who
darted out. "Ah, there he is!" she said, seeing Vronsky coming to meet
her with Veslovsky.

"Where are you going to put the Princess?" said Vronsky in French,
addressing Anna, and without waiting for a reply, he once more greeted
Darya Alexandrovna, and this time he kissed her hand. "I think the big
balcony room."

"Oh, no, that's too far off! Better in the corner room, we shall see
each other more. Come, let's go up," said Anna, as she gave her
favorite horse the sugar the footman had brought her.

"Et vous oubliez votre devoir," she said to Veslovsky, who came
out too on the steps.

"Pardon, j'en ai tout plein les poches," he answered, smiling,
putting his fingers in his waistcoat pocket.

"Mais vous venez trop tard," she said, rubbing her handkerchief on
her hand, which the horse had made wet in taking the sugar.

Anna turned to Dolly, "You can stay some time? For one day only?
That's impossible!"

"I promised to be back, and the children..." said Dolly, feeling
embarrassed both because she had to get her bag out of the carriage,
and because she knew her face must be covered with dust.

"No, Dolly, darling!... Well, we'll see. Come along, come along!"
and Anna led Dolly to her room.

That room was not the smart guestchamber Vronsky had suggested,
but the one which Anna had said Dolly would surely excuse. And this
room, for which excuse was needed, was more full of luxury than any in
which Dolly had ever stayed, a luxury that reminded her of the best
hotels abroad.

"Well, darling, how happy I am!" Anna said, sitting down in her
riding habit for a moment beside Dolly. "Tell me about all of you.
Stiva I had only a glimpse of, and he cannot tell one about the
children. How is my favorite, Tania? Quite a big girl, I expect?"

"Yes, she's very tall," Darya Alexandrovna answered shortly,
surprised herself that she should respond so coolly about her
children. "We are having a delightful stay at the Levins'," she added.

"Oh, if I had known," said Anna, "that you do not despise me!... You
might have all come to us. Stiva's an old friend and a great friend of
Alexei's, you know," she added, and suddenly she blushed.

"Yes, but we are all..." Dolly answered in confusion.

"But in my delight I'm talking nonsense. The one thing, darling,
is that I am so glad to have you!" said Anna, kissing her again.
"You haven't told me yet how and what you think about me, and I keep
wanting to know. But I'm glad you will see me as I am. The chief thing
I shouldn't like would be for people to imagine I want to prove
anything. I don't want to prove anything; I merely want to live, to do
no one harm but myself. I have the right to do that, haven't I? But it
is a big subject, and we'll talk over everything properly later. Now
I'll go and dress and send a maid to you."

                           XIX.


Left alone, Darya Alexandrovna, with a good housewife's eye, scanned
her room. All she had seen in entering the house and walking through
it, and all she saw now in her room, gave her an impression of
wealth and sumptuousness and of that modern European luxury of which
she had only read in English novels, but had never seen in Russia
and in the country. Everything was new, from the new French hangings
on the walls to the carpet which covered the whole floor. The bed
had a spring mattress, and a special sort of bolster and taffeta
pillowcases on the small pillows. The marble washstand, the dressing
table, the little sofa, the tables, the bronze clock on the chimney
piece, the window curtains and the portieres were all new and
expensive.

The smart maid, who came in to offer her services, with her hair
done up high, and a gown more fashionable that Dolly's, was as new and
expensive as the whole room. Darya Alexandrovna liked her neatness,
her deferential and obliging manners, but she felt ill at ease with
her. She felt ashamed of her seeing the patched dressing jacket that
had unluckily been packed by mistake for her. She was ashamed of the
very patches and darned places of which she had been so proud at home.
At home it had been so clear that for six dressing jackets there would
be needed twenty-four arsheenes of nainsook at sixty-five kopecks
the yard, which was a matter of fifteen roubles, besides the cutting
out and making, and these fifteen roubles had been saved. But before
the maid she felt, if not exactly ashamed, at least uncomfortable.

Darya Alexandrovna had a great sense of relief when Annushka, whom
she had known for years, walked in. The smart maid was sent for to
go to her mistress, and Annushka remained with Darya Alexandrovna.

Annushka was obviously much pleased at that lady's arrival, and
began to chatter away without a pause. Dolly observed that she was
longing to express her opinion in regard to her mistress's position,
especially as to the love and devotion of the Count to Anna
Arkadyevna, but Dolly carefully interrupted her whenever she began
to speak about this.

"I grew up with Anna Arkadyevna; my lady's dearer to me than
anything. Well, it's not for us to judge. And, to be sure, there seems
so much love..."

"Kindly order these things washed for me, please," Darya
Alexandrovna cut her short.

"Certainly. We've two women kept specially for washing small things,
but most of the linen's done by machinery. The Count goes into
everything himself. Ah, what a husband he would make!..."

Dolly was glad when Anna came in, and by her entrance put a stop
to Annushka's gossip.

Anna had put on a very simple batiste gown. Dolly scrutinized that
simple gown attentively. She knew what it meant, and the price at
which such simplicity was obtained.

"An old friend," said Anna of Annushka.

Anna was not embarrassed now. She was perfectly composed and at
ease. Dolly saw that she had now completely recovered from the
impression her arrival had made on her, and had assumed that
superficial, careless tone which, as it were, closed the door on
that compartment in which her deeper feelings and intimate meditations
were kept.

"Well, Anna, and how is your little girl?" asked Dolly.

"Annie?" (This was what she called her little daughter Anna.)
"Very well. She has got on wonderfully. Would you like to see her?
Come, I'll show her to you. We had a terrible bother," she began
telling her, "over nurses. We had an Italian wet nurse. A good
creature, but so stupid! We wanted to get rid of her, but the baby
is so used to her that we've gone on keeping her still."

"But how have you managed?..." Dolly was beginning a question as
to what name the little girl would have; but noticing a sudden frown
on Anna's face, she changed the drift of her question. "How did you
manage? Have you weaned her yet?"

But Anna had understood.

"You didn't mean to ask that? You meant to ask about her surname.
Yes? That worries Alexei. She has no name- that is, she's a Karenina,"
said Anna, dropping her eyelids till nothing could be seen but the
eyelashes meeting. "But we'll talk about all that later," her face
suddenly brightening. "Come, I'll show her to you. Elle est tres
gentille. She crawls now."

In the nursery the luxury which had impressed Dolly in the whole
house struck her still more. There were little gocarts ordered from
England, and appliances for learning to walk, and a sofa after the
fashion of a billiard table, purposely constructed for crawling, and
swings, and baths, all of special pattern, and modern. They were all
English, solid, and of good make, and obviously very expensive. The
room was large, and very light and lofty.

When they went in, the baby, with nothing on but her little smock,
was sitting in a little elbowchair at the table, having her dinner
of broth, which she was spilling all over her little chest. The baby
was being fed, and the Russian nurserymaid was evidently sharing her
meal. Neither the wet nurse nor the head nurse were there; they were
in the next room, from which came the sound of their conversation in
the queer French which was their only means of communication.

Hearing Anna's voice, a smart, tall English nurse with a
disagreeable face and a dissolute expression walked in at the door,
hurriedly shaking her fair curls, and immediately began to defend
herself though Anna had not found fault with her. At every word Anna
said the English nurse said hurriedly several times, "Yes, my lady."

The rosy baby with her black eyebrows and hair, her sturdy red
little body with tight goose-flesh skin, delighted Darya
Alexandrovna in spite of the cross expression with which she stared at
the stranger. She positively envied the baby's healthy appearance. She
was delighted, too, at the baby's crawling. Not one of her own
children had crawled like that. When the baby was put on the carpet
and its little dress tucked up behind, it was wonderfully charming.
Looking round like some little wild animal at the grown-up big
people with her bright black eyes, she smiled, unmistakably pleased at
their admiring her, and, holding her legs sideways, she pressed
vigorously on her arms, and rapidly drew her whole back up after,
and then made another step forward with her little arms.

But the whole atmosphere of the nursery, and especially the
English nurse, Darya Alexandrovna did not like at all. It was only
on the supposition that no good nurse would have entered so
irregular a household as Anna's that Darya Alexandrovna could
explain to herself how Anna with her insight into people could take
such an unprepossessing, indecorous woman as nurse to her child.
Besides, from a few words that were dropped, Darya Alexandrovna saw at
once that Anna, the two nurses, and the child, had no existence in
common, and that the mother's visit was something exceptional. Anna
wanted to get the baby her plaything, and could not find it.

Most amazing of all was the fact that on being asked how many
teeth the baby had, Anna answered wrong, and knew nothing about the
two last teeth.

"I sometimes feel sorry I'm, as it were, superfluous here," said
Anna, going out of the nursery, and holding up her skirt so as to
escape the plaything standing near the doorway. "It was very different
with my first child."

"I expected it to be the other way," said Darya Alexandrovna shyly.

"Oh, no! By the way, do you know I saw Seriozha?" said Anna,
screwing up her eyes, as though looking at something far away. "But
we'll talk about that later. You wouldn't believe it, I'm like a
hungry beggar woman when a full dinner is set before her, and she does
not know what to begin on first. The full dinner is you, and the talks
I have before me with you, which I could never have with anyone
else; and I don't know which subject to begin upon first. Mais je ne
vous ferai grace de rien. I must have everything out with you. Oh, I
ought to give you a sketch of the company you will meet with us,"
she began. "I'll begin with the ladies. Princess Varvara- you know
her, and I know your opinion and Stiva's about her. Stiva says the
whole aim of her existence is to prove her superiority over Auntie
Katerina Pavlovna: that's all true; but she's a good-natured woman,
and I am so grateful to her. In Peterburg there was a moment when un
chaperon was absolutely essential for me. Then she turned up. But,
really, she is good-natured. She did a great deal to alleviate my
position. I see you don't understand all the difficulty of my
position... there in Peterburg," she added. "Here I'm perfectly at
ease and happy. Well, of that later on, though. Then Sviiazhsky-
he's the marshal of the district, and he's a very good sort of a
man, but he wants to get something out of Alexei. You understand, with
his property, now that we are settled in the country, Alexei can
exercise great influence. Then there's Tushkevich- you have seen
him, you know- Betsy's admirer. Now he's been thrown over, and he's
come to see us. As Alexei says, he's one of those people who are
very pleasant if one accepts them for what they try to appear to be,
et puis, il est comme il faut, as Princess Varvara says. Then
Veslovsky... you know him. A very charming boy," she said, and a sly
smile curved her lips. "What's this wild story about him and the
Levins? Veslovsky told Alexei about it, and we don't believe it. Il
est tres gentil et naif," she said again with the same smile. "Men
need occupation, and Alexei needs a circle, so I value all these
people. We have to have the house lively and gay, so that Alexei may
not long for any novelty. Then you'll see the steward- a German, a
very good fellow, and he understands his work. Alexei has a very
high opinion of him. Then the doctor, a young man, not quite a
Nihilist perhaps, but, you know, he eats with his knife... But a
very good doctor. Then the architect... Une petite cour."

                           XX.


"Here's Dolly for you, Princess, you were so anxious to see her,"
said Anna, coming out with Darya Alexandrovna on the stone terrace
where Princess Varvara was sitting in the shade at an embroidery
frame, working at a cover for Count Alexei Kirillovich's easy chair.
"She says she doesn't want anything before dinner, but please order
some lunch for her, and I'll go look for Alexei and bring them all
in."

Princess Varvara gave Dolly a cordial and rather patronizing
reception, and began at once explaining to her that she was living
with Anna because she had always cared more for her than her sister,
that aunt that had brought Anna up; and that now, when everyone had
abandoned Anna, she thought it her duty to help her in this most
difficult period of transition.

"Her husband will give her a divorce, and then I shall go back to my
solitude; but now I can be of use, and I am doing my duty, however
difficult it may be for me- not like some other people. And how
sweet it is of you, how right of you to have come! They live like
the best of married couples; it's for God to judge them, not for us.
And didn't Biriuzovsky and Madame Avenieva... and Nikandrov himself,
and Vassiliev with Madame Mamonova, and Liza Neptunova... Did no one
say anything about them? And it has ended by their being received by
everyone. And then, c'est un interieur si joli, si comme il faut.
Tout-a-fait a l'anglaise. On se reunit le matin au breakfast, et
puis on se separe. Everyone does as he pleases till dinnertime. Dinner
at seven o'clock. Stiva did very rightly to send you. He needs their
support. You know that through his mother and brother he can do
everything. And then they do so much good. He didn't tell you about
his hospital? Ce sera admirable- everything from Paris."

Their conversation was interrupted by Anna, who had found the men of
the party in the billiard room, and returned with them to the terrace.
There was still a long time before the dinner hour, it was exquisite
weather, and so several different methods of spending the next two
hours were proposed. There were very many methods of passing the
time at Vozdvizhenskoe, and these were all unlike those in use at
Pokrovskoe.

"Une partie de lawn tennis," Veslovsky proposed, with his handsome
smile. "We'll be partners again, Anna Arkadyevna."

"No, it's too hot; better stroll about the garden and have a row
in the boat- show Darya Alexandrovna the riverbanks," Vronsky
proposed.

"I agree to anything," said Sviiazhsky.

"I imagine that what Dolly would like best would be a stroll-
wouldn't you? And then the boat, perhaps," said Anna.

So it was decided. Veslovsky and Tushkevich went off to the
bathing place, promising to get the boat ready and to wait there for
them.

They walked along the path in two couples, Anna with Sviiazhsky, and
Dolly with Vronsky. Dolly was a little embarrassed and anxious in
the new surroundings in which she found herself Abstractly,
theoretically, she did not merely justify- she positively approved
of Anna's conduct. As is indeed not infrequent with women of
unimpeachable virtue, weary of the monotony of virtuous existence,
at a distance she not only excused illicit love- she positively envied
it. Besides, she loved Anna with all her heart. But seeing Anna in
actual life among these strangers, with this fashionable tone that was
so new to Darya Alexandrovna, she felt ill at ease. What she
disliked particularly was seeing Princess Varvara ready to overlook
everything for the sake of the comforts she enjoyed.

As a general principle, abstractly, Dolly approved of Anna's action;
but to see the man for whose sake her action had been taken was
disagreeable to her. Moreover, she had never liked Vronsky. She
thought him very proud, and saw nothing in him of which he could be
proud except his wealth. But against her own will, here in his own
house, he imposed upon her more than ever, and she could not be at
ease with him. She experienced with him the same feeling she had had
the maid about her dressing jacket. Just as with the maid she had felt
not exactly ashamed, but embarrassed at her darns, so she felt with
him not exactly ashamed, but embarrassed at herself.

Dolly was ill at ease, and tried to find a subject of
conversation. Even though she supposed that, through his pride, praise
of his house and garden would be sure to be disagreeable to him, she
did all the same tell him how much she liked his house.

"Yes, it's a very fine building, and in the good old-fashioned
style," he said.

"I like so much the court in front of the steps. Was that always
so?"

"Oh, no!" he said, and his face beamed with pleasure. "If you
could only have seen the court last spring!"

And he began, at first rather diffidently, but more and more carried
away by the subject as he went on, to draw her attention to the
various details of the decoration of his house and garden. It was
evident that, having devoted a great deal of trouble to improve and
beautify his home, Vronsky felt a need to show off the improvements to
a new person, and was genuinely delighted at Darya Alexandrovna's
praise.

"If you would care to look at the hospital, and are not really
tired, it's not far. Shall we go?" he said, glancing into her face
to convince himself that she was not bored. "Are you coming, Anna?" he
turned to her.

"We will come, won't we?" she said, addressing Sviiazhsky. "Mais
il ne faut pas laisser le pauvre Veslovsky et Tushkevich se
morfondre la dans le bateau. We must send and tell them."

"Yes, this is a monument he is setting up here," said Anna,
turning to Dolly with that sly smile of comprehension with which she
had previously talked about the hospital.

"Oh, it's a work of real importance!" said Sviiazhsky. But to show
he was not trying to ingratiate himself with Vronsky, he promptly
added some slightly critical remarks. "I wonder, though, Count," he
said, "that while you do so much for the health of the peasants, you
take so little interest in the schools."

"C'est devenu tellement commun les ecoles," said Vronsky. "You
understand it's not on that account, but it just happens so, my
interest has been diverted elsewhere. This way, then, to the
hospital," he said to Darya Alexandrovna, pointing to a side path
leading out of the avenue.

The ladies put up their parasols and turned into the side path.
After going down several turnings, and going through a little gate,
Darya Alexandrovna saw standing on rising ground before her a large
pretentious-looking red building, almost finished. The iron roof,
which was not yet painted, shone with dazzling brightness in the
sunshine. Beside the finished building another had been begun,
surrounded by scaffolding. Workmen in aprons, standing on scaffolds,
were laying bricks, pouring mortar out of vats, and smoothing it
with trowels.

"How quickly work gets done with you!" said Sviiazhsky. "When I
was here last time the roof was not on."

"By the autumn it will all be ready. Inside almost everything is
done," said Anna.

"And what's this new building?"

"That's the house for the doctor and the dispensary," answered
Vronsky; seeing the architect in a short jacket coming toward him, and
excusing himself to the ladies, he went to meet him.

Going round a hole where the workmen were slaking lime, he stood
still with the architect and began talking rather warmly.

"The pediment looks still too low," he said to Anna, who had asked
what was the matter.

"I said the foundation ought to be raised," said Anna.

"Yes, of course, it would have been much better, Anna Arkadyevna,"
said the architect, "but now it's too late."

"Yes, I take a great interest in it," Anna answered Sviiazhsky,
who was expressing his surprise at her knowledge of architecture.
"This new building ought to have been in harmony with the hospital. It
was an afterthought, and was begun without a plan."

Vronsky, having finished his talk with the architect, joined the
ladies, and led them inside the hospital.

Although they were still at work on the cornices outside and were
painting on the ground floor, upstairs almost all the rooms were
finished. Going up the broad cast-iron staircase to the landing,
they walked into the first large room. The walls were stuccoed to look
like marble, the huge plate-glass windows were already in, only the
parquet floor was not yet finished, and the carpenters, who were
planing a block of it, left their work, taking off the bands that
fastened their hair, to greet the gentry.

"This is the reception room," said Vronsky. "Here there will be a
desk, a cupboard, and benches, and nothing more."

"This way; let us go in here. Don't go near the window," said
Anna, trying the paint to see if it were dry. "Alexei, the paint's dry
already," she added.

From the reception room they went into the corridor. Here Vronsky
showed them the mechanism for ventilation on a novel system. Then he
showed them marble baths, and beds with extraordinary springs. Then he
showed them the wards one after another, the storeroom, the linen
room, then the heating stove of a new pattern, then the trolleys,
which would make no noise as they carried everything needed along
the corridors, and many other things. Sviiazhsky, as a connoisseur
in the latest mechanical improvements, appreciated everything fully.
Dolly simply wondered at all as something she had not seen before,
and, anxious to understand it all, made minute inquiries about
everything, which gave Vronsky apparent satisfaction.

"Yes, I imagine that this will be the solitary example of a properly
fitted hospital in Russia," said Sviiazhsky.

"And won't you have a lying-in ward?" asked Dolly. "That's so much
needed in the country. I have often..."

In spite of his usual courtesy, Vronsky interrupted her.

"This is not a lying-in home, but a hospital for the sick, and is
intended for all diseases, except infectious complaints," he said.
"Ah! Look at this," and he rolled up to Darya Alexandrovna an
invalid chair that had just been ordered for convalescents. "Look!" He
sat down in the chair and began moving it. "The patient can't walk-
still too weak, perhaps, or something wrong with his legs, but he must
have air, and he moves, rolls himself along...."

Darya Alexandrovna was interested by everything. She liked
everything very much, but most of all she liked Vronsky himself,
with his natural, simplehearted enthusiasm. "Yes, he's a very dear,
good man," she thought several times, not hearing what he said, but
looking at him and penetrating into his expression, while she mentally
put herself in Anna's place. She liked him so much just now with his
eager interest that she saw how Anna could be in love with him.

                           XXI.


"No, I think the Princess is tired, and horses don't interest
her," Vronsky said to Anna, who wanted to go on to the stud farm,
where Sviiazhsky wished to see the new stallion. "You go on, while I
escort the Princess home, and we'll have a little talk," he said.
"If you would like that?" he added, turning to her.

"I know nothing about horses, and I shall be delighted to go back
with you," answered Darya Alexandrovna, rather astonished.

She saw by Vronsky's face that he wanted something from her. She was
not mistaken. As soon as they had passed through the little gate
back into the garden, he looked in the direction Anna had taken,
and, having made sure that she could neither hear nor see them, he
began:

"You guess that I have something I want to say to you," he said,
looking at her with laughing eyes. "I am not wrong in believing you to
be a friend of Anna's." He took off his hat, and taking out his
handkerchief, wiped his head, which was growing bald.

Darya Alexandrovna made no answer, and merely stared at him with
dismay. When she was left alone with him, she suddenly felt afraid;
his laughing eyes and stern expression scared her.

The most diverse suppositions as to what he was about to say to
her flashed into her brain. "He is going to beg me to come to stay
with them with the children, and I shall have to refuse; or to
create a set that will receive Anna in Moscow.... Or isn't it Vassenka
Veslovsky and his relations with Anna? Or perhaps about Kitty- that he
feels he was to blame?" All her conjectures were unpleasant, but she
did not guess what he really wanted to talk about to her.

"You have so much influence with Anna, she is so fond of you," he
said; "do help me."

Darya Alexandrovna looked with timid inquiry into his energetic
face, which under the linden trees was continually being lighted up in
patches by the sunshine, and then passing into complete shadow
again. She waited for him to say more, but he walked in silence beside
her, scratching with his cane in the gravel.

"You have come to see us, you, the only woman of Anna's former
friends- I don't count Princess Varvara- but I know that you have done
this not because you regard our position as normal, but because,
understanding all the difficulty of the position, you still love her
and want to be a help to her. Have I understood you rightly?" he
asked, looking round at her.

"Oh, yes," answered Darya Alexandrovna, putting down her sunshade,
"but..."

"No," he broke in, and unconsciously, oblivious of the awkward
position in which he was putting his companion, he stopped abruptly,
so that she had to stop short too. "No one feels more deeply and
intensely than I do all the difficulty of Anna's position; and that
you may well understand, if you do me the honor of supposing I have
any heart. I am to blame for that position, and that is why I feel
it."

"I understand," said Darya Alexandrovna, involuntarily admiring
the sincerity and firmness with which he said this. "But just
because you feel yourself responsible, you exaggerate it, I am
afraid," she said. "Her position in the world is difficult, I can well
understand."

"In the world it is hell!" he brought out quickly, frowning
darkly. "You can't imagine moral sufferings greater than what she went
through in Peterburg during that fortnight.... And I beg you to
believe it."

"Yes, but here, so long as neither Anna... nor you want society..."

"Society!" he said contemptuously. "How could I want society?"

"So far- and it may be so always- you are happy and at peace. I
see in Anna that she is happy, perfectly happy- she has had time to
tell me so much already," said Darya Alexandrovna, smiling; and
involuntarily, as she said this, at the same moment a doubt entered
her mind whether Anna really were happy.

But Vronsky, it appeared, had no doubts on that score.

"Yes, yes," he said, "I know that she has revived after all her
sufferings; she is happy. She is happy in the present. But I?... I
am afraid of what is before us... I beg your pardon- you would like to
walk on?"

"No, I don't mind."

"Well, then, let us sit here."

Darya Alexandrovna sat down on a garden seat in a corner of the
avenue. He stood up, facing her.

"I see that she is happy," he repeated, and the doubt whether she
were happy sank more deeply into Darya Alexandrovna's mind. "But can
it last? Whether we have acted rightly or wrongly is another question,
but the die is cast," he said, passing from Russian to French, "and we
are bound together for life. We are united by all the ties of love
that we hold most sacred. We have a child, we may have other children.
But the law and all the conditions of our position are such that
thousands of complications arise which she does not see at present,
and does not want to see, setting her heart at rest after all these
sufferings and ordeals. And that one can well understand. But I
can't help seeing them. My daughter is by law not my daughter, but
Karenin's. I cannot bear this falsity!" he said, with a vigorous
gesture of refusal, and he looked with gloomy inquiry toward Darya
Alexandrovna.

She made no answer, but simply gazed at him. He went on:

"One day a son may be born, my son, and he will be legally a
Karenin; he will not be the heir of my name nor of my property; and
however happy we may be in our home life, and however many children we
may have, there will be no real tie between us. They will be
Karenin's. You will understand the bitterness and horror of this
position! I have tried to speak of this to Anna. It irritates her. She
does not understand, and to her I cannot speak plainly of all this.
Now look at another side. I am happy, happy in her love, but I must
have occupation. I have found occupation, and am proud of what I am
doing, and consider it nobler than the pursuits of my former
companions at Court and in the army. And most certainly I would not
change the work I am doing for theirs. I am working here, settled in
my own place, and I am happy and contented, and we need nothing more
to make us happy. I love my work here. Ce n'est pas un pis-aller, on
the contrary..."

Darya Alexandrovna noticed that at this point in his explanation
he grew confused, and she did not quite understand this digression,
but she felt that having once begun to speak of matters near his
heart, of which he could not speak to Anna, he was now making a
clean breast of everything, and that the question of his pursuits in
the country fell into the same compartment of his intimate meditations
as the question of his relations with Anna.

"Well, I will go on," he said, collecting himself. "The great
thing is that as I work I want to have a conviction that what I am
doing will not die with me, that I shall have heirs to come after
me- and this I have not. Conceive the position of a man who knows that
his children, the children of the woman he loves, will not be his, but
will belong to someone who hates them and cares nothing about them! It
is awful!

He paused, evidently much moved.

"Yes, indeed, I see that. But what can Anna do?" queried Darya
Alexandrovna.

"Yes, that brings me to the object of my conversation," he said,
calming himself with an effort. "Anna can, it depends on her....
Even to petition the Czar for legitimization, a divorce is
essential. And that depends on Anna. Her husband agreed to a
divorce- at that time your husband had arranged it completely. And
now, I know, he would not refuse it. It is only a matter of writing to
him. He said plainly at that time that if she expressed the desire, he
would not refuse. Of course," he said gloomily, "it is one of those
Pharisaical cruelties of which only such heartless men are capable. He
knows what agony any recollection of him must give her, and knowing
her, he must have a letter from her. I can understand that it is agony
to her. But the matter is of such importance, that one must passer
pardessus toutes ces finesses de sentiment. Il y va du bonheur et de
l'existence d'Anne et de ses enfants. I won't speak of myself,
though it's hard for me, very hard," he said, with an expression as
though he were threatening someone for its being hard for him. "And so
it is, Princess, that I am shamelessly clutching at you as an anchor
of salvation. Help me to persuade her to write to him and ask for a
divorce."

"Yes, of course," Darya Alexandrovna said dreamily, as she vividly
recalled her last interview with Alexei Alexandrovich. "Yes, of
course," she repeated with decision, thinking of Anna.

"Use your influence with her, make her write. I don't like- I'm
almost unable to speak about this to her."

"Very well, I will talk to her. But how is it she does not think
of it herself?" said Darya Alexandrovna, and for some reason she
suddenly at that point recalled Anna's strange new habit of
half-closing her eyes. And she remembered that Anna drooped her
eyelids just when the deeper questions of life were touched upon.
"Just as though she half-shut her eyes to her own life, so as not to
see everything," thought Dolly. "Yes, indeed, for my own sake and
for hers, I will talk to her," Dolly said in reply to his expression
of gratitude.

They got up and walked to the house.

                           XXII.


When Anna found Dolly at home before her, she looked intently in her
eyes, as though questioning her about the talk she had had with
Vronsky, but she made no inquiry in words.

"I believe it's dinnertime," she said. "We've not seen each other at
all yet. I am reckoning on the evening. Now I want to go and dress.
I expect you do too; we all got splashed at the buildings."

Dolly went to her room and she felt amused. To change her dress
was impossible, for she had already put on her best dress. But in
order to signify in some way her preparation for dinner, she asked the
maid to brush her dress, changed her cuffs and rosette, and put some
lace on her head.

"This is all I can do," she said with a smile to Anna, who came in
to her in a third dress, again of extreme simplicity.

"Yes, we are too prim here," she said, as it were apologizing for
her finery. "Alexei is delighted at your visit, as he rarely is at
anything. He has completely lost his heart to you," she added. "You're
not tired?"

There was no time for talking about anything before dinner. Going
into the drawing room they found Princess Varvara already there, and
the gentlemen of the party in black frock coats. The architect wore
a swallow-tailed coat. Vronsky presented the doctor and the steward to
his guest. The architect he had already introduced to her at the
hospital.

A stout butler, resplendent with a smoothly shaven round chin and
a starched white cravat, announced that dinner was ready, and the
ladies got up. Vronsky asked Sviiazhsky to take in Anna Arkadyevna,
and himself offered his arm to Dolly. Veslovsky was before
Tushkevich in offering his arm to Princess Varvara, so that Tushkevich
with the steward and the doctor walked in alone.

The dinner, the dining room, the service, the waiting at table,
the wine and the food, were not simply in keeping with the general
tone of modern luxury throughout the house, but seemed even more
sumptuous and modern. Darya Alexandrovna watched this luxury which was
novel to her, and as a good housekeeper used to managing a
household- though she never dreamed of adapting anything she saw to
her own household, as it was all in a style of luxury far above her
own manner of living- she could not help scrutinizing every detail,
and wondering how and by whom it was all done. Vassenka Veslovsky, her
husband, and even Sviiazhsky, and many other people she knew, would
never have considered this question, and would have readily believed
what every well-bred host tries to make his guests feel, that is, that
all that is well-ordered in his house has cost him, the host, no
trouble whatever, but comes of itself. Darya Alexandrovna was well
aware that even porridge for the children's breakfast does not come of
itself, and that therefore, where so complicated and magnificent a
style of luxury was maintained, someone must give earnest attention to
its organization. And from the glance with which Alexei Kirillovich
scanned the table, from the way he nodded to the butler, and offered
Darya Alexandrovna her choice between cold soup and hot soup, she
saw that it was all organized and maintained by the care of the master
of the house himself. It was evident that it all rested no more upon
Anna than upon Veslovsky. She, Sviiazhsky, the Princess, and
Veslovsky, were equally guests, with light hearts enjoying what had
been arranged for them.

Anna was the hostess only in conducting the conversation. The
conversation was a difficult one for the lady of the house at a
small table with persons present, like the steward and the
architect, belonging to a completely different world, struggling not
to be overawed by an elegance to which they were unaccustomed, and
unable to sustain a large share in the general conversation. But
this difficult conversation Anna directed with her usual tact and
naturalness, and indeed she did so with actual enjoyment, as Darya
Alexandrovna observed.

The conversation began about the row Tushkevich and Veslovsky had
taken alone together in the boat, and Tushkevich began describing
the last boat races in Peterburg at the Yacht Club. But Anna,
seizing the first pause, at once turned to the architect to draw him
out of his silence.

"Nikolai Ivanich was struck," she said meaning Sviiazhsky, "at the
progress the new building had made since he was here last; but I am
there every day, and every day I wonder at the rate at which it
grows."

"It's first-rate working with His Excellency," said the architect
with a smile (he was respectful and composed, though with a sense of
his own dignity). "It's a very different matter to have to do with the
district authorities. Where one would have to write out sheaves of
papers, here I call upon the Count, and in three words we settle the
business."

"The American way of doing business," said Sviiazhsky, with a smile.

"Yes, there they build in a rational fashion...."

The conversation passed to the misuse of political power in the
United States, but Anna quickly brought it round to another topic,
so as to draw the steward into talk.

"Have you ever seen a reaping machine?" she said, addressing Darya
Alexandrovna. "We had just ridden over to look at one when we met.
It's the first time I ever saw one."

"How do they work?" asked Dolly.

"Exactly like scissors. A plank and a lot of little scissors. Like
this."

Anna took a knife and fork in her beautiful white hands, covered
with rings, and began showing how the machine worked. It was clear
that she saw nothing would be understood from her explanation; but
aware that her talk was pleasant, and her hands beautiful, she went on
explaining.

"More like little penknives," Veslovsky said playfully, never taking
his eyes off her.

Anna gave a just perceptible smile, but made no answer. "Isn't it
true, Karl Fedorich, that it's just like scissors?" she said to the
steward.

"Oh, ja," answered the German. "Es ist ein ganz einfaches Ding," and
he began to explain the construction of the machine.

"It's a pity it doesn't bind too. I saw one at the Vienna
exhibition, which binds with a wire," said Sviiazhsky. "They would
be more profitable in use."

"Es kommt drauf an... Der Preis vom Draht muss ausgerechnet werden."
And the German, roused from his taciturnity, turned to Vronsky. "Das
lasst sich ausrechnen, Erlaucht." The German was just feeling in the
pocket where were his pencil and the notebook he always wrote in,
but recollecting that he was at a dinner, and observing Vronsky's
chilly glance, he checked himself. "Zu compliziert, macht zu viel
pains," he concluded.

"Wunscht man gains, so hat man auch pains," said Vassenka Veslovsky,
bantering the German. "J'adore l'allemand," he addressed Anna again
with the same smile.

"Cessez," she said with playful severity.

"We expected to find you in the fields, Vassilii Semionich," she
said to the doctor, a sickly-looking man; "have you been there?"

"I went there, but I evaporated," the doctor answered with gloomy
jocoseness.

"Then you've taken a good constitutional?"

"Splendid!"

"Well, and how was the old woman? I hope it's not typhus?"

"Typhus it isn't, but she's not to be found to the best advantage."

"What a pity!" said Anna, and having thus paid the dues of
civility to her domestic circle, she turned to her own friends.

"It would be a hard task, though, to construct a machine from your
description, Anna Arkadyevna," Sviiazhsky said jestingly.

"Oh, no, why so?" said Anna with a smile that betrayed that she knew
there was something charming in her disquisitions upon the machine,
that had been noticed by Sviiazhsky too. This new trait of girlish
coquettishness made an unpleasant impression on Dolly.

"But Anna Arkadyevna's knowledge of architecture is marvelous," said
Tushkevich.

"To be sure, I heard Anna Arkadyevna saying yesterday: 'by cramp'
and 'plinths,'" said Veslovsky. "Have I got it right?"

"There's nothing marvelous about it, when one sees and hears so much
of it," said Anna. "But, I dare say, you don't even know what houses
are made of?"

Darya Alexandrovna saw that Anna disliked the tone of playfulness
that existed between her and Veslovsky, but fell in with it against
her will.

Vronsky acted in this matter quite differently from Levin. He
obviously attached no significance to Veslovsky's chattering; on the
contrary, he encouraged his jests.

"Come now, tell us, Veslovsky, how are the stones held together?"

"By cement, of course."

"Bravo! And what is cement?"

"Oh, some sort of paste.... No, putty," said Veslovsky, raising a
general laugh.

The company at dinner, with the exception of the doctor, the
architect, and the steward, who remained plunged in gloomy silence,
kept up a conversation that never paused, glancing off one subject,
fastening on another, and at times stinging one or the other of the
company to the quick. Once Darya Alexandrovna felt wounded to the
quick, and got so hot that she positively flushed and wondered
afterward whether she had said anything extreme or unpleasant.
Sviiazhsky began talking of Levin, describing his strange view that
machinery is simply pernicious in its effects on Russian agriculture.

"I have not the pleasure of knowing this M. Levin," Vronsky said,
smiling, "but most likely he has never seen the machines he
condemns; or if he has seen and tried any, it must have been after a
queer fashion, some Russian imitation, not a machine from abroad. What
sort of views can anyone have on such a subject?"

"Turkish views, in general," Veslovsky said, turning to Anna with
a smile.

"I can't defend his opinions," Darya Alexandrovna said, flaring
up; "but I can say that he's a highly cultivated man, and if he were
here he would know very well how to answer you, though I am not
capable of doing so."

"I like him extremely, and we are great friends," Sviiazhsky said,
smiling good-naturedly. "Mais pardon, il est un petit peu toque; he
maintains, for instance, that zemstvoes and justices of the peace
are all of no use, and he is unwilling to take part in anything."

"It's our Russian apathy," said Vronsky, pouring water from an
iced decanter into a delicate glass on a high stem; "we've no sense of
the duties our privileges impose upon us, and so we refuse to
recognize these duties."

"I know no man more strict in the performance of his duties," said
Darya Alexandrovna, irritated by Vronsky's tone of superiority.

"For my part," pursued Vronsky, who was evidently for some reason or
other keenly affected by this conversation, "such as I am, I am, on
the contrary, extremely grateful for the honor they have done me,
thanks to Nikolai Ivanich" (he indicated Sviiazhsky), "in electing
me an honorary justice of the peace. I consider that for me the duty
of being present at the session, of judging some peasants' quarrel
about a horse, is as important as anything I can do. And I shall
regard it as an honor if they elect me for the district council.
It's only in that way I can pay for the advantages I enjoy as a
landowner. Unluckily they don't understand the importance that the big
landowners ought to have in the state."

It was strange to Darya Alexandrovna to hear how serenely
confident he was of being right at his own table. She thought how
Levin, who believed the opposite, was just as positive in his opinions
at his own table. But she loved Levin, and so she was on his side.

"So we can reckon upon you, Count, for the coming elections?" said
Sviiazhsky. "But you must come a little beforehand, so as to be on the
spot by the eighth. If you would do me the honor to stop with me!"

"I rather agree with your beau-frere", said Anna, "though not
quite on the same ground as he," she added with a smile. "I'm afraid
that we have too many of these public duties in these latter days.
Just as in the old days there were so many government functionaries
that one had to call in a functionary for every single thing, so now
everyone's doing some sort of public duty. Alexei has been here now
six months, and he's a member, I do believe, of five or six
different public bodies, a guardian, a justice of the peace, a
member of the council, a juryman, an equine something. Du train que
cela va, his whole time will be wasted on it. And I'm afraid that with
such a multiplicity of these bodies, they'll end in being a mere form.
How many are you a member of, Nikolai Ivanich?" she turned to
Sviiazhsky. "Over twenty, I fancy."

Anna spoke lightly, but irritation could be discerned in her tone.
Darya Alexandrovna, watching Anna and Vronsky attentively, detected it
instantly. She noticed, too, that as she spoke Vronsky's face had
immediately taken a serious and obstinate expression. Noticing this,
and that Princess Varvara at once made haste to change the
conversation by talking of Peterburg acquaintances, and remembering
what Vronsky had without apparent connection said in the garden of his
work in the country, Dolly surmised that this question of public
activity was connected with some deep private disagreement between
Anna and Vronsky.

The dinner, the wine, the dinner set, were all very good; but it was
all like what Darya Alexandrovna had seen at formal dinners and
balls which of late years had become quite unfamiliar to her; it all
had the same impersonal and constrained character, and so on an
ordinary day and in a little circle of friends it made a
disagreeable impression on her.

After dinner they sat on the terrace; then they proceeded to play
lawn tennis. The players, divided into two parties, stood on
opposite sides of a tightly drawn net with gilt poles, on the
carefully leveled and rolled croquet ground. Darya Alexandrovna made
an attempt to play, but it was a long time before she could understand
the game, and by the time she did understand it she was so tired
that she sat down with Princess Varvara and simply looked on at the
players. Her partner, Tushkevich, gave up playing too, but the
others kept the game up for a long time. Sviiazhsky and Vronsky both
played very well and seriously. They kept a sharp lookout on the balls
served to them, and without loitering, they ran adroitly up to them,
waited for the rebound, and neatly and accurately returned them over
the net. Veslovsky played worse than the others. He was too eager, but
he kept the players lively with his high spirits. His laughter and
outcries never paused. Like the other men of the party, with the
ladies' permission, he took off his coat, and his solid, comely figure
in his white shirt sleeves, with his red perspiring face and his
impulsive movements, made a picture that imprinted itself vividly on
the memory.

When Darya Alexandrovna lay in bed that night, as soon as she closed
her eyes, she saw Vassenka Veslovsky flying about the croquet ground.

During the game Darya Alexandrovna was not enjoying herself. She did
not like the light tone of playfulness that was kept up all the time
between Vassenka Veslovsky and Anna, and the unnaturalness,
altogether, of grown-up people, all alone without children, playing at
a child's game. But to avoid breaking up the party and to get
through the time somehow, after a rest she joined the game again,
and pretended to be enjoying it. All that day it seemed to her as
though she were acting in a theater with actors cleverer than she, and
that her bad acting was spoiling the whole performance.

She had come with the intention of staying two days, if all went
well. But in the evening, during the game, she made up her mind that
she would go home next day. The maternal cares and worries, which
she had so hated on the way, now, after a day spent without them
struck her in quite another light, and tempted her back to them.

When, after evening tea and a row by night in the boat, Darya
Alexandrovna went alone to her room, took off her dress, and began
arranging her thin hair for the night, she had a great sense of
relief.

It was positively disagreeable to her to think that Anna would be
coming to see her immediately. She longed to be alone with her own
thoughts.

                           XXIII.


Dolly was just about to go to bed when Anna came in to see her,
attired for the night.

In the course of the day Anna had several times begun to speak of
matters near her heart, and every time after a few words she had
stopped: "Afterward, by ourselves, we'll talk about everything. I've
got so much I want to tell you," she had said.

Now they were by themselves, and Anna did not know what to talk
about. She sat in the window looking at Dolly, and going over in her
own mind all the stores of intimate talk which had seemed so
inexhaustible beforehand, and she found nothing. At that moment it
seemed to her that everything had been said already.

"Well, what of Kitty?" she said with a heavy sigh, looking
penitently at Dolly. "Tell me the truth, Dolly: isn't she angry with
me?"

"Angry? Oh, no!" said Darya Alexandrovna, smiling.

"But she hates me, despises me?"

"Oh, no! But you know that sort of thing isn't forgiven."

"Yes, yes," said Anna, turning away and looking out of the open
window. "But I was not to blame. And who is to blame? What's the
meaning of being to blame? Could it have been otherwise? What do you
think? Could it possibly have happened otherwise than that you
should become the wife of Stiva?"

"Really, I don't know. But this is what I want you to tell me..."

"Yes, yes, but we've not finished about Kitty. Is she happy? He's
a very fine man, they say."

"He's much more than very fine. I don't know a better man."

"Ah, how glad I am! I'm so glad! Much more than very fine," she
repeated.

Dolly smiled.

"But tell me about yourself. We've a great deal to talk about. And
I've had a talk with..." Dolly did not know what to call him. She felt
it awkward to call him either the Count or Alexei Kirillovich.

"With Alexei," said Anna, "I know what you talked about. But I
wanted to ask you directly what you think of me, of my life?"

"How am I to say anything so suddenly? I really don't know."

"No, tell me all the same.... You see my life. But you mustn't
forget that you're seeing us in the summer, when you have come to us
and we are not alone.... But we came here early in the spring, lived
quite alone, and shall be alone again, and I desire nothing better.
But imagine me living alone without him, alone, and that will be...
I see by everything that it will often be repeated, that he will be
half the time away from home," she said, getting up and sitting down
close by Dolly. "Of course," she interrupted Dolly, who would have
answered, "of course I won't try to keep him by force. I don't keep
him indeed. The races are just coming, his horses are running, he will
go. I'm very glad. But think of me, fancy my position.... But what's
the use of talking about it!" She smiled. "Well, what did he talk
about with you?"

"He spoke of what I want to speak about myself, and it's easy for me
to be his advocate; of whether there is not a possibility... whether
you could not..." (Darya Alexandrovna hesitated) "correct, or
improve your position.... You know how I look at it... But all the
same, if possible, you should get married...."

"Divorce, you mean?" said Anna. "Do you know, the only woman who
came to see me in Peterburg was Betsy Tverskaia? You know her, of
course? Au fond, c'est la femme la plus dipravee qui existe. She had
an intrigue with Tushkevich, deceiving her husband in the basest
way. And she told me that she did not care to know me so long as my
position was irregular. Don't imagine I would compare... I know you,
darling. But I could not help remembering... Well, so what did he
say to you?" she repeated.

"He said that he was unhappy on your account and his own. Perhaps
you will say that it's egoism, but what a legitimate and noble egoism.
He wants first of all to legitimize his daughter, and to be your
husband, to have a legal right to you."

"What wife, what slave can be so utterly a slave as I, in my
position?" she put in gloomily.

"The chief thing he desires... he desires that you should not
suffer."

"That's impossible. Well?"

"Well, and the most legitimate desire- he wishes that your
children should have a name."

"What children?" Anna said, not looking at Dolly, and half closing
her eyes.

"Annie and those to come..."

"He need not trouble on that score; I shall have no more children."

"How can you tell that you won't?"

"I shall not, because I don't wish it." And, in spite of all her
emotion, Anna smiled, as she caught the naive expression of curiosity,
wonder, and horror on Dolly's face.

"The doctor told me after my illness..."

"Impossible!" said Dolly, opening her eyes wide. For here this was
one of those discoveries the consequences and deductions from which
are so immense that all that one feels for the first instant is that
it is impossible to take it all in, and that one will have to
reflect a great, great deal upon it.

This discovery, suddenly throwing light on all those families of one
or two children, which had hitherto been so incomprehensible to her,
aroused so many ideas, reflections, and contradictory emotions, that
she had nothing to say, and simply gazed with wide-open eyes of wonder
at Anna. This was the very thing she had been dreaming of, but now
learning that it was possible, she was horrified. She felt that it was
too simple a solution of too complicated a problem.

"N'est-ce pas immoral?" was all she said, after a brief pause.

"Why so? Think- I have a choice between two alternatives: either
to be with child, that is an invalid, or to be the friend and
companion of my husband- practically my husband," Anna said in a
tone intentionally superficial and frivolous.

"Yes, yes," said Darya Alexandrovna, hearing the very arguments
she had used to herself, and not finding the same force in them as
before.

"For you, for other people," said Anna, as though divining her
thoughts, "there may be reason to hesitate; but for me... You must
consider- I am not his wife; he loves me as long as he loves me. And
how am I to keep his love? Not like this!"

She moved her white hands in a curve before her waist.

With extraordinary rapidity, as happens during moments of
excitement, ideas and memories rushed into Darya Alexandrovna's
head. "I," she thought, "did not keep my attraction for Stiva; he left
me for others, and the first woman for whom he betrayed me did not
keep him by being always pretty and lively. He deserted her and took
another. And can Anna attract and keep Count Vronsky in that way? If
that is what he looks for, he will find dresses and manners still more
attractive and charming. And, however white and beautiful her bare
arms are, however beautiful her full figure and her eager face under
her black curls, he will find something better still, just as my
disgusting, pitiful, and charming husband does."

Dolly made no answer, she merely sighed. Anna noticed this sigh,
indicating dissent, and she went on. In her armory she had other
arguments so strong that no answer could be made to them.

"Do you say that it's not right? But you must consider," she went
on; "you forget my position. How can I desire children? I'm not
speaking of the suffering- I'm not afraid of that. Think, only- what
are my children to be? Ill-fated children, who will have to bear a
stranger's name. For the very fact of their birth they will be
forced to be ashamed of their mother, their father, their birth."

"But that is just why a divorce is necessary."

But Anna did not hear her. She longed to give utterance to all the
arguments with which she had so many times convinced herself.

"What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid
bringing unhappy beings into the world!"

She looked at Dolly, but without waiting for a reply she went on:

"I should always feel I had wronged these unhappy children," she
said. "If there are none, at any rate they are not unhappy; while if
they are unhappy, I alone should be to blame for it."

These were the very arguments Darya Alexandrovna had used in her own
reflections; but she heard them now without understanding them. "How
can one wrong creatures that don't exist?" she thought. And all at
once the idea struck her. Could it possibly, under any
circumstances, have been better for her favorite Grisha if he had
never existed? And this seemed to her so wild, so strange, that she
shook her head to drive away this tangle of whirling, mad ideas.

"No, I don't know; it's not right," was all she said, with an
expression of disgust on her face.

"Yes, but you mustn't forget what you are and what I am.... And
besides that," added Anna, in spite of the wealth of her arguments and
the poverty of Dolly's objections, seeming still to admit that it
was not right, "don't forget the chief point, that I am not now in the
same position as you. For you the question is: Do you desire not to
have any more children? While for me it is: Do I desire to have
them? And that's a great difference. You must see that I can't
desire them in my position."

Darya Alexandrovna made no reply. She suddenly felt that she had got
away from Anna so far, that there lay between them a barrier of
questions on which they could never agree, and about which it was
better not to speak.

                           XXIV.


"Then there is all the more reason for you to legalize your
position, if possible," said Dolly.

"Yes, if possible," said Anna, speaking all at once in an utterly
different tone, subdued and mournful.

"Surely you don't mean a divorce is impossible? I was told your
husband had consented to it."

"Dolly, I don't want to talk about that."

"Oh, we won't then," Darya Alexandrovna hastened to say, noticing
the expression of suffering on Anna's face. "All I see is that you
take too gloomy a view of things."

"I? Not at all! I'm very satisfied and happy. You see, je fais
passions. Veslovsky..."

"Yes, to tell the truth, I don't like Veslovsky's tone," said
Darya Alexandrovna, anxious to change the subject.

"Oh, that's nonsense! It amuses Alexei, and that's all; but he's a
boy, and quite under control. You know, I turn him as I please. It's
just as it might be with your Grisha.... Dolly!" she suddenly
changed the subject. "You say I take too gloomy a view of things.
You can't understand. It's too awful! I try not to take any view of it
at all."

"But I think you ought to. You ought to do all you can."

"But what can I do? Nothing. You tell me to marry Alexei, and say
I don't think about it. I don't think about it!" she repeated, and a
flush rose into her face. She got up, straightening her chest, and
sighed heavily. With her light step she began pacing up and down the
room, stopping now and then. "I don't think of it? Not a day, not an
hour passes that I don't think of it, and blame myself for what I
think... because thinking of that may drive me mad. Drive me mad!" she
repeated. "When I think of it, I can't sleep without morphine. But
never mind. Let us talk quietly. They tell me- divorce. In the first
place, he won't give me a divorce. He's under the influence of
Countess Lidia Ivanovna now."

Darya Alexandrovna, sitting erect on a chair, turned her head
following Anna with a face of sympathetic suffering.

"You ought to make the attempt," she said softly.

"Suppose I make the attempt. What does it mean?" she said, evidently
giving utterance to a thought, a thousand times thought over and
learned by heart. "It means that I, hating him, but still
recognizing that I have wronged him- and I consider him magnanimous-
that I humiliate myself to write to him.... Well, suppose I make the
effort; I do it. Either I receive a humiliating refusal, or consent.
Well, I have received his consent, say..." Anna was at that moment
at the farthest end of the room, and she stopped there, doing
something to the curtain at the window. "I receive his consent, but
my... my son? They won't give him up to me. He will grow up
despising me, with his father, whom I've abandoned. Do you see, I love
equally, I think, but both more than myself, two beings- Seriozha
and Alexei."

She came out into the middle of the room and stood facing Dolly,
with her arms pressed tightly across her chest. In her white
dressing gown her figure seemed more than usually grand and broad. She
bent her head, and with shining, wet eyes looked from under her
brows at Dolly, a thin little pitiful figure in her patched dressing
jacket and nightcap, shaking all over with emotion.

"It is only those two beings whom I love, and one excludes the
other. I can't have them together, and that's the only thing I want.
And since I can't have that, I don't care about the rest. I don't care
about anything- anything. And it will end one way or another, and so I
can't, I don't like to talk of it. So don't blame me, don't judge me
for anything. You can't with your pure heart understand all that I'm
suffering."

She went up, sat down beside Dolly, and, with a guilty look,
peeped into her face and took her hand.

"What are you thinking? What are you thinking about me? Don't
despise me. I don't deserve contempt. I'm simply unhappy. If anyone is
unhappy, I am," she uttered, and turning away, she burst into tears.

Left alone, Dolly said her prayers and went to bed. She had felt for
Anna with all her heart while she was speaking to her, but now she
could not force herself to think of her. The memories of home and of
her children rose up in her imagination with a peculiar charm quite
new to her, with a sort of new brilliance. That world of her own
seemed to her now so sweet and precious that she would not on any
account spend an extra day outside it, and she made up her mind that
she would certainly go back the next day.

Anna meantime went back to her boudoir, took a wineglass, and
dropped into it several drops of a medicine, of which the principal
ingredient was morphine. After drinking it off and sitting still a
little while, she went into her bedroom in a soothed and more cheerful
frame of mind.

When she went into the bedroom, Vronsky looked intently at her. He
was looking for traces of the conversation which he knew, staying so
long in Dolly's room, she must have had with her. But in her
expression of restrained excitement, and of a sort of reserve, he
could find nothing but the beauty that always bewitched him afresh
though he was used to it, the consciousness of it, and the desire that
it should affect him. He did not want to ask her what they had been
talking of, but he hoped that she would tell him something of her
own accord. But she only said:

"I am so glad you like Dolly. You do, don't you?"

"Oh, I've known her a long while. She's very goodhearted, I suppose,
mais excessivement terre-a-terre. Still, I'm very glad to see her."

He took Anna's hand and looked inquiringly into her eyes.

Misinterpreting the look, she smiled to him.


Next morning, in spite of the protests of her hosts, Darya
Alexandrovna prepared for her homeward journey. Levin's coachman, in
his by no means new coat and shabby hat, with his ill-matched horses
and his carriage with the patched mudguards, drove with gloomy
determination into the covered gravel approach.

Darya Alexandrovna disliked taking leave of Princess Varvara and the
gentlemen of the party. After a day spent together, both she and her
hosts were distinctly aware that they did not get on together, and
that it was better for them not to meet. Only Anna was sad. She knew
that now, after Dolly's departure, no one again would stir up within
her soul the feelings that had been roused by their conversation. It
hurt her to stir up these feelings, but yet she knew that that was the
best part of her soul, and that that part of her soul would quickly
grow weedy in the life she was leading.

As she drove out into the open country, Darya Alexandrovna had a
delightful sense of relief, and she felt tempted to ask the two men
how they had liked being at Vronsky's, when suddenly the coachman,
Philip, expressed himself unasked:

"Rolling in wealth they may be, but three pots of oats was all
they gave us. Everything cleared up till there wasn't a grain left
by cock-crow. What are three pots? A mere mouthful! And oats now you
could get from innkeepers for forty-five kopecks. At our place, no
fear, all comers may have as much as they can eat."

"The master's a screw," put in the countinghouse clerk.

"Well, did you like their horses?" asked Dolly.

"The horses! There's no two opinions about them. And the food was
good. But it seemed to me sort of dreary there, Darya Alexandrovna.
I don't know what you thought," he said, turning his handsome,
good-natured face to her.

"I thought so too. Well, shall we get home by evening?"

"Eh, we must!"

On reaching home and finding everyone entirely safe and particularly
charming, Darya Alexandrovna began with great liveliness telling
them about her arrival, her warm reception, about the luxury and
good taste in which the Vronskys lived, and about their recreations,
and she would not allow a word to be said against them.

"One has to know Anna and Vronsky- I have got to know him better
now- to see how fine they are, and how touching," she said, speaking
now with perfect sincerity, and forgetting the vague feeling of
dissatisfaction and awkwardness she had experienced there.

                           XXV.


Vronsky and Anna spent the whole summer and part of the autumn in
the country, living in just the same condition, and still taking no
steps to obtain a divorce. It was a decided thing between them that
they should not go away anywhere; but both felt, the longer they lived
alone, especially in the autumn, and without guests in the house, that
they could not stand this existence, and that they would have to
change it.

Their life was apparently such that nothing better could be desired.
They had the fullest abundance of everything; they had a child, and
both had occupation. Anna devoted just as much care to her
appearance when they had no visitors, and she did a great deal of
reading, both of novels and of what serious literature was in fashion.
She ordered all the books that were praised in the foreign papers
and journals she received, and read them with that concentrated
attention which is only given to what is read in seclusion.
Moreover, every subject that was of interest to Vronsky, she studied
in books and special journals, so that he often went straight to her
with questions relating to agriculture or architecture, sometimes even
with questions relating to horse breeding or sport. He was amazed at
her knowledge, her memory, and at first was disposed to doubt it, to
ask for confirmation of her facts; and she would find what he asked
for in some book, and show it to him.

The building of the hospital, too, interested her. She did not
merely assist, but planned and suggested a great deal herself. But her
chief thought was still of herself- how far she was dear to Vronsky,
how far she could make up to him for all he had given up. Vronsky
appreciated this desire not only to please, but to serve him, which
had become the sole aim of her existence, but at the same time he
wearied of the loving snares in which she tried to hold him fast. As
time went on, and he saw himself more and more often held fast in
these snares, he had an ever-growing desire, not so much to escape
from them, as to try whether they hindered his freedom. Had it not
been for this growing desire to be free, not to have scenes every time
he wanted to go to the town to a session or a race, Vronsky would have
been perfectly satisfied with his life. The role he had taken up,
the role of a wealthy landowner, one of that class which ought to be
the very heart of the Russian aristocracy, was entirely to his
taste; and now, after spending six months in that role, he derived
even greater satisfaction from it. And his management of his estate,
which occupied and absorbed him more and more, was most successful. In
spite of the immense sums which the hospital, the machinery, the
cows ordered from Switzerland, and many other things, cost him, he was
convinced that he was not wasting but increasing his substance. In all
matters affecting income, the sales of timber, wheat, and wool, the
letting of lands, Vronsky was hard as a rock, and knew well how to
keep up prices. In all operations on a large scale on this and his
other estates, he kept to the simplest methods involving no risk,
and in trifling details he was careful and exacting to an extreme
degree. In spite of all the cunning and ingenuity of the German
steward, who would try to tempt him into purchases by making his
original estimate always far larger than really required, and then
representing to Vronsky that he might get the thing cheaper, and so
make a profit, Vronsky did not give in. He listened to his steward,
cross-examined him, and only agreed to his suggestions when the
implement to be ordered or constructed was the very newest, not yet
known in Russia, and likely to excite wonder. Apart from such
exceptions, he resolved upon an increased outlay only where there
was a surplus, and in making such an outlay he went into the
minutest details, and insisted on getting the very best for his money;
so that by the method on which he managed his affairs, it was clear
that he was not wasting, but increasing his substance.

In October there were the provincial nobility elections in the
Kashinsky province, where were the estates of Vronsky, Sviiazhsky,
Koznishev, Oblonsky, and a small part of Levin's land.

These elections were attracting public attention from several
circumstances connected with them, and also from the people taking
part in them. There had been a great deal of talk about these
elections, and great preparations were being made for them. Persons
who never attended the elections were coming from Moscow, from
Peterburg, and from abroad to attend these.

Vronsky had long before promised Sviiazhsky to go to them.

Before the elections Sviiazhsky, who often visited Vozdvizhenskoe,
drove over to fetch Vronsky.

On the day before there had been almost a quarrel between Vronsky
and Anna over this proposed expedition. It was the very dullest autumn
weather, which is so dreary in the country, and so, preparing
himself for a struggle, Vronsky, with a hard and cold expression,
informed Anna of his departure as he had never spoken to her before.
But, to his surprise, Anna accepted the information with great
composure, and merely asked when he would be back. He looked
intently at her, at a loss to explain this composure. She smiled at
his look. He knew that way she had of withdrawing into herself, and
knew that it only happened when she had determined upon something
without letting him know her plans. He was afraid of this; but he
was so anxious to avoid a scene that he kept up appearances, and
half sincerely believed in what he longed to believe in- her
reasonableness.

"I hope you won't be dull?"

"I hope not," said Anna. "I got a box of books yesterday from
Gautier's. No, I shan't be dull."

"She's trying to take that tone, and so much the better," he
thought, "or else it would be the same thing over and over again."

And he set off for the elections without appealing to her for a
candid explanation. It was the first time since the beginning of their
intimacy that he had parted from her without a full explanation.
From one point of view this troubled him, but on the other side he
felt that it was better so. "At first there will be, as this time,
something undefined, kept back, and then she will get used to it. In
any case I can give up anything for her, but not my masculine
independence," he thought.

                           XXVI.


In September Levin moved to Moscow for Kitty's confinement. He had
spent a whole month in Moscow with nothing to do, when Sergei
Ivanovich, who had property in the Kashinsky province, and took
great interest in the question of the approaching elections, made
ready to set off to the elections. He invited his brother, who had a
vote in the Selezniovsky district, to come with him. Levin had,
moreover, to transact in Kashin some extremely important business
relating to the wardship, and to the receiving of certain redemption
money for his sister, who was abroad.

Levin still hesitated, but Kitty, who saw that he was bored in
Moscow, and urged him to go, on her own authority ordered him the
proper nobleman's uniform, costing eighty roubles. And this eighty
roubles paid for the uniform was the chief reason that finally decided
Levin to go. He went to Kashin.

Levin had been five days in Kashin, visiting the assembly each
day, and busily engaged about his sister's business, which still
dragged on. The district marshals of nobility were all occupied with
the elections, and it was impossible to get the simplest thing done
that depended upon the court of wardship. The other matter, the
receipt of the sums due, was also met by difficulties. After long
negotiations over the lifting of the prohibition, the money was at
last ready to be paid; but the notary, a most obliging person, could
not hand over the order, because it must have the signature of the
president, and the president, though he had not given over his
duties to a deputy, was at the elections. All these worrying
negotiations, this endless going from place to place, and talking with
pleasant and excellent people, who quite saw the unpleasantness of the
petitioner's position, but were powerless to assist him- all these
efforts that yielded no result, led to a feeling of misery in Levin
akin to the mortifying helplessness one experiences in dreams, when
one tries to use physical force. He felt this frequently as he
talked to his exceedingly good-natured solicitor. This solicitor
did, it seemed, everything possible, and strained every nerve to get
him out of his difficulties. "I tell you what you might try," he
said more than once; "go to so-and-so and so-and-so," and the
solicitor drew up a regular plan for getting round the fatal point
that hindered everything. But he would add immediately, "It'll mean
some delay, anyway, but you might try it." And Levin did try, and
did go. Everyone was kind and civil, but the point evaded seemed to
crop up again in the end, and again to bar the way. What was
particularly trying, was that Levin could not make out with whom he
was struggling, to whose interest it was that his business should
not be done. That no one seemed to know; the solicitor certainly did
not know. If Levin could have understood why, just as he saw why one
can only approach the booking office of a railway station in single
file, it would not have been so vexatious and tiresome to him. But
in the case of the hindrances that confronted him in his business,
no one could explain why they existed.

But Levin had changed a good deal since his marriage; he was
patient, and if he could not see why it was all arranged like this, he
told himself that he could not judge without knowing all about it, and
that most likely it must be so, and he tried not to resent it.

In attending the elections, too, and taking part in them, he tried
now not to judge, not to fall foul of them, but to comprehend as fully
as he could the question which was so earnestly and ardently absorbing
honest and excellent men whom he respected. Since his marriage there
had been revealed to Levin so many new and serious aspects of life
which had previously, through his frivolous attitude to them, seemed
of no importance, that in the question of the elections, too, he
assumed and tried to find some serious significance.

Sergei Ivanovich explained to him the meaning and object of the
proposed radical change at the elections. The marshal of the
province in whose hands the law had placed the control of so many
important public functions- the guardianship of wards (the very
department which was giving Levin so much trouble just now), the
disposal of large sums subscribed by the nobility of the province, the
high schools, for girls, for boys, and military, and primary
instruction on the new statute and finally, the Zemstvo- the marshal
of the province, Snetkov, was a nobleman of the old school,
dissipating an immense fortune, a goodhearted man, honest after his
own fashion, but utterly without any comprehension of the needs of
modern days. He always took, in every question, the side of the
nobility; he was positively antagonistic to the spread of primary
education, and he succeeded in giving a purely party character to
the Zemstvo which ought by rights to be of such an immense importance.
What was needed was to put in his place a fresh, capable, perfectly
modern man, of contemporary ideas, and to frame their policy so as
to derive, from the rights conferred upon the nobles (not as the
nobility, but as an element of the Zemstvo), all the benefits of
self-government that could possibly be derived from them. In the
wealthy Kashinsky province, which always took the lead of other
provinces in everything, there was now such a preponderance of
forces that this policy, once carried through properly there, might
serve as a model for other provinces- for all Russia. And hence the
whole question was of the greatest importance. It was proposed to
elect as marshal in place of Snetkov either Sviiazhsky, or, better
still, Neviedovsky, a former university professor, a man of remarkable
intelligence, and a great friend of Sergei Ivanovich.

The meeting was opened by the governor, who made a speech to the
nobles, urging them to elect the public functionaries, not from regard
for persons, but for the service and welfare of the native country,
and hoping that the honorable nobility of the Kashinsky province
would, as at all former elections, hold their duty as sacred, and
vindicate the exalted confidence of the Monarch.

When he had finished his speech, the governor walked out of the
hall, and the noblemen noisily and eagerly- some even
enthusiastically- followed him and thronged round him while he put
on his fur coat and conversed amicably with the marshal of the
province. Levin, anxious to see into everything and not miss anything,
also stood there in the crowd, and heard the governor say: "Please,
tell Marya Ivanovna my wife is very sorry she could not visit the
charity school." And thereupon the nobles in high good humor sorted
out their fur coats and all drove off to the cathedral.

In the cathedral Levin, lifting his hand like the rest, and
repeating the words of the dean, vowed with the most awesome oaths
to do all the governor had hoped they would do. Church services always
affected Levin, and as he uttered the words: "I kiss the cross," and
glanced round at the crowd of young and old men repeating the same, he
felt touched.

On the second and third days there was business relating to the
finances of the nobility, and the high school for girls, of no
importance whatever, as Sergei Ivanovich explained, and Levin, busy
seeing after his own affairs, did not attend the meetings. On the
fourth day the auditing of the marshal's accounts took place at the
high table of the marshal of the province. And then there occurred the
first skirmish between the new party and the old. The committee
which had been deputed to verify the accounts reported to the
meeting that all was in order. The marshal of the province got up,
thanked the nobility for their confidence, and shed tears. The
nobles gave him a loud welcome and shook hands with him. But at that
instant a nobleman of Sergei Ivanovich's party said that he had
heard that the committee had not verified the accounts, considering
such a verification an insult to the marshal of the province. One of
the members of the committee incautiously admitted this. Then a
small gentleman, very young-looking but very venomous, began to say
that it would probably be agreeable to the marshal of the province
to give an account of his expenditures of the public moneys, and
that the misplaced delicacy of the members of the committee was
depriving him of this moral satisfaction. Then the members of the
committee tried to withdraw their admission, and Sergei Ivanovich
began to prove that they must logically admit either that they had
verified the accounts or that they had not, and he developed this
dilemma in detail. Sergei Ivanovich was answered by the talker of
the opposite party. Then Sviiazhsky spoke, and then the venomous
gentleman again. The discussion lasted a long time and ended in
nothing. Levin was surprised that they should dispute upon this
subject so long, especially as, when he asked Sergei Ivanovich whether
he supposed that money had been misappropriated, Sergei Ivanovich
answered:

"Oh, no! He's an honest man. But those old-fashioned methods of
paternal family arrangements in the management of nobility affairs
must be broken down."

On the fifth day came the elections of the district marshals. It was
rather a stormy day in several districts. In the Selezniovsky district
Sviiazhsky was elected unanimously without a ballot, and he gave a
dinner that evening.

                           XXVII.


The sixth day was fixed for the election of the marshal of the
province. The rooms, large and small, were full of nobleman in all
sorts of uniforms. Many had come only for that day. Men who had not
seen each other for years, some from the Crimea, some from
Peterburg, some from abroad, met in the rooms of the Hall of Nobility.
There was much discussion around the province table under the portrait
of the Czar.

The nobles, both in the larger and in the smaller rooms, grouped
themselves in camps, and from their hostile and suspicious glances,
from the silence that fell upon them when outsiders approached a
group, and from the way that some, whispering together, retreated to
the farther corridor, it was evident that each side had secrets from
the other. In appearance the noblemen were sharply divided into two
classes: the old and the new. The old were for the most part either in
the old uniform of the nobility, buttoned up closely, with spurs and
hats, or in their own special naval, cavalry, infantry uniforms,
earned by their former service. The uniforms of the older men were
embroidered in the old-fashioned way with small puffs on their
shoulders; they were unmistakably tight and short in the waists, as
though their wearers had grown out of them. The younger men wore the
uniform of the nobility with long waists and broad shoulders,
unbuttoned over white waistcoats, or uniforms with black collars and
with the embroidered laurel leaves of justices of the peace. To the
younger men belonged the Court uniforms that here and there brightened
up the crowd.

But the division into young and old did not correspond with the
division of parties. Some of the young men, as Levin observed,
belonged to the old party; and some of the very oldest noblemen, on
the contrary, were whispering with Sviiazhsky, and were evidently
ardent partisans of the new party.

Levin stood in the smaller room, where they were smoking and
taking light refreshments, close to his own friends, and, listening to
what they were saying, he vainly exerted all his intelligence trying
to understand what was said. Sergei Ivanovich was the center round
which the others grouped themselves. He was listening at that moment
to Sviiazhsky and Khliustov, the marshal of another district, who
belonged to their party. Khliustov would not agree to go with his
district to ask Snetkov to be a candidate, while Sviiazhsky was
persuading him to do so, and Sergei Ivanovich was approving of the
plan. Levin could not make out why the opposition had to ask the
marshal to be a candidate when they wanted to supersede him.

Stepan Arkadyevich, who had just been drinking and taking some snack
lunch, came up to them in his uniform of a gentleman of the
bedchamber, wiping his lips with a perfumed handkerchief of bordered
batiste.

"We are placing our forces," he said, pulling out his side whiskers,
"Sergei Ivanovich!"

And listening to the conversation, he supported Sviiazhsky's
contention.

"One district's enough, and Sviiazhsky's obviously of the
opposition," he said, words evidently intelligible to all except
Levin.

"Why, Kostia, you, it seems, get the taste for these affairs too!"
he added, turning to Levin and drawing his arm through his. Levin
would have been glad indeed to get the taste for these affairs, but
could not make out what the point was, and retreating a few steps from
the speakers, he explained to Stepan Arkadyevich his inability to
understand why the marshal of the province should be asked to be a
candidate.

"O sancta simplicitas!" said Stepan Arkadyevich, and briefly and
clearly he explained it to Levin.

If, as at previous elections, all the districts asked the marshal of
the province to be a candidate, then he would be elected without a
ballot. That must not be. Now eight districts had agreed to call
upon him: if two refused to do so, Snetkov might decline the candidacy
entirely; and then the old party might choose another of their
party, which would throw them completely out in their reckoning. But
if only one district, Sviiazhsky's, did not call upon him to be a
candidate, Snetkov would let himself be balloted for. They were
even, some of them, going to vote for him, and purposely to let him
get a good many votes, so that the enemy might be thrown off the
scent, and when a candidate of the other side was put up, they too
might give him some votes. Levin understood to some extent, but not
fully, and would have put a few more questions, when suddenly everyone
began talking and making a noise, and they moved toward the big room.

"What is it? Eh? Whom?... Proxy? Whose? What?... They won't pass
him?... No proxy?... They won't let Fliorov in?... Eh, because of
the charge against him?... Why, at this rate, they won't admit anyone.
It's a swindle!... The law!" Levin heard exclamations on all sides,
and he moved into the big room together with the others, all
hurrying somewhere and afraid of missing something. Squeezed by the
crowding noblemen, he drew near the high table where the marshal of
the province, Sviiazhsky, and the other leaders, were hotly
disputing about something.

                           XXVIII.


Levin was standing rather far off. A nobleman breathing heavily
and hoarsely at his side, and another whose thick boots were creaking,
prevented him from hearing distinctly. He could only hear the soft
voice of the marshal faintly, then the shrill voice of the venomous
gentleman, and then the voice of Sviiazhsky. They were disputing, as
far as he could make out, as to the interpretation to be put on the
act and the exact meaning of the words: "liable to be called up for
trial."

The crowd parted to make way for Sergei Ivanovich approaching the
table. Sergei Ivanovich, waiting till the venomous gentleman had
finished speaking, said that he thought the best solution would be
to refer to the act itself, and asked the secretary to find the act.
The act said that in case of difference of opinion, there must be a
ballot.

Sergei Ivanovich read the act and began to explain its meaning,
but at that point a tall, stout, stoop-shouldered landowner, with dyed
mustache, in a tight uniform that made the back of his neck bulge
up, interrupted him. He went up to the table, and striking it with his
finger ring, he shouted loudly:

"A ballot! Put it to the vote! No need for more talking!"

Then several voices began to talk all at once, and the tall nobleman
with the ring, getting more and more exasperated, shouted more and
more loudly. But it was impossible to make out what he said.

He was shouting for the very course Sergei Ivanovich had proposed;
but it was evident that he hated him and all his party, and this
feeling of hatred spread through the whole party and roused in
opposition to it the same vindictiveness, though in a more seemly
form, on the other side. Shouts were raised, and for a moment all
was confusion, so that the marshal of the province had to call for
order.

"A ballot! A ballot! Whoever is a nobleman understands! We shed
our blood for our country!... The confidence of the Monarch.... No
checking of the accounts of the marshal- he's not a cashier!... But
that's not the point.... Votes, please! What vileness!..." shouted
furious and violent voices on all sides. Looks and faces were even
more violent and furious than their words. They expressed the most
implacable hatred. Levin did not in the least understand what it was
all about, and he marveled at the passion with which it was disputed
whether or not the decision about Fliorov should be put to the vote.
He forgot, as Sergei Ivanovich explained to him afterward, this
syllogism: that it was necessary for the public good to get rid of the
marshal of the province; that to get rid of the marshal it was
necessary to have a majority of votes; that to get a majority of votes
it was necessary to secure Fliorov's right to vote; that to secure the
recognition of Fliorov's right to vote they must decide on the
interpretation to be put on the act.

"And one vote may decide the whole question, and one must be serious
and consecutive, if one wants to be of use in public life,"
concluded Sergei Ivanovich. But Levin forgot all that, and it was
painful to him to see all these excellent persons, for whom he had
respect, in such an unpleasant and vicious state of excitement. To
escape from this painful feeling he went away into the other room
where there was nobody except the waiters at the refreshment bar.
Seeing the waiters busy washing up the crockery and setting in order
their plates and wineglasses, seeing their alert and vivacious
faces, Levin felt an unexpected sense of relief, as though he had come
out of a stuffy room into the fresh air. He began walking up and down,
looking with pleasure at the waiters. He particularly liked the way
one gray-whiskered waiter, who showed his scorn for the other
younger ones, and was jeered at by them, was teaching them how to fold
napkins properly. Levin was just about to enter into conversation with
the old waiter, when the secretary of the court of wardship, a
little old man whose speciality it was to know all the noblemen of the
province by name and patronymic, drew him away.

"Please come, Konstantin Dmitrievich," he said, "your brother's
looking for you. They are voting on the legal point."

Levin walked into the room, received a white ball, and followed
his brother, Sergei Ivanovich, to the table where Sviiazhsky was
standing with a significant and ironical face, holding his beard in
his fist and sniffing at it. Sergei Ivanovich put his hand into the
box, put the ball somewhere, and, making room for Levin, stopped.
Levin advanced, but utterly forgetting what he was to do, and much
embarrassed, he turned to Sergei Ivanovich with the question, "Where
am I to put it?" He asked this softly, at a moment when there was
talking going on near, so that he had hoped his question would not
be overheard. But the persons speaking paused, and his improper
question was overheard. Sergei Ivanovich frowned.

"That is a matter for each man's own decision," he said severely.

Several people smiled. Levin crimsoned, hurriedly thrust his hand
under the cloth, and put the ball to the right as it was in his
right hand. Having put it in, he recollected that he ought to have
thrust his left hand in too, and so he thrust it in though too late,
and, still more overcome with confusion, he beat a hasty retreat
into the background.

"A hund'ed and twenty-six fo' admission! Ninety-eight against!" sang
out the voice of the secretary, who could not pronounce the letter
r. Then there was a laugh; a button and two hazelnuts were found in
the box. The nobleman was allowed the right to vote, and the new party
had conquered.

But the old party did not consider themselves conquered. Levin heard
that they were asking Snetkov to be candidate, and he saw that a crowd
of noblemen was surrounding the marshal, who was saying something.
Levin went nearer. In reply Snetkov spoke of the trust the noblemen of
the province had placed in him, the affection they had shown him,
which he did not deserve, as his only merit had been his attachment to
the nobility, to whom he had devoted twelve years of service.
Several times he repeated the words: "I have served to the best of
my powers with truth and good faith; I value your goodness and thank
you," and suddenly he stopped short from the tears that choked him,
and went out of the room. Whether these tears came from a sense of the
injustice being done him, from his love for the nobility, or from
the strain of the position he was placed in, feeling himself
surrounded by enemies, his emotion infected the assembly, the majority
were touched, and Levin felt a tenderness for Snetkov.

In the doorway the marshal of the province jostled against Levin.

"Beg pardon- excuse me, please," he said as to a stranger, but,
recognizing Levin, he smiled timidly. It seemed to Levin that he would
have liked to say something, but could not speak for emotion. His face
and his whole figure in his uniform with the crosses, and white
trousers striped with galloons, as he moved hurriedly along,
reminded Levin of some hunted beast who sees that he is in evil
plight. This expression on the marshal's face was particularly
touching to Levin, because, only the day before, he had been at his
house about his guardianship business and had seen him in all his
grandeur, a kindhearted, fatherly man. The big house with the old
family furniture; the rather slovenly, far from stylish, but
respectful footmen- unmistakably old house serfs who had stuck to
their master; the stout, good-natured wife in a cap with lace and a
Turkish shawl, petting her pretty grandchild, her daughter's daughter;
the young son, a sixth-form high school boy, coming home from
school, and greeting his father by kissing his big hand; the
genuine, cordial words and gestures of the old man- all this had the
day before roused an instinctive feeling of respect and sympathy in
Levin. This old man was a touching and pathetic figure to Levin now,
and he longed to say something pleasant to him.

"So you're our marshal again," he said.

"It's not likely," said the marshal, looking round with a scared
expression. "I'm worn-out, I'm old. If there are men younger and
more deserving than I, let them serve."

And the marshal disappeared through a side door.

The most solemn moment was at hand. They were to proceed immediately
to the election. The leaders of both parties were reckoning white
and black on their fingers.

The discussion upon Fliorov had given the new party not only
Fliorov's vote, but had also gained time for them, so that they
could send to fetch three noblemen who had been rendered unable to
take part in the elections by the wiles of the other party. Two
noble gentlemen, who had a weakness for strong drink, had been made
drunk by the partisans of Snetkov, and a third had been relieved of
his uniform.

On learning this, the new party had made haste, during the dispute
about Fliorov, to send some of their men in a cab to clothe the
stripped gentleman, and to bring along one of the intoxicated to the
meeting.

"I've brought one after bringing him to by throwing water- over
him," said the landowner who had gone on this errand, to Sviiazhsky.
"Never mind- he'll do."

"Not too drunk- he won't fall down?" said Sviiazhsky, shaking his
head.

"No, he's first-rate. If only they don't give him any more
here.... I've told the barman not to give him anything, on any
account."

                           XXIX.


The narrow room, in which they were smoking and taking
refreshment, was full of noblemen. The excitement grew more intense,
and every face betrayed some uneasiness. The excitement was
specially keen for the leaders of each party, who knew every detail,
and had reckoned up every vote. They were the generals organizing
the approaching battle. The rest, like the rank and file before an
engagement, though they were getting ready for the fight, sought for
other distractions in the interval. Some were lunching, standing at
the bar, or sitting at the table; others were walking up and down
the long room, smoking cigarettes, and talking with friends whom
they had not seen for a long while.

Levin did not care to eat, and he was not a smoker; he did not
want to join his own friends- that is Sergei Ivanovich, Stepan
Arkadyevich, Sviiazhsky, and the rest, because Vronsky in his
equerry's uniform was standing with them in eager conversation.
Levin had seen him already at the meeting on the previous day, and
he had studiously avoided him, not caring to greet him. He went to the
window and sat down, scanning the groups, and listening to what was
being said around him. He felt depressed, especially because
everyone else was, as he saw, eager, anxious, and interested, and he
alone, with an old, toothless little man with mumbling lips, wearing a
naval uniform who sat beside him, had no interest in it, and nothing
to do.

"He's such a blackguard! I have told him so, but it makes no
difference. Only think of it! He couldn't collect it in three
years!" he heard vigorously uttered by a stoop-shouldered, short
country gentleman, who had pomaded hair hanging over his embroidered
collar, and new boots obviously put on for the occasion, with heels
that tapped energetically as he spoke. Casting a displeased glance
at Levin, this gentleman sharply turned his back.

"Yes, it's a dirty business, there's no denying," another puny
landowner assented in a high voice.

Next, a whole crowd of country gentlemen, surrounding a stout
general, hurriedly came near Levin. These persons were unmistakably
seeking a place where they could talk without being overheard.

"How dare he say I had his breeches stolen! Pawned them for drink, I
expect. Damn the fellow- Prince indeed! He'd better not say it- that's
swinish!"

"But excuse me! They take their stand on the act," was being said in
another group; "the wife must be registered as a noble."

"Oh, damn your acts! I speak from my heart. We're all gentlemen,
aren't we? Have trust in us."

"Shall we go on, Your Excellency- fine champagne?"

Another group was following a nobleman who was shouting something in
a loud voice; it was one of the three intoxicated gentlemen.

"I always advised Marya Semionovna to let for a fair rent, for she
can never save a profit," he heard a pleasant voice say. The speaker
was a country gentleman with white mustache, wearing the regimental
uniform of an old general staff officer. It was the very landowner
Levin had met at Sviiazhsky's. He knew him at once. The landowner
too stared at Levin, and they exchanged greetings.

"Very glad to see you! To be sure! I remember you very well. Last
year at our district marshal's, Nikolai Ivanovich's."

"Well, and how is your land doing?" asked Levin.

"Oh, still just the same, always at a loss," the landowner
answered with a resigned smile, but with an expression of serenity and
conviction that it must be thus. "And how do you come to be in our
province?" he asked. "Come to take part in our coup d'etat?" he
said, confidently pronouncing the French words with a bad accent.

"All Russia's here- gentlemen of the bedchamber, and everything
short of the ministry." He pointed to the imposing figure of Stepan
Arkadyevich in white trousers and his court uniform, walking by with a
general.

"I ought to own that I don't very well understand the drift of the
provincial elections," said Levin.

The landowner looked at him.

"Why, what is there to understand? There's no meaning in it at
all. It's a decaying institution that goes on running only by the
force of inertia. Just look, the very uniforms tell you that it's an
assembly of justices of the peace, permanent members of the boards,
and so on, but not of noblemen."

"Then why do you come?" asked Levin.

"From habit, nothing else. Then, too, one must keep up
connections. It's a moral obligation of a sort. And then, to tell
the truth, there are one's own interests. My son-in-law wants to run
as a permanent member; they're not rich people, and he must be brought
forward. These gentlemen, now- what do they come for?" he said,
pointing to the venomous gentleman, who was talking at the high table.


"That's the new generation of nobility."

"New it may be, but nobility it isn't. They're landed proprietors-
but we're the landowners. As noblemen, they're cutting their own
throats."

"But you say it's an institution that's served its time."

"That it may be, but still, it ought to be treated a little more
respectfully. Snetkov, now... We may be of use, or we may not, but
we're the growth of a thousand years. If we're laying out a garden,
planning one before the house, you know, and there you've a tree
that's stood for centuries in the very spot... Old and gnarled it
may be, and yet you don't cut down the old fellow to make room for the
flowerbeds, but lay out your beds so as to take advantage of the tree.
You won't grow him again in a year," he said cautiously, and he
immediately changed the conversation. "Well, and how is your estate
doing?"

"Oh, not very well. I make about five per cent."

"Yes, but you don't reckon your own work. Aren't you worth something
too? I'll tell you my own case. Before I took to seeing after the
land, I had a salary of three thousand roubles from the service. Now I
do more work than I did in the service, and, like you, I get five
per cent on the land, and thank God for that. But one's work is thrown
in for nothing."

"Then why do you do it, if it's a clear loss?"

"Oh, well, one does it! What would you have? It's habit, and one
knows it's as it should be. And what's more," the landowner went on,
leaning on the window and chatting on, "my son, I must tell you, has
no taste for it. There's no doubt he'll be a savant. So there'll be no
one to keep it up. And yet one does it. Here this year I've planted an
orchard."

"Yes, yes," said Levin, "that's perfectly true. I always feel
there's no real balance of gain in my work on the land, and yet one
does it.... It's a sort of duty one feels to the land."

"But I tell you what," the landowner pursued; "a neighbor of mine, a
merchant, was at my place. We walked about the fields and the park.
'No,' said he, 'Stepan Vassilyevich- everything's well looked after
but your garden's neglected.' But, as a fact, it's well kept up. 'To
my thinking, I'd cut down the linden trees. Only do it when they're
running sap. Here's a thousand lindens, and each would make two good
bundles of bast. And nowadays that bast's worth something. And you'd
cut down the lot of the linden shells.'"

"And with what he made he'd buy up livestock, or buy some land for a
trifle, and let it out to the peasants," Levin added, smiling. He
had evidently more than once come across those commercial
calculations. "And he'd make his fortune. But you and I must thank God
if we keep what we've got and leave it to our children."

"You're married, I've heard?" said the landowner.

"Yes," Levin answered, with proud satisfaction. "Yes, all this is
rather strange," he went on. "So we live on without any reckoning,
as though we were the vestals of antiquity, set to guard a sacred fire
or something."

The landowner chuckled under his white mustaches.

"There are some among us, too, like our friend Nikolai Ivanovich, or
Count Vronsky, who's settled here lately- they try to set up an
agronomic industry; but so far it leads to nothing but making away
with capital."

"But why is it we don't do like the merchants? Why don't we cut down
our parks for bast?" said Levin, returning to a thought that had
struck him.

"Why, as you said, to guard the fire. Besides, that's not work for a
nobleman. And our work as noblemen isn't done here at the elections,
but yonder, each in his own nook. There's a class instinct, too, of
what one ought and oughtn't to do. There are the peasants, too- I
wonder at them sometimes; any good peasant tries to take all the
land he can. However bad the land is, he'll work it. Without a
reckoning too. At a simple loss."

"Just as we do," said Levin. "Very, very glad to have met you," he
added, seeing Sviiazhsky approaching him.

"And here we've met for the first time since we met at your
place," said the landowner to Sviiazhsky, "and we've had a good
talk, too."

"Well, have you been attacking the new order of things?" said
Sviiazhsky with a smile.

"That we're bound to do."

"You've been relieving your feelings."

                           XXX.


Sviiazhsky took Levin's arm, and went with him to his own friends.
This time there was no avoiding Vronsky. He was standing with Stepan
Arkadyevich and Sergei Ivanovich, and looking straight at Levin as
he drew near.

"Delighted! I believe I've had the pleasure of meeting you... at
Princess Shcherbatskaia's," he said, giving Levin his hand.

"Yes, I quite remember our meeting," said Levin, and, blushing
crimson, he turned away immediately, and began talking to his brother.

With a slight smile Vronsky went on talking to Sviiazhsky, obviously
without the slightest inclination to enter into conversation with
Levin. But Levin, as he talked to his brother, was continually looking
round at Vronsky, trying to think of something to say to him to smooth
over his rudeness.

"What are we waiting for now?" asked Levin, looking at Sviiazhsky
and Vronsky.

"For Snetkov. He has to refuse or accept the candidacy," answered
Sviiazhsky.

"Well, and what has he done- consented or not?"

"That's the point: he's done neither," said Vronsky.

"And if he refuses, who will run then?" asked Levin, looking at
Vronsky.

"Whoever chooses to," said Sviiazhsky.

"Shall you?" asked Levin.

"Certainly not I," said Sviiazhsky, looking confused, and turning an
alarmed glance at the venomous gentleman, who was standing beside
Sergei Ivanovich.

"Who then? Neviedovsky?" said Levin, feeling he was putting his foot
into it.

But this was worse still. Neviedovsky and Sviiazhsky were the two
candidates.

"I certainly shall not, under any circumstances," answered the
venomous gentleman.

This was Neviedovsky himself. Sviiazhsky introduced him to Levin.

"Well, do you find it exciting too?" said Stepan Arkadyevich,
winking at Vronsky. "It's something like a race. One might bet on it."

"Yes, it is keenly exciting," said Vronsky. "And once taking the
thing up, one's eager to see it through. It's a fight!" he said,
scowling and setting his powerful jaws.

"What a businessman Sviiazhsky is! Sees it all so clearly."

"Oh, yes!" Vronsky assented indifferently.

A silence followed, during which Vronsky- since he had to look at
something- looked at Levin, at his feet, at his frock coat, then at
his face, and noticing his gloomy eyes fixed upon him, he said, in
order to say something:

"How is it that you, living constantly in the country, are not a
justice of the peace? You are not in the uniform of one."

"It's because I consider the justice of the peace a silly
institution," morosely answered Levin, who had been all the time
looking for an opportunity to enter into conversation with Vronsky, so
as to smooth over his rudeness at their first meeting.

"I don't think so- quite the contrary," Vronsky said, with calm
surprise.

"It's a plaything," Levin cut him short. "We don't want justices
of the peace. I've never had a single thing to do with them during
eight years. And what I have had, was decided wrongly by them. The
justice of the peace is over thirty miles from me. For a matter of two
roubles or so, I should have to send a lawyer, who costs me fifteen."

And he related how a peasant had stolen some flour from the
miller, and when the miller told him of it, had lodged a complaint for
slander. All this was utterly uncalled-for and stupid, and Levin
felt it himself as he said it.

"Oh, this is such an original fellow!" said Stepan Arkadyevich
with his most soothing, almond-oil smile. "But come along; I think
they're voting...."

And they separated.

"I can't understand," said Sergei Ivanovich, who had observed his
brother's gaucherie, "I can't understand how anyone can be so
absolutely devoid of political tact. That's where we Russians are so
deficient. The marshal of the province is our opponent, and with him
you're ami cochon, and you beg him to be candidate. Count Vronsky,
now... I'm not making a friend of him- he's asked me to dinner, and
I'm not going; but he's one of our side- why make an enemy of him?
Then you ask Neviedovsky if he's going to run. That's not done."

"Oh, I don't understand it at all! And it's all such nonsense,"
Levin answered somberly.

"You say it's all such nonsense- yet as soon as you have anything to
do with it, you make a muddle."

Levin did not answer, and they walked together into the big room.

The marshal of the province, though he was vaguely conscious in
the air of some trap being prepared for him, and though he had not
been called upon by all to run, had nevertheless made up his mind to
run for office. All was silence in the room. The secretary announced
in a loud voice that Mikhail Stepanovich Snetkov, captain of the
guards, would now be balloted for as marshal of the province.

The district marshals walked carrying plates, on which were balls,
from their tables to the province table, and the election began.

"Put it in the right side," whispered Stepan Arkadyevich, as Levin
with his brother followed the marshal of his district to the table.
But Levin had forgotten by now the machination that had been explained
to him, and was afraid Stepan Arkadyevich might be mistaken in
saying "the right side." Surely Snetkov was the enemy. As he went
up, he held the ball in his right hand, but thinking he was wrong,
just at the box he changed to the left hand, and undoubtedly put the
ball to the left. An adept in the business, standing at the box and
seeing by the mere action of the elbow where each put his ball,
scowled with annoyance. It was no good for him to use his insight.

Everything was still, and the counting of the balls was heard.
Then a single voice rose and proclaimed the numbers for and against.

The marshal had been voted for by a considerable majority. All was
noise and eager movement toward the doors. Snetkov came in, and the
nobles thronged round him, congratulating him.

"Well, now, is it over?" Levin asked Sergei Ivanovich.

"It's only just beginning," Sviiazhsky said, replying for Sergei
Ivanovich with a smile. "Some other candidate may receive more votes
than the marshal."

Levin had quite forgotten about that again. Now he could only
remember that there was some sort of trickery in it, but he was too
bored to think what it was exactly. He felt depressed, and longed to
get out of the crowd.

As no one was paying any attention to him, and no one apparently
needed him, he quietly slipped away into the little room where the
refreshments were, and again had a great sense of comfort when he
saw the waiters. The little old waiter pressed him to have
something, and Levin agreed. After eating a cutlet with beans and
talking to the waiters of their former masters, Levin, not wishing
to go back to the hall, where it was all so distasteful to him,
proceeded to walk through the galleries.

The galleries were full of fashionably dressed ladies, leaning
over the balustrade and trying not to lose a single word of what was
being said below. With the ladies were sitting and standing smart
lawyers, high school teachers in spectacles, and officers.
Everywhere they were talking of the election, and of how worried the
marshal was, and how splendid the discussions had been. In one group
Levin heard his brother's praises. One lady was telling a lawyer:

"How glad I am I heard Koznishev! It's worth missing one's lunch.
He's exquisite! So clear and distinct- all of it! There's not one of
you in the law courts that speaks like that. The only one is Meidel,
and he's very far from being so eloquent."

Finding a free place, Levin leaned over the balustrade and began
looking and listening.

All the noblemen were sitting railed off behind barriers,
according to their districts. In the middle of the room stood a man in
a uniform, who shouted in a loud high voice:

"As a candidate for the marshalship of the nobility of the
province we call upon staff captain Eugenii Ivanovich Apukhtin!" A
dead silence followed, and then a weak old voice was heard:

"Declined!"

"We call upon the privy councilor Piotr Petrovich Bol," the voice
began again.

"Declined!" a high boyish voice replied.

Again it began, and again came the "Declined." And so it went on for
about an hour. Levin, with his elbows on the balustrade, looked and
listened. At first he wondered and wanted to know what it meant;
then feeling sure that he could not make it out he began to be
bored. Then, recalling all the excitement and vindictiveness he had
seen on all the faces, he felt sad; he made up his mind to go, and
went downstairs. As he passed through the entry to the galleries he
met a dejected high school boy walking up and down with
tired-looking eyes. On the stairs he met a couple- a lady running
quickly on her high heels and the jaunty deputy prosecutor.

"I told you you weren't late," the deputy prosecutor was saying at
the moment when Levin moved aside to let the lady pass.

Levin was on the stairs to the way out, and was just feeling in
his waistcoat pocket for his overcoat check, when the secretary
overtook him. "This way, please, Konstantin Dmitrievich; they are
voting."

The candidate who was being voted on was Neviedovsky, who had so
stoutly denied all idea of candidacy.

Levin went up to the door of the room; it was locked. The
secretary knocked, the door opened, and Levin was met by two red-faced
gentlemen, who darted out.

"I can't stand any more of it," said one red-faced gentleman.

After them the face of the marshal of the province was poked out.
His face was dreadful-looking from exhaustion and dismay.

"I told you not to let anyone out!" he cried to the doorkeeper.

"I let someone in, Your Excellency!"

"Mercy on us!" And with a heavy sigh the marshal of the province
walked with downcast head to the high table in the middle of the room,
his white-trousered legs wavering from fatigue.

Neviedovsky had scored a higher majority, as they had planned, and
he was the new marshal of the province. Many people were amused,
many were pleased and happy, many were in ecstasies, many were
disgusted and unhappy. The former marshal of the province was in a
state of despair which he could not conceal. When Neviedovsky went out
of the room, the crowd thronged round him and followed him
enthusiastically, just as they had followed the governor on the
first day, when he had opened the meetings, and just as they had
followed Snetkov when he had been elected.

                           XXXI.


The newly elected marshal and many of the successful party dined
that day with Vronsky.

Vronsky had come to the elections partly because he was bored in the
country and wanted to show Anna his right to independence, and also to
repay Sviiazhsky by his support at the election for all the trouble he
had taken for Vronsky at the Zemstvo election, but chiefly for the
strict performance of all those duties of a nobleman and landowner
which he had taken upon himself. But he had not in the least
expected that the election would interest him so, so keenly excite
him, and that he would be so good at this kind of thing. He was
quite a new man in the circle of the nobility of the province, but his
success was unmistakable, and he was not wrong in supposing that he
had already obtained a certain influence. This influence was due to
his wealth and aristocracy; the capital house in the town lent him
by his old friend Shirkov, who had a post in the department of
finances and was director of a flourishing bank in Kashin; the
excellent cook Vronsky had brought from the country; and his
friendship with the governor, who was a schoolfellow of Vronsky- a
schoolfellow he had patronized and protected indeed. But what
contributed more than all to his success was his direct, equable
manner with everyone, which very quickly made the majority of the
noblemen reverse the current opinion of his supposed haughtiness. He
was himself conscious that, except for that mad gentleman married to
Kitty Shcherbatskaia, who had a propos de bottes poured out a stream
of irrelevant absurdities with such spiteful fury, every nobleman with
whom he had made acquaintance had become his adherent. He saw clearly,
and other people recognized it, too, that he had done a great deal
to secure the success of Neviedovsky. And now at his own table,
celebrating Neviedovsky's election, he was experiencing an agreeable
sense of triumph over the success of his candidate. The election
itself had so fascinated him that, if he could succeed in getting
married during the next three years, he began to think of running
for office himself- much as, after winning a race ridden by a
jockey, he had longed to ride a race himself.

Today he was celebrating the success of his jockey. Vronsky sat at
the head of the table, on his right hand sat the young governor, a
general of high rank. To all the rest he was the master of the
province, who had solemnly opened the elections with his speech, and
aroused a feeling of respect and even of awe in many people, as
Vronsky saw; to Vronsky he was Katka Maslov- that had been his
nickname in the Pages' Corps- whom he felt to be shy and tried to
put at ease. On the left hand sat Neviedovsky with his youthful,
stubborn, and venomous countenance. With him Vronsky was simple and
deferential.

Sviiazhsky took his failure very lightheartedly. It was indeed no
failure in his eyes, as he said himself, turning, glass in hand, to
Neviedovsky: they could not have found a better representative of
the new movement, which the nobility ought to follow. And so every
honest person, as he said, was on the side of today's success and
was celebrating over it.

Stepan Arkadyevich was glad, too, because he was having a good time,
and because everyone was pleased. The episodes of the elections served
as a good occasion for a capital dinner. Sviiazhsky comically imitated
the tearful discourse of marshal, and observed, addressing
Neviedovsky, that His Excellency would have to select another, more
complicated method of auditing accounts than tears. Another nobleman
jocosely described how footmen in stockings had been imported for
the marshal's ball, and how now they would have to be sent back unless
the new marshal would give a ball with footmen in stockings.

Continually during dinner they said of Neviedovsky: "Our Marshal"
and "Your Excellency."

This was said with the same pleasure with which a young wife is
called "Madame" and by her husband's name. Neviedovsky affected to
be not merely indifferent but scornful of this appellation, but it was
obvious that he was highly delighted, and had to keep a curb on
himself not to betray the triumph which was unsuitable to their new,
liberal party.

In the course of dinner several telegrams were sent to people
interested in the result of the election. And Stepan Arkadyevich,
who was in high spirits, sent Darya Alexandrovna a telegram:
"Neviedovsky elected by twenty votes. Congratulations. Tell people."
He dictated it aloud, saying: "We must let them share our
rejoicing." Darya Alexandrovna, getting the message, simply sighed
over the rouble wasted on it, and understood that it was an
afterdinner affair. She knew Stiva had a weakness after dining for
faire jouer le telegraphe.

Everything, together with the excellent dinner and the wine, not
from Russian merchants, but imported direct from abroad, was extremely
dignified, simple, and enjoyable. The party- some twenty- had been
selected by Sviiazhsky from among the more active new liberals, all of
the same way of thinking, who were at the same time clever and
well-bred. They drank, also half in jest, to the health of the new
marshal of the province, of the governor, of the bank director, and of
"our amiable host."

Vronsky was satisfied. He had never expected to find so pleasant a
tone in the provinces.

Toward the end of dinner it was still more lively. The governor
asked Vronsky to come to a concert for the benefit of the brethren
which his wife, who was anxious to make his acquaintance, had been
getting up:

"There'll be a ball, and you'll see the belle of the province. Worth
seeing, really."

"Not in my line," Vronsky answered. He liked that English phrase.
But he smiled, and promised to come.

Before they rose from the table, when all of them were smoking,
Vronsky's valet went up to him with a letter on a tray.

"From Vozdvizhenskoe by special messenger," he said with a
significant expression.

"Astonishing! How like he is to the deputy prosecutor Sventitsky,"
said one of the guests in French of the valet, while Vronsky,
frowning, read the letter.

The letter was from Anna. Before he read the letter, he knew its
contents. Expecting the elections to be over in five days, he had
promised to be back on Friday. Today was Saturday, and he knew that
the letter contained reproaches for not being back at the time
fixed. The letter he had sent the previous evening had probably not
reached her yet.

The letter was what he had expected, but the form of it was
unexpected, and particularly disagreeable to him. "Annie is very
ill, the doctor says it may be inflammation of the lungs. I am
losing my head all alone. Princess Varvara is no help, but a
hindrance. I expected you the day before yesterday, and yesterday, and
now I am sending to find out where you are and what you are doing. I
wanted to come myself, but thought better of it, knowing you would
dislike it. Send some answer, that I may know what to do."

The child ill, yet she had thought of coming herself. Their daughter
ill- and this hostile tone.

The innocent festivities over the election, and this gloomy,
burdensome love to which he had to return, struck Vronsky by their
contrast. But he had to go, and by the first train that night he set
off home.

                           XXXII.


Before Vronsky's departure for the elections, Anna had reflected
that the scenes constantly repeated between them each time he left
home might only make him cold to her instead of attaching him to
her, and resolved to do all she could to control herself so as to bear
the parting with composure. But the cold, severe glance with which
he had looked at her when he came to tell her he was going had wounded
her, and before he had started her peace of mind was destroyed.

In solitude, later, thinking over that glance which had expressed
his right to freedom, she came, as she always did, to the same
point- the sense of her own humiliation. "He has the right to go
away when and where he chooses. Not simply to go away, but to leave
me. He has every right, and I have none. But knowing that, he ought
not to do it. What has he done, though?... He looked at me with a
cold, severe expression. Of course that is something indefinable,
impalpable, but it has never been so before, and that glance means a
great deal," she thought. "That glance shows the beginning of
coolness."

And though she felt sure that a coolness was beginning, there was
nothing she could do; she could not in any way alter her relations
to him. Just as before, only by love and by charm could she keep
him. And so, just as before, only by occupation in the day, by
morphine at night, could she stifle the fearful thought of what
would come if he ceased to love her. It is true there was still one
means; not to keep him- for that she wanted nothing more than his
love- but to be nearer to him, to be in such a position that he
would not leave her. That means was divorce and marriage. And she
began to long for that, and made up her mind to agree to it the
first time he or Stiva approached her on the subject.

Absorbed in such thoughts, she passed five days without him, the
five days that he was to be absent.

Walks, conversation with Princess Varvara, visits to the hospital,
and, most of all, reading- reading of one book after another- filled
up her time. But on the sixth day, when the coachman came back without
him, and she felt that now she was utterly incapable of stifling the
thought of him and of what he was doing there- just at that time her
little girl was taken ill. Anna began to look after her, but even that
did not distract her mind, especially as the illness was not
serious. However hard she tried, she could not love this little child,
and to feign love was beyond her powers. Toward the evening of that
day, still alone, Anna was in such a panic about him that she
decided to start for the town, but on second thought wrote him the
contradictory letter that Vronsky received, and, without reading it
through, sent it off by a special messenger. The next morning she
received his letter and regretted her own. She dreaded a repetition of
the severe look he had flung at her at parting, especially when he
would learn that the baby was not dangerously ill. But still, she
was glad she had written to him. By now Anna was admitting to
herself that she was a burden to him, that he would relinquish his
freedom regretfully to return to her, and in spite of that she was
glad he was coming. Let him weary of her, but he would be here with
her, so that she would see him, would know of every action he took.

She was sitting in the drawing room near a lamp, with a new volume
of Taine, and, as she read, listening to the sound of the wind
outside, and every minute expecting the carriage to arrive. Several
times she had fancied she heard the sound of wheels, but she had
been mistaken. At last she heard not the sound of wheels, but the
coachman's shout and the dull rumble in the covered entry. Even
Princess Varvara, playing solitaire, confirmed this, and Anna,
flushing hotly, got up; but, instead of going down, as she had done
twice before, she stood still. She suddenly felt ashamed of her
duplicity, but even more she dreaded how he might meet her. All
feeling of wounded pride had passed now; she was only afraid of the
expression of his displeasure. She remembered that her child had
been perfectly well again for the last day. She felt positively
vexed with her for getting better from the very moment her letter
was sent off. Then she thought of him, that he was here- all of him,
with his hands, his eyes. She heard his voice. And forgetting
everything, she ran joyfully to meet him.

"Well, how is Annie?" he said apprehensively from below, looking
up to Anna as she ran down to him.

He was sitting on a chair, and a footman was pulling off his warm
overboots.

"Oh, she is better."

"And you?" he said, shaking himself.

She took his hand in both of hers, and drew it to her waist, never
taking her eyes off him.

"Well, I'm glad," he said, coldly scanning her, her hair, her dress,
which he knew she had put on for him. All was charming, but how many
times it had charmed him! And the stern, stony expression that she
so dreaded settled upon his face.

"Well, I'm glad. And are you well?" he said, wiping his damp beard
with his handkerchief and kissing her hand.

"Never mind," she thought, "only let him be here, and so long as
he's here he cannot, he dare not, cease to love me."

The evening was spent happily and gaily in the presence of
Princess Varvara, who complained to him that Anna had been taking
morphine in his absence.

"What am I to do? I couldn't sleep.... My thoughts prevented me.
When he's here I never take it- hardly ever."

He told her about the election, and Anna knew how by adroit
questions to bring him to what gave him most pleasure- his own
success. She told him of everything that interested him at home; and
all that she told him was of the most cheerful description.

But late in the evening, when they were alone, Anna, seeing that she
had regained complete possession of him, wanted to erase the painful
impression of the glance he had given her for her letter. She said:

"Tell me frankly, you were vexed at getting my letter, and you
didn't believe me?"

As soon as she had said it, she felt that however warm his
feelings were to her, he had not forgiven her for that.

"Yes," he said, "the letter was so strange. First, Annie ill, and
then you thought of coming yourself."

"It was all the truth."

"Oh, I don't doubt it."

"Yes, you do doubt it. You are vexed, I see."

"Not for one moment. I'm only vexed, that's true, that you seem
somehow unwilling to admit that there are duties..."

"The duty of going to a concert...."

"But we won't talk about it," he said.

"Why not talk about it?" she said.

"I only meant to say that matters of real importance may turn up.
Now, for instance, I shall have to go to Moscow to arrange about the
house.... Oh, Anna, why are you so irritable? Don't you know that I
can't live without you?"

"If so," said Anna, her voice suddenly changing, "it means that
you are sick of this life.... Yes, you will come for a day and go
away, as men do...."

"Anna, that's cruel. I am ready to give up my whole life."

But she did not hear him.

"If you go to Moscow, I will go too. I will not stay here. Either we
must separate or else live together."

"Why, you know, that's my one desire. But to do that..."

"We must get a divorce. I will write to him. I see I cannot go on
like this.... But I will come with you to Moscow."

"You talk as if you were threatening me. But I desire nothing so
much as never to be parted from you," said Vronsky, smiling.

But as he said these words there gleamed in his eyes not merely a
cold look, but the vindictive look of a man persecuted and made cruel.

She saw the look and correctly divined its meaning.

"And, if things have come to such a pass, it's a calamity!" that
glance told her. It was a moment's impression, but she never forgot
it.

Anna wrote to her husband asking him about a divorce, and toward the
end of November, taking leave of Princess Varvara, who wanted to go to
Peterburg, she went with Vronsky to Moscow. Expecting every day an
answer from Alexei Alexandrovich, and after that the divorce, they now
established themselves together, like married people.

                      PART SEVEN


                           I.


The Levins had been two months in Moscow. The date had long passed
on which, according to the most trustworthy calculations of people
learned in such matters, Kitty should have been confined. But she
was still about, and there was nothing to show that her time was any
nearer than two months ago. The doctor, the midwife, and Dolly and her
mother, and most of all Levin, who could not think of the
approaching event without terror, began to be impatient and uneasy.
Kitty was the only person who felt perfectly calm and happy.

She was distinctly conscious now of the birth of a new feeling of
love for the future child, for her to some extent actually existing
already, and she brooded blissfully over this feeling. He was not by
now altogether a part of herself, but sometimes lived his own life
independently of her. Often this separate being gave her pain, but
at the same time she wanted to laugh with a strange new joy.

All the people she loved were with her, and all were so good to her,
so attentively looking out for her, so entirely pleasant was
everything presented to her, that if she had not known and felt that
it must all soon be over, she could not have wished for a better and
pleasanter life. The only thing that spoiled the charm of this mode of
life was that here her husband was not as she loved him to be, and
as he was in the country.

She liked his serene, friendly, and hospitable manner in the
country. In the town he seemed continually uneasy and on his guard, as
though he were afraid someone would be rude to him, and, still more,
to her. At home in the country, definitely knowing himself to be in
his right place, he was never in haste to be off elsewhere, was
occupied all the time. Here in town he was in a continual hurry, as
though afraid of missing something, and yet he had nothing to do.
And she felt pity for him. To others, she knew, he did not appear an
object of pity; on the contrary, when Kitty looked at him in
society, as one sometimes looks at those one loves, trying to see
him as if he were a stranger, so as to catch the impression he must
make on others, she saw with a panic even of jealous fear that he
was far indeed from being a pitiable figure, that he was very
attractive with his honesty, his rather old-fashioned, reserved
courtesy to women, his powerful figure, and striking, as she
thought, and expressive face. But she saw him not from without, but
from within; she saw that here he was not himself; that was the only
way she could define his condition to herself. Sometimes she
inwardly reproached him for his inability to live in the town;
sometimes she recognized that it was really hard for him to order
his life here so that he could be satisfied with it.

What had he to do, indeed? He did not care for cards; he did not
go to a club. Spending the time with jovial gentlemen of Oblonsky's
type- she knew now what that meant... it meant drinking, and going
somewhere after drinking. She could not think without horror of
where men went on such occasions. Was he to go into society? But she
knew he could only find satisfaction in that if he took pleasure in
the society of young women, and that she could not wish for. Should he
stay at home with her, her mother, and her sisters? But much as she
liked and enjoyed their conversations forever on the same subjects-
"Alines-Nadines," as the old Prince called the sisters' talks- she
knew it must bore him. What was there left for him to do? To go on
writing his book? He had indeed attempted to do it; and at first he
used to go to the library and make extracts and look up references for
his book, but, as he told her, the more he did nothing, the less
time he had to do anything. And besides, he complained that he had
talked too much about his book here, and that consequently all his
ideas about it were muddled and had lost their interest for him.

One advantage in this town life was that quarrels hardly ever
happened between them here in town. Whether it was that their
conditions, in town, were different, or that they had both become more
careful and sensible in that respect, they had no quarrels in Moscow
from jealousy, which they had so dreaded when they moved from the
country.

One event, an event of great importance to both from that point of
view, did indeed happen- which was Kitty's meeting with Vronsky.

The old Princess Marya Borissovna, Kitty's godmother, who had always
been very fond of her, had insisted on seeing her. Kitty, though she
did not go into society at all on account of her condition, went
with her father to see the venerable old lady, and there met Vronsky.

The only thing Kitty could reproach herself for at this meeting
was that at the instant when she recognized in his civilian dress
the features once so familiar to her, her breath failed her, the blood
rushed to her heart, and a vivid blush- she felt it- overspread her
face. But this lasted only a few seconds. Before her father, who
purposely began talking in a loud voice to Vronsky, had finished,
she was perfectly ready to look at Vronsky, to speak to him, if
necessary, exactly as she spoke to Princess Marya Borissovna, and,
more than that, to do so in such a way that everything, to the
faintest intonation and smile would have been approved by her husband,
whose unseen presence she seemed to feel about her at that instant.

She said a few words to him, even smiled serenely at his joke
about the elections, which he called "our parliament." (She had to
smile to show she saw the joke.) But she turned away immediately to
Princess Marya Borissovna, and did not once glance at him till he
got up to go; then she looked at him, but evidently only because it
would be uncivil not to look at a man when he is saying good-by.

She was grateful to her father for saying nothing to her about their
meeting Vronsky, but she saw by his special warmth to her after the
visit, during their usual walk, that he was pleased with her. She
was pleased with herself. She had not expected she would have had
the power, while keeping somewhere in the bottom of her heart all
the memories of her old feeling for Vronsky, not only to seem, but
to be, perfectly indifferent and composed with him.

Levin flushed a great deal more than she when she told him she had
met Vronsky at Princess Marya Borissovna's. It was very hard for her
to tell him this, but still harder to go on speaking of the details of
the meeting, as he did not question her, but simply gazed at her
with a frown.

"I am very sorry you weren't there," she said. "It wasn't so much
the fact that you weren't in the room... I couldn't have been so
natural in your presence... I am blushing now much more- much, much
more," she said, blushing till the tears came into her eyes. "But it's
a pity you couldn't have looked through a peephole."

The truthful eyes told Levin that she was satisfied with herself,
and, in spite of her blushing he was quickly reassured and began
questioning her, which was all she wanted. When he had heard
everything, even to the detail that for the first second she could not
help flushing, but that afterward she was just as direct and as much
at her ease as with any chance acquaintance, Levin was quite happy
again and said he was glad of it, and would not now behave as stupidly
as he had done at the election, but would try the first time he met
Vronsky to be as friendly as possible.

"It's so wretched to feel that there's any man who is almost your
enemy, and whom it's painful to meet," said Levin. "I'm very, very
glad."

                           II.


"Do go then, please, and call on the Bols," Kitty said to her
husband, when he came in to see her at eleven o'clock before going
out. "I know you are dining at the club; papa put down your name.
But what are you going to do in the morning?"

"I am only going to Katavassov," answered Levin.

"Why so early?"

"He promised to introduce me to Metrov. I wanted to talk to him
about my work. He's a distinguished savant from Peterburg," said
Levin.

"Yes; wasn't it his article you were praising so? Well, and after
that?" said Kitty.

"I shall go to the court, perhaps, about my sister's business."

"And the concert?" she queried.

"I shan't go there all alone."

"No? Do go; there are going to be some new things.... That used to
interest you so. I should certainly go."

"Well, anyway, I shall come home before dinner," he said, looking at
his watch.

"Put on your frock coat, so that you can go straight to call on
Countess Bol."

"But is it absolutely necessary?"

"Oh, absolutely! He has been to see us. Come, what is it? You go in,
sit down, talk for five minutes of the weather, get up, and go away."

"Oh, you wouldn't believe it! I've got so out of the way of all this
that it makes me feel positively ashamed. It's such a horrible thing
to do! A complete outsider walks in, sits down, stays on with
nothing to do, wastes their time and upsets himself, and then goes
away!"

Kitty laughed.

"Why, I suppose you used to pay calls before you were married,
didn't you?"

"Yes, I did, but I always felt ashamed, and now I'm so
unaccustomed to it that, by God, I'd sooner go two days running
without my dinner than pay this call! One's so ashamed! I feel all the
while that they're annoyed, that they're saying: What has he come
for?"

"No, they won't. I'll answer for that," said Kitty, looking into his
face with a laugh. She took his hand. "Well, good-by.... Do go,
please."

He was just going out after kissing his wife's hand, when she
stopped him.

"Kostia, do you know I've only fifty roubles left?"

"Oh, all right, I'll go to the bank and get some. How much?" he
said, with the expression of dissatisfaction she knew so well.

"No, wait a minute." She held his hand. "Let's talk about it, it
worries me. I seem to spend nothing unnecessarily, but money seems
simply to fly away. We don't manage well, somehow."

"Not at all," he said with a little cough, looking at her from under
his brows.

That cough she knew well. It was a sign of intense
dissatisfaction, not with her, but with himself. He certainly was
displeased, not at so much money being spent, but at being reminded of
what he, knowing something was unsatisfactory, wanted to forget.

"I have told Sokolov to sell the wheat, and to borrow an advance
on the mill. We shall have money enough in any case."

"Yes, but I'm afraid that altogether it's too much...."

"Not at all, not at all," he repeated. "Well, good-by, darling."

"No, I'm really sorry sometimes that I listened to mamma. How nice
it would have been in the country! As it is, I'm worrying you all, and
we're wasting our money."

"Not at all, not at all. Not once since I've been married have I
said that things could have been better than they are...."

"Truly?" she said, looking into his eyes.

He had said it without thinking, simply to console her. But when
he glanced at her and saw those sweet truthful eyes fastened
questioningly on him, he repeated it with his whole heart. "I was
positively forgetting her," he thought. And he remembered what was
before them, so soon to come.

"Will it be soon? How do you feel?" he whispered, taking her two
hands.

"I have so often thought so, that now I don't think about it, or
know anything about it."

"And you're not frightened?"

She smiled contemptuously.

"Not the least little bit," she said.

"Well, if anything happens, I shall be at Katavassov's."

"No, nothing will happen, and don't think about it. I'm going for
a walk on the boulevard with papa. We're going to see Dolly. I shall
expect you before dinner. Oh, yes! Do you know that Dolly's position
is becoming utterly impossible? She's in debt all round; she hasn't
a penny. We were talking yesterday with mamma and Arsenii" (this was
her sister's husband, Lvov), "and we determined to send you with him
to talk to Stiva. It's really unbearable. One can't speak to papa
about it.... But if you and he..."

"Why, what can we do?" said Levin.

"You'll be at Arsenii's, anyway; talk to him- he will tell you
what we decided."

"Oh, I agree to everything Arsenii thinks beforehand. I'll go and
see him. By the way, if I do go to the concert, I'll go with
Natalie. Well, good-by."

On the steps Levin was stopped by his old servant Kouzma, who had
been with him before his marriage, and now looked after their
household in town.

"Little Adonis" (that was the left shaft horse brought up from the
country) "has been shod anew, but she is still lame," he said. "What
does Your Honor wish to be done?"

During the first part of their stay in Moscow, Levin had used his
own horses brought up from the country. He had tried to arrange this
part of their expenses in the best and cheapest way possible; but it
appeared that their own horses came dearer than hired horses, and they
still hired additional horses.

"Send for the veterinary- there may be a bruise."

"And for Katerina Alexandrovna?" asked Kouzma.

Levin was not by now struck as he had been at first by the fact that
to get in Moscow from the Vozdvizhenka to the Ssivtzev-Vrazhek he
had to have two powerful horses put into a heavy carriage, to take the
carriage a quarter of a versta through the snowy mush and to keep it
standing there four hours, paying five roubles every time.

Now it seemed quite natural.

"Hire a pair for our carriage from the livery stable," said he.

"Yes, sir."

And so, simply and easily, thanks to the facilities of town life,
Levin settled a question which, in the country, would have called
for so much personal trouble and exertion, and, going out on the
steps, he called a sleigh, sat down, and drove to the Nikitskaia. On
the way he thought no more of money, but mused on the introduction
that awaited him to the Peterburg savant, a writer on sociology, and
what he would say to him about his book.

Only during the first days of his stay in Moscow Levin had been
struck by the expenditure, strange to one living in the country,
unproductive but inevitable, that was expected of him on every side.
But by now he had grown used to it. That had happened to him in this
matter which is said to happen to drunkards- the first glass sticks in
the throat, the second flies down like a hawk, but after the third
they're like tiny little birds. When Levin had changed his first
hundred-rouble note to pay for liveries for his footman and hall
porter he could not help reflecting that these liveries were of no use
to anyone- but they were indubitably necessary, to judge by the
amazement of the Princess and Kitty when he suggested that they
might do without liveries- that these liveries would cost the wages of
two laborers for the summer- that is, would pay for about three
hundred working days from Easter to the fast of Advent, and each a day
of hard work from early morning to late evening- and that
hundred-rouble note did stick in his throat. But the next note,
changed to pay for providing a dinner for their relations, that cost
twenty-eight roubles, though it did excite in Levin the reflection
that twenty-eight roubles meant nine chetverts of oats, which men
would with groans and sweat have reaped and bound and threshed and
winnowed and sifted and sown- this next one he parted with more
easily. And now the notes he changed no longer aroused such
reflections, and they flew off like little birds. Whether the labor
devoted to obtaining the money corresponded to the pleasure given by
what was bought with it, was a consideration he had long ago
dismissed. His business calculation that there was a certain price
below which he could not sell certain grain was forgotten too. The
rye, for the price of which he had so long held out, had been sold for
fifty kopecks a chetvert cheaper than it had been fetching a month
ago. Even the consideration that with such an expenditure he could not
go on living for a year without debt, even that had no force. Only one
thing was essential: to have money in the bank, without inquiring
where it came from, so as to know that one had the wherewithal to
buy meat for tomorrow. And this condition had hitherto been fulfilled;
he had always had the money in the bank. But now the money in the bank
had gone, and he could not quite tell where to get the next
installment. And this it was which, at the moment when Kitty had
mentioned money, had disturbed him; but he had no time to think
about it. He drove off, thinking of Katavassov and the meeting with
Metrov which was before him.

                           III.


Levin had on this visit to town seen a great deal of his old
friend at the university, Professor Katavassov, whom he had not seen
since his marriage. He liked in Katavassov the clearness and
simplicity of his conception of life. Levin thought that the clearness
of Katavassov's conception of life was due to the poverty of his
nature; Katavassov thought that the disconnectedness of Levin's
ideas was due to his lack of intellectual discipline; but Levin
enjoyed Katavassov's clearness, and Katavassov enjoyed the abundance
of Levin's untrained ideas, and they liked to meet and to dispute.

Levin had read to Katavassov some parts of his book, and he had
liked them. On the previous day Katavassov had met Levin at a public
lecture and told him that the celebrated Metrov, whose article Levin
had so much liked, was in Moscow, that he had been much interested
by what Katavassov had told him about Levin's work, and that he was
coming to see him tomorrow at eleven, and would be very glad to make
Levin's acquaintance.

"You're positively a reformed character, my dear, I'm glad to
see," said Katavassov, meeting Levin in the little drawing room. "I
heard the bell and thought: Impossible! It can't be he at the exact
time!... Well, what do you say to the Montenegrins now? They're a race
of warriors."

"Why, what's happened?" asked Levin.

Katavassov in a few words told him the last piece of news from the
war, and, going into his study, introduced Levin to a short,
thickset man of pleasant appearance. This was Metrov. The conversation
touched for a brief space on politics and on how recent events were
looked at in the higher spheres in Peterburg. Metrov repeated a saying
that had reached him through a most trustworthy source, reported as
having been uttered on this subject by the Czar and one of the
ministers. Katavassov had heard also on excellent authority that the
Czar had said something quite different. Levin tried to imagine
circumstances in which both sayings might have been uttered, and the
conversation on that topic dropped.

"Yes, here he's practically written a book on the natural conditions
of the laborer in relation to the land," said Katavassov; "I'm not a
specialist, but I, as a student of natural science, was pleased at his
not taking mankind as something outside biological laws; but, on the
contrary, perceiving his dependence on his surroundings, and in that
dependence seeking the laws of his development."

"That's very interesting," said Metrov.

"To tell the truth, I began to write a book on agriculture; but,
studying the chief instrument of agriculture, the laborer," said
Levin, reddening, "I could not help coming to quite unexpected
results."

And Levin began carefully, as though feeling his ground, to
expound his views. He knew Metrov had written an article against the
generally accepted theory of political economy, but to what extent
he could reckon on his sympathy with his own new views he did not know
and could not guess from the clever and serene face of the savant.

"But in what do you see the special characteristics of the Russian
laborer?" said Metrov; "in his biological characteristics, so to
speak, or in the condition in which he is placed?"

Levin saw that there was an idea underlying this question with which
he did not agree. But he went on explaining his own idea that the
Russian laborer has a quite special view of the land, different from
that of other people; and to support this proposition he made haste to
add that in his opinion this attitude of the Russian peasant was due
to the consciousness of his vocation to settle vast unoccupied
expanses in the East.

"One may easily be led into error in basing any conclusion on the
general vocation of a people," said Metrov, interrupting Levin. "The
condition of the laborer will always depend on his relation to the
land and to capital."

And without letting Levin finish explaining his idea, Metrov began
expounding to him the special point of his own theory.

In what the point of his theory lay, Levin did not understand,
because he did not take the trouble to understand. He saw that Metrov,
like other people, in spite of his own article, in which he had
attacked the current theory of political economy, looked at the
position of the Russian peasant simply from the point of view of
capital, wages, and rent. He would indeed have been obliged to admit
that in the eastern- much the larger- part of Russia rent was as yet
nil, that for nine-tenths of the eighty millions of the Russian
peasants wages took the form simply of food provided for themselves,
and that capital does not so far exist except in the form of the
most primitive tools. Yet it was only from that point of view that
he considered every laborer, though in many points he differed from
the economists and had his own theory of the wage fund, which he
expounded to Levin.

Levin listened reluctantly, and at first made objections. He would
have liked to interrupt Metrov, to explain his own thought, which in
his opinion would have rendered further exposition of Metrov's
theories superfluous. But later on, feeling convinced that they looked
at the matter so differently, that they could never understand one
another, he did not even oppose his statements, but simply listened.
Although what Metrov was saying was by now utterly devoid of
interest for him, he yet experienced a certain satisfaction in
listening to him. It flattered his vanity that such a learned man
should explain his ideas to him so eagerly, with such intensity and
confidence in Levin's understanding of the subject, sometimes with a
mere hint referring him to a whole aspect of the subject. He put
this down to his own credit, unaware that Metrov, who had already
discussed his theory over and over again with all his intimate
friends, talked of it with special eagerness to every new person,
and in general was eager to talk to anyone of any subject that
interested him, even if still obscure to himself.

"We are late though," said Katavassov, looking at his watch directly
Metrov had finished his discourse.

"Yes, there's a meeting of the Society of Amateurs today in
commemoration of the fifty-year jubilee of Svintich," said
Katavassov in answer to Levin's inquiry. "Piotr Ivanovich and I were
going. I've promised to deliver an address on his labors in zoology.
Come along with us, it's very interesting."

"Yes, and it's really time to start," said Metrov. "Come with us,
and from there, if you care to, come to my place. I should very much
like to hear your work."

"Oh, no! It's no good yet- it's unfinished. But I shall be very glad
to go to the meeting."

"I say, my dear, have you heard? He has handed in a minority
report," Katavassov called from the other room, where he was putting
on his dress coat.

And a conversation sprang up on the university question.

The university question was a very important event that winter in
Moscow. Three old professors in the council had not accepted the
opinion of the younger professors. The young ones had registered a
separate resolution. This resolution, in the judgment of some
people, was monstrous, in the judgment of others it was the simplest
and most just thing to do, and the professors were split into two
parties.

One party, to which Katavassov belonged, saw in the opposite party a
scoundrelly betrayal and treachery, while the opposite party saw in
them childishness and lack of respect for the authorities. Levin,
though he did not belong to the university, had several times
already during his stay in Moscow heard and talked about this
matter, and had his own opinion on the subject. He took part in the
conversation that was continued in the street, as all three walked
to the old buildings of the university.

The meeting had already begun. Round the cloth-covered table, at
which Katavassov and Metrov seated themselves, there were some
half-dozen persons, and one of these was bending close over a
manuscript, reading something aloud. Levin sat down in one of the
empty chairs that were standing round the table, and in a whisper
asked a student sitting near what was being read. The student, eying
Levin with displeasure, said:

"The biography."

Though Levin was not interested in the biography, he could not
help listening, and learned some new and interesting facts about the
life of the distinguished man of science.

When the reader had finished, the chairman thanked him and read some
verses of the poet Ment, sent him on the jubilee, and said a few words
by way of thanks to the poet. Then Katavassov in his loud, ringing
voice read his address on the scientific labors of the man whose
jubilee was being kept.

When Katavassov had finished, Levin looked at his watch, saw it
was past one, and thought that there would not be time before the
concert to read his paper to Metrov, and indeed, he did not now care
to do so. During the reading he had thought over their conversation.
He saw distinctly now that though Metrov's ideas might perhaps have
value, his own ideas had a value too, and their ideas could only be
made clear and lead to something if each worked separately in his
chosen path, and that nothing would be gained by communicating these
ideas. And having made up his mind to refuse Metrov's invitation,
Levin went up to him at the end of the meeting. Metrov introduced
Levin to the chairman, with whom he was talking of the political news.
Metrov told the chairman what he had already told Levin, and Levin
made the same remarks on his news that he had already made that
morning, but for the sake of variety he expressed also a new opinion
which had only just struck him. After that the conversation turned
again on the university question. As Levin had already heard it all,
he made haste to tell Metrov that he was sorry he could not take
advantage of his invitation, took leave, and drove to Lvov's.

                           IV.


Lvov, the husband of Natalie, Kitty's sister, had spent all his life
in the capitals and abroad, where he had been educated, and had been
in the diplomatic service.

During the previous year he had left the diplomatic service, not
owing to any "unpleasantness" (he never had any "unpleasantness"
with anyone), and was transferred to the Palace Department in
Moscow, in order to give his two boys the best education possible.

In spite of the striking contrast in their habits and views and
the fact that Lvov was older than Levin, they had seen a great deal of
one another that winter, and had taken a great liking to each other.

Lvov was at home, and Levin went in to him unannounced.

Lvov, in a house coat with a belt and in chamois leather shoes,
was sitting in an armchair, and with a pince-nez with blue lenses he
was reading a book that stood on a reading desk, while in his
beautiful hand he held a half-burned cigar carefully away from him.

His handsome, delicate, and still youthful-looking face, to which
his curly, glistening silvery hair gave a still more aristocratic air,
lighted up with a smile when he saw Levin.

"Capital! I intended to send to you. How's Kitty? Sit here, it's
more comfortable." He got up and pushed up a rocking chair. "Have
you read the last circular in the Journal de St Petersbourg? I think
it's excellent," he said with a slight French accent.

Levin told him what he had heard from Katavassov was being said in
Peterburg, and, after talking a little about politics, he told him
of his interview with Metrov, and the learned society's meeting. To
Lvov it was very interesting.

"That's what I envy you, that you are able to mix in these
interesting scientific circles," he said. And as he talked, he
passed as usual into French, which was easier for him. "It's true I
haven't the time for it. My official work and the children leave me no
time; and then I'm not ashamed to own that my education has been too
defective."

"That I don't believe," said Levin with a smile, feeling, as he
always did, touched at Lvov's low opinion of himself, which was not in
the least put on from a desire to seem or to be modest, but was
absolutely sincere.

"Oh, yes, indeed! I feel now how badly educated I am. To educate
my children I positively have to look up a great deal, and, in fact,
actually to study myself. For it's not enough to have teachers-
there must be someone to look after them; just as on your land you
want laborers and an overseer. See what I'm reading"- he pointed to
Buslaev's Grammar on the desk- "it's expected of Misha, and it's so
difficult.... Come, explain to me.... Here he says..."

Levin tried to explain to him that it couldn't be understood, but
that it had to be taught; but Lvov would not agree with him.

"Oh, you're laughing at it!"

"On the contrary, you can't imagine how, when I look at you, I'm
always learning the task that lies before me- that is, the education
of one's children."

"Well, there's nothing for you to learn," said Lvov.

"All I know," said Levin, "is that I have never seen better
brought-up children than yours, and I wouldn't wish for children
better than yours."

Lvov visibly tried to restrain the expression of his delight, but he
was positively radiant with smiles.

"If only they're better than I! That's all I desire. You don't
know yet all the work," he said, "with boys who've been left like mine
to run wild abroad."

"You'll catch up with all that. They're such clever children. The
great thing is the education of character. That's what I learn when
I look at your children."

"You talk of the education of character. You can't imagine how
difficult that is! You have hardly succeeded in combating one tendency
when others crop up, and the struggle begins again. If one had not a
support in religion- you remember we talked about that- no father
could bring children up relying on his own strength alone, without
that help."

This subject, which always interested Levin, was cut short by the
entrance of the beauty Natalya Alexandrovna, dressed to go out.

"I didn't know you were here," she said, unmistakably feeling no
regret, but a positive pleasure, in interrupting this conversation
on a topic she had heard so much of that she was by now weary of it.
"Well, how is Kitty? I am dining with you today. I tell you what,
Arsenii," she turned to her husband, "you take the carriage."

And the husband and wife began to discuss their arrangements for the
day. As the husband had to drive to meet someone on official business,
while the wife had to go to the concert and some public meeting of a
committee on the South-Eastern Question, there was a great deal to
consider and settle. Levin had to take part in their plans as one of
themselves. It was settled that Levin should go with Natalie to the
concert and the meeting, and that from there they should send the
carriage to the office for Arsenii and he should call for her and take
her to Kitty's; or that, if he had not finished his work, he should
send the carriage back and Levin would go with her.

"He's spoiling me," Lvov said to his wife: "he assures me that our
children are splendid, when I know how much bad there is in them."

"Arsenii goes to extremes, I always say," said his wife. "If you
look for perfection, you will never be satisfied. And it's true, as
papa says- that when we were brought up there was one extreme- we were
kept in the attic, while our parents lived in the best rooms; now it's
just the other way- the parents are in the washhouse, while the
children are in the best rooms. Parents now are not expected to live
at all, but to exist altogether for their children."

"Well, what if they like it better? Lvov said, with his beautiful
smile, touching her hand. "Anyone who didn't know you would think
you were a stepmother, not a true mother."

"No, extremes are not good in anything," Natalie said serenely,
putting his paper knife straight in its proper place on the table.

"Well, come here, you perfect children," Lvov said to the two
handsome boys who came in, and, after bowing to Levin, went up to
their father, obviously wishing to ask him about something.

Levin would have liked to talk to them, to hear what they would
say to their father, but Natalie began talking to him, and then Lvov's
colleague in the service, Makhotin, walked in, wearing his Court
dress, to go with him to meet someone, and a conversation was kept
up without a break upon Herzegovina, Princess Korzinskaya, the town
council, and the sudden death of Madame Apraksina.

Levin even forgot the commission intrusted to him. He recollected it
as he was going into the hall.

"O, Kitty told me to talk to you about Oblonsky," he said, as Lvov
was standing on the stairs, seeing his wife and Levin off.

"Yes, yes, maman wants us, les beaux-freres, to attack him," he
said, blushing. "But why should I?"

"Well, then, I will attack him," said Madame Lvova, with a smile,
standing in her round white dogskin opera cloak waiting till they
had finished speaking. "Come, let us go."

                           V.


At the concert in the afternoon two very interesting things were
performed.

One was a fantasia, King Lear in the Heath; the other was a
quartette dedicated to the memory of Bach. Both were new and in the
new style, and Levin was eager to form an opinion of them. After
escorting his sister-in-law to her stall, he stood against a column
and tried to listen as attentively and conscientiously as possible. He
tried not to let his attention be distracted, and not to spoil his
impression by looking at the conductor in a white tie, waving his
arms, which always disturbed his enjoyment of music so much, or the
ladies in bonnets, the ribbons of which, since it was a concert,
they had carefully tied over their ears, and all these people either
thinking of nothing at all, or thinking of all sorts of things
except the music. He tried to avoid meeting musical connoisseurs or
talkative acquaintances, and stood looking at the floor straight
before him, listening.

But the more he listened to the fantasia of King Lear the further he
felt from forming any definite opinion of it. There was, as it were, a
continual beginning, a preparation of the musical expression of some
feeling, but it fell to pieces again directly, breaking into new
musical motifs, or simply nothing but the whims of the composer-
exceedingly complex but disconnected sounds. And these fragmentary
musical expressions, though sometimes beautiful, were disagreeable,
because they were utterly unexpected and not led up to by anything.
Gaiety and grief and despair and tenderness and triumph followed one
another without any ground, like the emotions of a madman. And those
emotions, like a madman's, sprang up quite unexpectedly.

During the whole performance Levin felt like a deaf man watching
people dancing, and was in a state of complete bewilderment when the
fantasia was over, and felt a great weariness from the fruitless
strain on his attention. Loud applause resounded on all sides.
Everyone got up, moved about, and began talking. Anxious to throw some
light on his own perplexity from the impressions of others, Levin
began to walk about, looking for connoisseurs, and was glad to see a
well-known musical amateur in conversation with Pestsov, whom he knew.

"Marvelous!" Pestsov was saying in his deep bass. "How are you,
Konstantin Dmitrievich? Particularly sculpturesque and plastic, so
to say, and richly colored is that passage where you feel Cordelia's
approach, where woman, das ewig Weibliche, enters into conflict with
fate. Isn't it?"

"You mean... What has Cordelia to do with it?" Levin asked
timidly, forgetting that the fantasia was supposed to represent King
Lear.

"Cordelia comes in... See here!" said Pestsov, tapping his finger on
the satiny surface of the program he held in his hand and passing it
to Levin.

Only then Levin recollected the title of the fantasia, and made
haste to read in the Russian translation the lines from Shakespeare
that were printed on the back of the program.

"You can't follow it without that," said Pestsov, addressing
Levin, as the person he had been speaking to had gone away, and he had
no one to talk to.

In the entr'acte Levin and Pestsov fell into an argument upon the
merits and defects of the music of the Wagner school. Levin maintained
that the mistake of Wagner and all his followers lay in their trying
to take music into the sphere of another art, just as poetry goes
wrong when it tries to paint a face as the art of painting ought to
do, and as an instance of this mistake he cited the sculptor who
carved in marble certain poetic phantasms flitting round the figure of
the poet on the pedestal. "These phantoms were so far from being
phantoms that they were positively clinging to the stairs," said
Levin. The comparison pleased him, but he could not remember whether
he had not used the same phrase before, and to Pestsov, too, and as he
said it he felt confused.

Pestsov maintained that art is one, and that it can attain its
highest manifestations only by the conjunction of all kinds of art.

The second piece that was performed Levin could not hear. Pestsov,
who was standing beside him, was talking to him almost all the time,
condemning the music for its excessive affected assumption of
simplicity, and comparing it with the simplicity of the
Pre-Raphaelites in painting. As he went out Levin met many more
acquaintances, with whom he talked of politics, of music, and of
common acquaintances. Among others he met Count Bol, whom he had
utterly forgotten to call upon.

"Well, go at once then," Madame Lvova said, when he told her;
"perhaps they'll not be at home, and then you can come to the
meeting to fetch me. You'll find me still there."

                           VI.


"Perhaps they're not at home?" said Levin, as he went into the
hall of Countess Bol's house.

"At home; please walk in," said the porter, resolutely removing
his overcoat.

"How annoying!" thought Levin with a sigh, taking off one glove
and stroking his hat. "What did I come for? What have I to say to
them?"

As he passed through the first drawing room Levin met in the doorway
Countess Bol, with a careworn and severe face, giving some order to
a servant. On seeing Levin she smiled, and asked him to come into
the next little drawing room where he heard voices. In this room there
were sitting in armchairs the two daughters of the Countess, and a
Moscow colonel, whom Levin knew. Levin walked up, greeted them, and
sat down beside the sofa, with his hat on his knees.

"How is your wife? Have you been at the concert? We couldn't go.
Mamma had to be at the requiem."

"Yes, I heard.... What a sudden death!" said Levin.

The Countess came in, sat down on the sofa, and she too asked
after his wife and inquired about the concert.

Levin answered, and repeated an inquiry about Madame Apraksina's
sudden death.

"But she was always in poor health."

"Were you at the opera yesterday?"

"Yes, I was."

"Lucca was very good."

"Yes, very good," he said, and, as it was utterly of no
consequence to him what they thought of him, he began repeating what
they had heard a hundred times about the characteristics of the
singer's talent. Countess Bol pretended to be listening. Then, when he
had said enough and had paused, the colonel, who had been silent
till then, began to talk. The colonel too talked of the opera and
illumination. At last, after speaking of the proposed folle journee at
Turin's, the colonel laughed, got up noisily, and went away. Levin too
rose, but he saw by the face of the Countess that it was not yet
time for him to go. He must stay two minutes longer. He sat down.

But as he was thinking all the while how stupid it was, he could not
find a subject for conversation, and sat silent.

"You are not going to the public meeting? They say it will be very
interesting," began the Countess.

"No, I promised my belle-soeur to fetch her from it," said Levin.

A silence followed. The mother once more exchanged glances with
one of the daughters.

"Well, now I think the time has come," thought Levin, and he got up.
The ladies shook hands with him, and begged him to say mille choses to
his wife for them.

The porter asked him, as he gave him his coat: "Where is Your
Honor staying?" and immediately wrote down his address in a big
handsomely bound book.

"Of course I don't care, but still I feel ashamed and awfully
stupid," thought Levin, consoling himself with the reflection that
everyone does it. He drove to the public meeting, where he was to find
his sister-in-law, so as to drive home with her.

At the public meeting of the committee there were a great many
people, and almost all the highest society. Levin was in time for
the report which, as everyone said, was very interesting. When the
reading of the report was over, people moved about, and Levin met
Sviiazhsky, who invited him very pressingly to come that evening to
a meeting of the Society of Agriculture, where a celebrated report was
to be delivered, and Stepan Arkadyevich, who had only just come from
the races, and many other acquaintances; and Levin heard and uttered
various criticisms on the meeting, on the new play, and on a public
trial. But, probably from the mental fatigue he was beginning to feel,
he made a blunder in speaking of the trial, and this blunder he
recalled several times with vexation. Speaking of the sentence upon
a foreigner who had been condemned in Russia, and of how unfair it
would be to punish him by exile abroad, Levin repeated what he had
heard the day before in conversation from an acquaintance.

"I think sending him abroad is much the same as punishing a carp
by putting it into the water," said Levin. Then he recollected that
this idea, which he had heard from an acquaintance and uttered as
his own, came from a fable of Krilov's, and that the acquaintance
had picked it up from a newspaper article.

After driving home with his sister-in-law, and finding Kitty in good
spirits and quite well, Levin drove to the club.

                           VII.


Levin reached the club just at the right time. Members and
visitors were driving up as he arrived. Levin had not been at the club
for a very long while- not since he lived in Moscow, when he was
leaving the university and going into society. He remembered the club,
the external details of its arrangement, but he had completely
forgotten the impression it had made on him in old days. But as soon
as, driving into the wide semicircular court and getting out of the
cab, he mounted the steps, and the hall porter, adorned with a
crossbelt, noiselessly opened the door to him with a bow; as soon as
he saw in the porter's room the cloaks and galoshes of members who
thought it less trouble to take them off downstairs; as soon as he
heard the mysterious ringing bell that preceded him as he ascended the
low-stepped, carpeted staircase, and saw the statue on the landing,
and the third porter at the top doors, a familiar figure grown
older, in the club livery, opening the door without haste or delay,
and scanning the visitors as they passed in- Levin felt the old
impression of the club come back in a rush, an impression of repose,
comfort, and propriety.

"Your hat, please," the porter said to Levin, who forgot the club
rule of checking his hat in the porter's room. "Long time since you've
been here. The Prince put your name down yesterday. Prince Stepan
Arkadyevich is not here yet."

The porter not only knew Levin, but also all his connections and
relationships, and so immediately mentioned his intimate friends.

Passing through the outer hall, divided up by screens, and the
room partitioned on the right, where a man sits at the fruit buffet,
Levin passed by a shuffling old man, and entered the dining room, full
of noise and people.

He walked along the tables, almost all full, and scrutinized the
visitors. He saw people of all sorts, old and young; some he knew a
little; some were intimate friends. There was not a single cross or
worried-looking face. All seemed to have checked their cares and
anxieties in the porter's room with their hats, and were all
deliberately getting ready to enjoy the material blessings of life.
Sviiazhsky was here and Shcherbatsky, Neviedovsky and the old
Prince, and Vronsky and Sergei Ivanovich.

"Ah! Why are you late?" the Prince said smiling, and giving him
his hand over his own shoulder. "How's Kitty?" he added, smoothing out
the napkin he had tucked in at his waistcoat buttons.

"Very well; they are dining at home, all three of them."

"Ah, 'Alines-Nadines' to be sure! There's no room with us. Go to
that table, and make haste and take a seat," said the Prince, and
turning away he carefully took a plate of burbot soup.

"Levin, this way!" a good-natured voice shouted a little farther on.
It was Turovtsin. He was sitting with a young officer, and beside them
were two chairs tipped over. Levin gladly went up to them. He had
always liked the goodhearted rake, Turovtsin- he was associated in his
mind with memories of his courtship- and at that moment, after the
strain of intellectual conversation, the sight of Turovtsin's
good-natured face was particularly welcome.

"For you and Oblonsky. He'll be here directly."

The young man, holding himself very erect, with eyes forever
twinkling with enjoyment, was an officer from Peterburg, Gaghin.
Turovtsin introduced them.

"Oblonsky's always late."

"Ah, here he is!

"Have you only just come?" said Oblonsky, coming quickly toward
them. "Good day. Had some vodka? Well, come along then."

Levin got up and went with him to the big table spread with
spirits and appetizers of the most varied kinds. One would have
thought that out of two dozen delicacies one might find something to
one's taste, but Stepan Arkadyevich asked for something special, and
one of the liveried waiters standing by immediately brought what was
required. They drank a pony each and returned to their table.

At once, while they were still at their soup, Gaghin was served with
champagne, and told the waiter to fill four glasses. Levin did not
refuse the wine, and asked for a second bottle. He was very hungry,
and ate and drank with great enjoyment, and with still greater
enjoyment took part in the lively and simple conversation of his
companions. Gaghin, dropping his voice, told the last good story
from Peterburg, and the story, though improper and stupid, was so
ludicrous that Levin broke into roars of laughter so loud that those
near looked round.

"That's in the same style as, 'that's a thing I can't endure!' You
know the story?" said Stepan Arkadyevich. "Ah, that's exquisite!
Another bottle," he said to the waiter, and he began to relate his
good story.

"Piotr Illyich Vinovsky invites you to drink with him," a little old
waiter interrupted Stepan Arkadyevich, bringing two delicate glasses
of sparkling champagne, and addressing Stepan Arkadyevich and Levin.
Stepan Arkadyevich took the glass, and looking toward a bald man
with red mustaches at the other end of the table, he nodded to him,
smiling.

"Who's that?" asked Levin.

"You met him once at my place, don't you remember? A good-natured
fellow."

Levin did the same as Stepan Arkadyevich and took the glass.

Stepan Arkadyevich's anecdote too was very amusing. Levin told his
story, and that too was successful. Then they talked of horses, of the
races, of what they had been doing that day, and of how smartly
Vronsky's Atlas had won the first prize. Levin did not notice how
the time passed at dinner.

"Ah! And here they are!" Stepan Arkadyevich said toward the end of
dinner, leaning over the back of his chair and holding out his hand to
Vronsky, who came up with a tall colonel of the Guards. Vronsky's face
too beamed with the look of good-humored enjoyment that was general in
the club. He propped his elbow playfully on Stepan Arkadyevich's
shoulder, whispering something to him, and he held out his hand to
Levin with the same good-humored smile.

"Very glad to meet you," he said. "I looked out for you at the
election, but I was told you had gone away."

"Yes, I left the same day. We've just been talking of your horse.
I congratulate you," said Levin. "It was run in very fast time."

"Yes; you've race horses too, haven't you?"

"No, my father had; but I remember and know something about them."

"Where have you dined?" asked Stepan Arkadyevich.

"We were at the second table, behind the columns."

"We've been celebrating his success," said the tall colonel. "It's
his second Imperial prize. I wish I might have the luck at cards he
has with horses."

"Well, why waste precious time? I'm going to the 'infernal
regions,'" added the colonel, and he walked away.

"That's Iashvin," Vronsky said in answer to Turovtsin, and he sat
down in the vacated seat beside them. He drank the glass offered
him, and ordered a bottle of wine. Under the influence of the club
atmosphere or the wine he had drunk, Levin chatted away to Vronsky
of the best breeds of cattle, and was very glad not to feel the
slightest hostility to this man. He even told him, among other things,
that he had heard from his wife that she had met him at Princess Marya
Borissovna's.

"Ah, Princess Marya Borissovna- she's exquisite!" said Stepan
Arkadyevich, and he told an anecdote about her which set them all
laughing. Vronsky in particular laughed with such simplehearted
amusement that Levin felt quite reconciled to him.

"Well, have we finished?" said Stepan Arkadyevich, getting up with a
smile. "Let us go."

                           VIII.


Getting up from the table, Levin walked with Gaghin through the
lofty rooms to the billiard room, feeling his arms swing as he
walked with a peculiar lightness and ease. As he crossed the big room,
he came upon his father-in-law.

"Well, how do you like our Temple of Indolence?" said the Prince,
taking his arm. "Come along, come along!"

"Yes, I wanted to walk about and look at everything. It's
interesting."

"Yes, it's interesting for you. But its interest for me is quite
different. You look at such little ancients, now," he said, pointing
to a club member with bent back and pendulous lip, shuffling toward
them in his soft boots, "and imagine that they were shlupiks like that
from their birth up."

"Shlupiks?"

"I see you don't know that name. That's our club designation. You
know the game of rolling eggs: when one's rolled a long while it
becomes a shlupik. So it is with us; one goes on coming and coming
to the club, and ends by becoming a shlupik. Ah, you laugh! but we
look out, for fear of dropping into it ourselves. You know Prince
Chechensky?" inquired the Prince; and Levin saw by his face that he
was just going to relate something funny.

"No, I don't know him."

"You don't say so! Well, Prince Chechensky is a well-known figure.
No matter, though. He's always playing billiards here. Only three
years ago he was not a shlupik, and kept up his spirits, and even used
to call other people shlupiks. But one day he turns up, and our
porter... You know Vassilii? Why, that fat one; he's famous for his
bons mots. And so Prince Chechensky asks him, 'Come, Vassilii who's
here? Any shlupiks here yet?' And he says: 'You're the third.' Yes, my
dear boy, that he did!"

Talking and greeting the friends they met, Levin and the Prince
walked through all the rooms: the great room where tables had
already been set, and the usual partners were playing for small
stakes; the divan room, where they were playing chess, and Sergei
Ivanovich was sitting talking to somebody; the billiard room, where,
about the sofa in a recess, there was a lively party drinking
champagne- Gaghin was one of them. They peeped into the "infernal
regions," where a good many men were crowding round one table, at
which Iashvin was sitting. Trying not to make a noise, they walked
into the dark reading room, where under the shaded lamps there sat a
young man with a wrathful countenance, turning over one journal
after another, and a bald general buried in a book. They went, too,
into what the Prince called the intellectual room, where three
gentlemen were engaged in a heated discussion of the latest
political news.

"Prince, please come, we're ready," said one of his card party,
who had come to look for him, and the Prince went off. Levin sat
down and listened, but recalling all the conversation of the morning
he felt all of a sudden fearfully bored. He got up hurriedly, and went
to look for Oblonsky and Turovtsin, with whom it had been so pleasant.

Turovtsin was one of the circle drinking in the billiard room, and
Stepan Arkadyevich was talking with Vronsky near the door at the
farther corner of the room.

"It's not that she's dull; but this undefined, this unsettled
position," Levin caught, and he was going to hurry away, but Stepan
Arkadyevich called him.

"Levin!" said Stepan Arkadyevich; and Levin noticed that his eyes
were not full of tears exactly, but moist, which always happened
when he had been drinking, or when he was touched. Today it was due to
both causes. "Levin, don't go," he said, and he warmly squeezed his
arm above the elbow, obviously not at all wishing to let him go.

"This is a true friend of mine- almost my greatest friend," he
said to Vronsky. "You also are still closer and dearer to me. And I
want you, and I know you ought, to be friends, and great friends,
because you're both splendid fellows."

"Well, there's nothing for us now but to kiss and be friends,"
Vronsky said, with good-natured playfulness, holding out his hand.

Levin quickly took the offered hand, and squeezed it warmly.

"I'm very, very glad," said Levin.

"Waiter, a bottle of champagne," said Stepan Arkadyevich.

"And I'm very glad," said Vronsky.

But in spite of Stepan Arkadyevich's desire, and their own desire,
they had nothing to talk about, and both felt it.

"Do you know, he has never met Anna?" Stepan Arkadyevich said to
Vronsky. "And I want above everything to take him to see her. Let us
go, Levin!"

"Really?" said Vronsky. "She will be very glad to see you. I
should be going home at once," he added, "but I'm worried about
Iashvin, and I want to stay on till he finishes."

"Why, is he losing?"

"He keeps losing, and I'm the only friend that can restrain him."

"Well, what do you say to pyramids? Levin, will you play?
Capital!" said Stepan Arkadyevich. "Get the table ready," he said to
the marker.

"It has been ready a long while," answered the marker, who had
already set the balls in a triangle, and was knocking the red one
about for his own diversion.

"Well, let us begin."

After the game Vronsky and Levin sat down at Gaghin's table, and
at Stepan Arkadyevich's suggestion Levin took a hand in the game.
Vronsky sat down at the table, surrounded by friends, who were
incessantly coming up to him. Every now and then he went to the
"infernal" to keep an eye on Iashvin. Levin was enjoying a
delightful sense of repose after the mental fatigue of the morning. He
was glad that all hostility was at an end with Vronsky, and the
sense of peace, decorum and comfort never left him.

When the game was over, Stepan Arkadyevich took Levin's arm.

"Well, let us go to Anna's, then. At once? Eh? She is at home. I
promised her long ago to bring you. Where were you intending to
spend the evening?"

"Oh, nowhere specially. I promised Sviiazhsky to go to the Society
of Agriculture. By all means, let us go," said Levin.

"Very good; come along. Find out if my carriage is here," Stepan
Arkadyevich said to the waiter.

Levin went up to the table, paid the forty roubles he had lost; paid
his bill, the amount of which was in some mysterious way ascertained
by the little old waiter who stood at the counter, and, swinging his
arms, he walked through all the rooms to the exit.

                           IX.


"Oblonsky's carriage!" the porter shouted in an angry bass. The
carriage drove up and both got in. It was only for the first few
moments, while the carriage was driving out of the clubhouse gates,
that Levin was still under the influence of the club atmosphere of
repose, comfort, and unimpeachable good form. But as soon as the
carriage drove out into the street, and he felt it jolting over the
uneven road, heard the angry shout of a driver coming toward them, saw
in the uncertain light the red blind of a tavern and the shops, this
impression was dissipated, and he began to think over his actions, and
to wonder whether he was doing right in going to see Anna. What
would Kitty say? But Stepan Arkadyevich gave him no time for
reflection, and, as though divining his doubts, he dispersed them.

"How glad I am," he said, "that you should know her! You know
Dolly has long wished for it. And Lvov's been to see her, and often
goes. Though she is my sister," Stepan Arkadyevich pursued, "I don't
hesitate to say that she's a remarkable woman.... But you will see.
Her position is very painful, especially now."

"Why especially now?"

"We are carrying on negotiations with her husband about a divorce.
And he's agreed; but there are difficulties in regard to the son,
and the business, which ought to have been arranged long ago, has been
dragging on for three months past. As soon as the divorce is over, she
will marry Vronsky. How stupid these old ritual forms are- 'Isaiah,
rejoice!'- which no one believes in, and which only prevent people
being comfortable!" Stepan Arkadyevich put in. "Well, then their
position will be as regular as mine, as yours."

"What is the difficulty?" said Levin.

"Oh, it's a long and tedious story The whole business is in such
an indefinite state with us. But the point is, she has been for
three months in Moscow, where everyone knows her, waiting for the
divorce; she goes out nowhere, sees no woman except Dolly, because, do
you understand, she doesn't care to have people come as a favor.
That fool Princess Varvara, even she has left her, considering this
a breach of propriety. Well, you see, in such a position any other
woman would not have found resources in herself. But you'll see how
she has arranged her life- how calm, how dignified she is. To the
left, in the alley opposite the church!" shouted Stepan Arkadyevich,
leaning out of the window of the carriage. "Phew! How hot it is!" he
said, in spite of twelve degrees of frost, flinging open his
unbuttoned overcoat still more.

"But she has a daughter: no doubt she's busy looking after her?"
said Levin.

"I believe you picture every woman simply as a female, une
couveuse," said Stepan Arkadyevich. "If she's occupied, it must be
with her children. No, she brings her up capitally, I believe, but one
doesn't hear about her. She's busy, in the first place, with what
she writes. I see you're smiling ironically, but you're wrong. She's
writing a children's book, and doesn't talk about it to anyone, but
she read it to me and I gave the manuscript to Vorkuev... you know,
the publisher.... And he's an author himself too, I fancy. He
understands those things, and he says it's a remarkable piece of work.
But are you fancying she's a writing woman? Not a bit of it. She's a
woman with a heart, before everything, but you'll see. Now she has a
little English girl with her, and a whole family she's looking after."

"Oh, something in a philanthropic way?"

"Why, you will look at everything in the worst light. It's not
from philanthropy, it's from the heart. They- that is, Vronsky- had
a trainer, an Englishman, first-rate in his own line, but a
drunkard. He's completely given up to drink- delirium tremens- and the
family were cast on the world. She saw them, helped them, got more and
more interested in them, and now the whole family is on her hands. But
not by way of patronage, you know, helping with money; she's herself
preparing the boys in Russian for the high school, and she's taken the
little girl to live with her. But you'll see her for yourself."

The carriage drove into the courtyard, and Stepan Arkadyevich rang
loudly at the entrance where a sleigh was standing.

And, without asking the servant who opened the door whether the lady
were at home, Stepan Arkadyevich walked into the hall. Levin
followed him, more and more doubtful whether he were doing right or
wrong.

Looking at himself in the glass, Levin noticed that he was red in
the face, but he felt certain he was not drunk, and he followed Stepan
Arkadyevich up the carpeted stairs. At the top Stepan Arkadyevich
inquired of the footman, who bowed to him as to an intimate friend,
who was with Anna Arkadyevna, and received the answer that it was M.
Vorkuev.

"Where are they?"

"In the study."

Passing through the dining room, a room not very large, with dark
paneled walls, Stepan Arkadyevich and Levin walked over the soft
carpet to the half-dark study, lighted up by a single lamp with a
big dark shade. Another lamp with a reflector was hanging on the wall,
lighting up a big full-length portrait of a woman, which Levin could
not help looking at. It was the portrait of Anna, painted in Italy
by Mikhailov. While Stepan Arkadyevich went behind the treillage,
and the man's voice which had been speaking paused, Levin gazed at the
portrait, which stood out from the frame in the brilliant light thrown
on it, and he could not tear himself away from it. He positively
forgot where he was, and not even hearing what was said, he could
not take his eyes off the marvelous portrait. It was not a picture,
but a living, charming woman, with black curling hair, with bare
arms and shoulders, with a pensive smile on the lips, covered with
soft down; triumphantly and softly she looked at him with eyes that
baffled him. She was not living, only because she was more beautiful
than any living woman can be.

"I am delighted." He heard suddenly near him a voice, unmistakably
addressing him, the voice of the very woman he had been admiring in
the portrait. Anna had come from behind the treillage to meet him, and
Levin saw in the dim light of the study the very woman of the
portrait, in a dark-blue gown of changeable blue, not in the same
position nor with the same expression, but with the same perfection of
beauty which the artist had caught in the portrait. She was less
dazzling in reality, but, on the other hand, there was something fresh
and seductive in the living woman which was not in the portrait.

                           X.


She had risen to meet him, without concealing her pleasure at seeing
him; and in the quiet ease with which she held out her little and
vigorous hand, introduced him to Vorkuev, and indicated a
red-haired, pretty little girl who was sitting at work, calling her
her pupil, Levin recognized and liked the manners of a woman of the
great world, always self-possessed and natural.

"I am delighted, delighted," she repeated, and on her lips these
simple words took for Levin's ears a special significance. "I have
known you and liked you for a long while, both from your friendship
with Stiva and for your wife's sake.... I knew her for a very short
time, but she left on me the impression of an exquisite flower- just a
flower. And to think she will soon be a mother!"

She spoke easily and without haste, looking now and then from
Levin to her brother, and Levin felt that the impression he was making
was good, and he felt immediately at home, at ease and happy with her,
as though he had known her from childhood.

"Ivan Petrovich and I settled in Alexei's study," she said in answer
to Stepan Arkadyevich's question whether he might smoke, "just so as
to be able to smoke"- and glancing at Levin, instead of asking whether
he would smoke, she pulled closer a tortoise-shell cigarette case
and took a corn-leaf cigarette.

"How are you feeling today?" her brother asked her.

"Oh, nothing. Nerves, as usual."

"Yes, isn't it extraordinarily fine?" said Stepan Arkadyevich,
noticing that Levin was glancing at the picture.

"I have never seen a better portrait."

"And extraordinarily like, isn't it?" said Vorkuev.

Levin looked from the portrait to the original. A peculiar
brilliance lighted up Anna's face when she felt his eyes on her. Levin
flushed, and to cover his confusion would have asked whether she had
seen Darya Alexandrovna lately; but at that moment Anna spoke:

"We were just talking, Ivan Petrovich and I, of Vashchenkov's last
pictures. Have you seen them?"

"Yes, I have seen them," answered Levin.

"But, I beg your pardon, I interrupted you... You were saying?..."

Levin asked if she had seen Dolly lately.

"She was here yesterday. She was very indignant with the high school
people on Grisha's account. The Latin teacher, it seems, had been
unfair to him."

"Yes, I have seen his pictures. I didn't care for them very much,"
Levin went back to the subject she had started.

Levin talked now not at all with that purely businesslike attitude
to the subject with which he had been talking all the morning. Every
word in his conversation with her had a special significance. And
talking to her was pleasant; still pleasanter was it to listen to her.

Anna talked not merely naturally and cleverly, but cleverly and
carelessly, attaching no value to her own ideas and giving great
weight to the ideas of the person she was talking to.

The conversation turned on the new movement in art, on the new
illustrations of the Bible by a French artist. Vorkuev attacked the
artist for a realism carried to the point of coarseness. Levin said
that the French had carried conventionality further than anyone, and
that consequently they see a great merit in the return to realism.
In the fact of not lying they see poetry.

Never had anything clever said by Levin given him so much pleasure
as this remark. Anna's face lighted up at once, as she immediately
appreciated the thought. She laughed.

"I laugh," she said, "as one laughs when one sees a very true
portrait. What you said so perfectly hits off French art now,
painting- and literature too, indeed- Zola, Daudet. But perhaps it
is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious,
conventional types, and then- all the combinaisons made- they are
tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true
figures."

"That's perfectly true," said Vorkuev.

"So you've been at the club?" she said to her brother.

"Yes, yes, this a woman!" Levin thought, forgetting himself and
staring persistently at her lovely, mobile face, which at that
moment was all at once completely transformed. Levin did not hear what
she was talking of as she leaned over to her brother, but he was
struck by the change of her expression. Her face- so handsome a moment
before in its repose- suddenly wore a look of strange curiosity,
anger, and pride. But this lasted only an instant. She half-closed her
eyes, as though recollecting something.

"Oh, well, but that's of no interest to anyone," she said, and she
turned to the English girl.

"Please order the tea in the drawing room," she said in English.

The girl got up and went out.

"Well, how did she get through her examination?" asked Stepan
Arkadyevich.

"Splendidly! She's a very gifted child and a sweet character."

"It will end in your loving her more than your own."

"There a man speaks. In love there's no such thing as more or
less. I love my daughter with one love, and her with another."

"I was just telling Anna Arkadyevna," said Vorkuev, "that if she
were to put a hundredth part of the energy she devotes to this English
girl to the public question of the education of Russian children,
she would be doing a great and useful work."

"Yes, but I can't help it; I couldn't do it. Count Alexei
Kirillovich urged me very much" (as she uttered the words Count Alexei
Kirillovich she glanced with appealing timidity at Levin, and he
unconsciously responded with a respectful and reassuring look), "he
urged me to take up the school in the village. I visited it several
times. The children were very dear, but I could not feel drawn to
the work. You speak of energy. Energy rests upon love; and, come as it
will, there's no forcing it. I took to this child- I could not
myself say why."

And she glanced again at Levin. And her smile and her glance- all
told him that it was to him only she was addressing her words, valuing
his good opinion, and at the same time sure beforehand that they
understood one another.

"I quite understand that," Levin answered. "It's impossible to
give one's heart to a school or such institutions in general, and I
believe that that's just why philanthropic institutions always give
such poor results."

She was silent for a while, then she smiled. "Yes, yes," she agreed;
"I never could. Je n'ai pas le coeur assez large to love a whole
asylum of horrid little girls. Cela ne m'a jamais reussi. There are so
many women who have made themselves une position sociale in that
way. And now more than ever," she said with a mournful, confiding
expression, ostensibly addressing her brother, but unmistakably
intending her words only for Levin, "now when I have such need of some
occupation, I cannot." And suddenly frowning (Levin saw that she was
frowning at herself for talking about herself) she changed the
subject. "I know about you," she said to Levin; "that you're not a
public-spirited citizen, and I have defended you to the best of my
ability."

"How have you defended me?"

"Oh, according to the attacks made on you. But won't you have some
tea?" She rose and took up a book bound in morocco.

"Give it to me, Anna Arkadyevna," said Vorkuev, indicating the book.
"It's well worth taking up."

"Oh, no, it's all so sketchy."

"I told him about it," Stepan Arkadyevich said to his sister,
nodding at Levin.

"You shouldn't have. My writing is something after the fashion of
those little baskets and carvings which Liza Mertsalova used to sell
me from the prisons. She had the direction of the prison department in
that society," she turned to Levin; "and they were miracles of
patience, the work of those poor wretches."

And Levin saw a new trait in this woman, who attracted him so
extraordinarily. Besides wit, grace, and beauty, she had truth. She
had no wish to hide from him all the bitterness of her position. As
she said that she sighed, and her face, suddenly assuming a hard
expression, looked, as it were, turned to stone. With that
expression on her face she was more beautiful than ever; but the
expression was new; it was utterly unlike that expression, radiant
with happiness and creating happiness, which had been caught by the
painter in her portrait. Levin looked more than once at the portrait
and at her figure, as taking her brother's arm she walked with him
to the high doors, and he felt for her a tenderness and pity at
which he wondered himself.

She asked Levin and Vorkuev to go into the drawing room, while she
stayed behind to say a few words to her brother. "About her divorce,
about Vronsky, and what he's doing at the club, about me?" wondered
Levin. And he was so keenly interested by the question of what she was
saying to Stepan Arkadyevich, that he scarcely heard what Vorkuev
was telling him of the qualities of the story for children Anna
Arkadyevna had written.

At tea the same pleasant sort of talk, full of interesting matter,
continued. There was not a single instant when a subject for
conversation was to seek; on the contrary, it was felt that one had
hardly time to say what one had to say, and eagerly held back to
hear what the others were saying. And all that was said, not only by
her, but by Vorkuev and Stepan Arkadyevich- all, so it seemed to
Levin, gained peculiar significance from her attention to him and
her criticism.

While he followed this interesting conversation, Levin was all the
time admiring her- her beauty, her intelligence, her culture, and at
the same time her directness and her cordiality. He listened and
talked, and all the while he was thinking of her inner life, trying to
divine her feelings. And though he had judged her so severely
hitherto, now by some strange chain of reasoning he was justifying her
and also was sorry for her, and afraid that Vronsky did not fully
understand her. At ten o'clock, when Stepan Arkadyevich got up to go
(Vorkuev had left earlier), it seemed to Levin that he had only just
come. Regretfully Levin too rose.

"Good-by," she said, holding his hand and glancing into his face
with a winning look. "I am very glad que la glace est rompue."

She dropped his hand, and half-closed her eyes.

"Tell your wife that I love her as before, and that if she cannot
pardon me my position, then my wish for her is that she may never
pardon me. To pardon it, one must go through what I have gone through,
and may God spare her that."

"Certainly, yes, I will tell her..." Levin said, blushing.