Anna Karenina

Chapter 21
Dolly came out of her room to the tea of the grownups. Stepan Arkadyevich did not come out. He must have left his wife's room by a back door.
`I am afraid you'll be cold upstairs,' observed Dolly, addressing Anna; `I want to move you downstairs, and we shall be nearer.'

`Oh, please, don't trouble about me,' answered Anna, looking intently into Dolly's face, trying to make out whether there had been a reconciliation or not.

`It will be lighter for you here,' answered her sister-in-law.

`I assure you that I can sleep like a marmot anywhere and any time.'

`What's all this?' inquired Stepan Arkadyevich, coming out of his room and addressing his wife.

From his tone both Kitty and Anna at once gathered that a reconciliation had taken place.

`I want to move Anna downstairs, but we must hang up blinds. No one knows how to do it; I must see to it myself,' answered Dolly addressing him.

`God knows whether they are fully reconciled,' thought Anna, hearing her tone, cold and composed.

`Come, Dolly, why be always making difficulties,' answered her husband. `There, I'll do it all, if you like...'

`I know how you do everything,' answered Dolly. `You tell Matvei to do what can't be done, and go away yourself, leaving him to make a muddle of everything,' and her habitual, mocking smile curved the corners of Dolly's lips as she spoke.

`Full, full reconciliation - full,' thought Anna, `thank God!' and rejoicing that she was the cause of it, she went up to Dolly and kissed her.

`Not at all. Why do you always look down on me and Matvei?' said Stepan Arkadyevich, smiling hardly perceptibly, and addressing his wife.

The whole evening Dolly was, as always, a little mocking in her tone to her husband, while Stepan Arkadyevich was happy and cheerful, yet not so as to seem as if, having been forgiven, he had forgotten his fault.

At half-past nine o'clock a particularly joyful and pleasant family conversation over the tea table at the Oblonsky's was broken up by an apparently simple incident. But this simple incident for some reason struck everyone as strange. Having begun talking about common acquaintances in Peterburg, Anna got up quickly.

`She is in my album,' she said; `and, by the way, I'll show you my Seriozha,' she added, with a mother's smile of pride.

Toward ten o'clock, when she usually said good night to her son, and often, before going to a ball put him to bed herself, she felt depressed at being so far from him; and whatever she was talking about, she kept coming back in thought to her curly-headed Seriozha. She longed to look at his photograph and talk of him. Seizing the first pretext, she got up, and with her light, resolute step went for her album. The stairs up to her room came out on the landing of the great warm main staircase.

Just as she was leaving the drawing room, a ring was heard in the hall.

`Who can that be?' said Dolly.

`It's too early for me to be fetched, and for anyone else it's too late,' observed Kitty.

`It's sure to be someone with papers for me,' put in Stepan Arkadyevich. When Anna was passing the top of the staircase, a servant was running up to announce the visitor, while the visitor himself was standing under a lamp. Anna, glancing down, at once recognized Vronsky, and a strange feeling of pleasure and, at the same time, of some dread, stirred in her heart. He stood there, without taking off his coat, and pulling something out of his pocket. At the instant when she was just halfway up the stairs he raised his eyes, caught sight of her, and the expression of his face changed to embarrassment and dismay. With a slight inclination of her head she passed, hearing behind her Stepan Arkadyevich's loud voice calling him to come up, and the quiet, soft, and calm voice of Vronsky refusing.

When Anna returned with the album he was already gone, and Stepan Arkadyevich was telling them that he had called to inquire about the dinner they were giving next day to a foreign celebrity.

`And nothing would induce him to come up. What a queer fellow he is!' added Stepan Arkadyevich.

Kitty blushed. She thought that she was the only person who knew why he had come, and why he would not come up. `He has been at home,' she thought, `and didn't find me, and thought I should be here, but he did not come up because he thought it late, and Anna's here.'

All of them looked at each other, saying nothing, and began to look at Anna's album.

There was nothing either exceptional or strange in a man's calling at half-past nine on a friend to inquire details of a proposed dinner party and not coming in, yet it seemed strange to all of them. And to Anna it seemed stranger and more unpleasant than to any of the others.

Chapter 22
The ball was only just beginning as Kitty and her mother walked up the great staircase, flooded with light, and lined with flowers and footmen in powder and red coats. From the rooms came a constant, steady noise, like that of a hive aswarm; and as they were giving the final little touches to hair and dresses before a mirror on the landing between potted trees, they heard, coming from the ballroom, the gently distinct notes of the fiddles of the orchestra, beginning the first waltz. A little ancient in civilian dress, arranging his gray curls before another mirror, and diffusing an odor of scent, stumbled against them on the stairs, and stood aside, evidently admiring Kitty, whom he did not know. A beardless youth, one of those society youths whom the old Prince Shcherbatsky called whelps, in an exceedingly open waistcoat, straightening his white tie as he went, bowed to them and after running by, came back to ask Kitty for a quadrille. As the first quadrille had already been given to Vronsky, she had to promise this youth the second. An officer, buttoning his glove, stood aside in the doorway, and, stroking his mustache, admired the rosy Kitty.
Although her dress, her coiffure, and all the preparations for the ball had cost Kitty much trouble and planning, at this moment she walked into the ballroom in the elaborate tulle dress over a pink slip as unconcernedly and simply as though all the rosettes and lace, all the minute details of her attire, had not cost her or her family a moment's attention, as though she had been born in this tulle and lace, with this towering coiffure, surmounted by a rose and two small leaves.

When, just before entering the ballroom, the old Princess tried to adjust a sash ribbon that had become twisted, Kitty had drawn back a little. She felt that everything must be right of itself, and graceful, and that nothing could need setting straight.

Kitty had one of her good days. Her dress was not uncomfortable anywhere; her lace bertha did not droop anywhere; her rosettes were neither crushed nor torn off; her pink slippers with high, curving heels did not pinch, but gladdened her tiny feet; and the thick bandeaux of fair hair kept up on her head. All the three buttons buttoned up without tearing on the long glove that covered her hand without concealing its lines. The black velvet ribbon of her locket nestled with special tenderness round her neck. This velvet ribbon was a darling; at home, regarding her neck in the looking glass, Kitty had felt that that velvet was speaking. About all the rest there might be a doubt, but the velvet ribbon was a darling. Kitty smiled here too, at the ball, when she glanced at it in the glass. Her bare shoulders and arms gave Kitty a sensation of chill marble - a sensation she particularly liked. Her eyes sparkled, and her rosy lips could not help but smile from the consciousness of their own attractiveness. She had scarcely entered the ballroom and reached the tulle-ribbon-lace-colored throng of ladies, waiting to be asked to dance - Kitty was never one of that throng - when she was asked for a waltz, and asked by the best partner, the first star in the hierarchy of the ballroom, a renowned conductor of the dances and master of ceremonies, married man, handsome and well built, Iegorushka Korsunsky. He had only just left the Countess Banina, with whom he had danced the first turn of the waltz, and, scanning his demesne - that is to say, a few couples who had started dancing - he caught sight of Kitty entering, and flew up to her with that peculiar, easy amble which is confined to conductors of the dances. Bowing and without even asking her if she cared to dance, he put out his arm to encircle her slender waist. She looked round for someone to give her fan to, and their hostess, smiling to her, took it.

`How good of you to come in good time,' he said to her, embracing her waist; `such a bad habit to be late.'

Bending her left arm, she laid it on his shoulder, and her little feet in their pink slippers began swiftly, lightly, and rhythmically moving over the slippery floor in time to the music.

`It's a rest to waltz with you,' he said to her, as they fell into the first slow steps of the waltz. `It's charming - such lightness, precision.' He said to her the same thing he said to almost all his partners whom he knew well.

She smiled at his praise, and continued to look about the room over his shoulder. She was not like a girl at her first ball, for whom all faces in the ballroom melt into one vision of fairyland. And she was not a girl who had gone the stale round of balls till every face in the ballroom was familiar and tiresome. But she was in the middle stage between these two; she was excited, and at the same time she had sufficient self-possession to be able to observe. In the left corner of the ballroom she saw the very flower of society grouped together. There - impossibly naked - was the beauty Liddy, Korsunsky's wife; there was the lady of the house; there shone the bald pate of Krivin, always to be found wherever the best people were; in that direction gazed the young men, not venturing to approach; there, too, she descried Stiva, and there she saw the charming figure and head of Anna in a black velvet gown. And he was there. Kitty had not seen him since the evening she refused Levin. With her farsighted eyes, knew him at once, and was even aware that he was looking at her.

`Another turn, eh? You're not tired?' said Korsunsky, a little out of breath.

`No, thank you!'

`Where shall I take you?'

`Madame Karenina's here, I think.... Take me to her.'

`Wherever you command.'

And Korsunsky began waltzing with measured steps straight toward the group in the left corner, continually saying, `Pardon, mesdames, pardon, pardon, mesdames,' and steering his course through the sea of lace, tulle and ribbon, and not disarranging a feather, he turned his partner sharply round, so that her slim ankles, in light, transparent stockings, were exposed to view, and her train floated out in fan shape and covered Krivin's knees. Korsunsky bowed, set straight his open shirt front, and gave her his arm to conduct her to Anna Arkadyevna. Kitty, flushed, took her train from Krivin's knees, and, a little giddy, looked round, seeking Anna. Anna was not in lilac, as Kitty had so urgently wished, but in a black, low-cut, velvet gown, showing her full shoulders and bosom, that looked as though carved in old ivory, and her rounded arms, with tiny, slender hands. The whole gown was trimmed with Venetian guipure. On her head, among her black hair - her own, with no false additions - was a little wreath of pansies, and a similar one on the black ribbon of her sash, among white lace. Her coiffure was not striking. All that was noticeable was the little willful tendrils of her curly hair that persisted in escaping on the nape of her neck, and on her temples. Encircling her sculptured, strong neck was a thread of pearls.

Kitty had been seeing Anna every day; she adored her, and had pictured her invariably in lilac. But now, seeing her in black, she felt that she had not fully perceived her charm. She saw her now as someone quite new and surprising to her. Now she understood that Anna could not have been in lilac, and that her charm was precisely in that she always stood out against her attire, that her dress could never be noticeable on her. And her black dress, with its sumptuous lace, was not noticeable on her; it was only the frame and all that was seen was she - simple, natural, elegant, and at the same time gay and animated.

She was standing, as always, very erect, and when Kitty drew near the group she was speaking to the master of the house, her head slightly turned toward him.

`No, I won't cast a stone,' she was saying, in answer to something, `though I can't understand it she went on, shrugging her shoulders, and she turned at once with a soft smile of protection toward Kitty. With a cursory feminine glance she scanned her attire, and made a movement of her head, hardly perceptible, but understood by Kitty, signifying approval of her dress and her looks. `You came into the room dancing,' she added.

`This is one of my most faithful supporters,' said Korsunsky, bowing to Anna Arkadyevna, whom he had not yet seen. `The Princess helps to make any ball festive and successful. Anna Arkadyevna, a waltz?' he said, bending down to her.

`Why, have you met?' inquired their host.

`Is there anyone we have not met? My wife and I are like white wolves - everyone knows us,' answered Korsunsky. `A waltz, Anna Arkadyevna?'

`I don't dance whenever it's possible not to,' she said.

`But tonight it's impossible,' answered Korsunsky.

During the conversation Vronsky was approaching them.

`Well, since it's impossible tonight, let us start,' she said, not noticing Vronsky's bow, and hastily put her hand on Korsunsky's shoulder.

`What is she vexed with him about?' thought Kitty, discerning that Anna had intentionally not responded to Vronsky's bow. Vronsky went up to Kitty, reminding her of the first quadrille, and expressing his regret at not having seen her all this time. Kitty gazed in admiration at Anna waltzing, as she listened to him. She expected him to ask her for a waltz, but he did not, and she glanced wonderingly at him. He flushed, and hurriedly asked her to waltz, but he had barely put his arm round her slender waist and taken the first step when the music suddenly stopped. Kitty looked into his face, which was so close to her own, and long afterward - for several years - this look, full of love, to which he made no response, cut her to the heart with an agony of shame.

`Pardon! Pardon! Waltz! Waltz!' shouted Korsunsky from the other side of the room, and, seizing the first young lady he came across he began dancing.

Chapter 23
Vronsky and Kitty waltzed several times round the room. After the waltz Kitty went to her mother, and she had hardly time to say a few words to Countess Nordstone when Vronsky came up again for the first quadrille. During the quadrille nothing of any significance was said: there was disjointed talk between them of the Korsunskys, husband and wife, whom he described very amusingly, as delightful children at forty, and of the future popular theater; and only once did the conversation touch her to the quick - when he asked her whether Levin were here, and added that he liked him very much. But Kitty did not expect much from the quadrille. She looked forward with a sinking heart to the mazurka. She fancied that the mazurka would decide everything. The fact that he did not during the quadrille ask her for the mazurka did not trouble her. She felt sure she would dance it with him, as she had done at former balls, and refused five young men, saying she was engaged for the mazurka. The whole ball up to the last quadrille was for Kitty an enchanted vision of delightful colors, sounds and motions. She only sat down when she felt too tired and begged for a rest. But as she was dancing the last quadrille with one of the tiresome young men whom she could not refuse, she chanced to be vis-à-vis with Vronsky and Anna. She had not been near Anna since the beginning of the evening, and now she again suddenly saw her as quite new and surprising. She saw in her the signs of that excitement of success she knew so well in herself; she saw that she was intoxicated with the delighted admiration she was exciting. She knew that feeling and knew its signs, and saw them in Anna; saw the quivering, flashing light in her eyes, and the smile of happiness and excitement unconsciously curving her lips, and the distinct grace, precision and lightness of her movements.
`Who is it?' she asked herself. `All - or one?' And without keeping up her end of the conversation, the thread of which the harassed young man she was dancing with lost and could not pick up again, she obeyed with external liveliness the peremptory shouts of Korsunsky starting them all into the grand rond, and then into the chaine, and at the same time she kept watch with a growing pang at her heart. `No, it's not admiration of the crowd that has intoxicated her, but the adoration of one. And that one? Can it be he?' Every time he spoke to Anna the joyous light flashed into her eyes, and the smile of happiness curved her red lips. She seemed to make an effort to control herself, in order not to show these signs of delight, but they appeared on her face of themselves. `But what of him?' Kitty looked at him and was horrified. What was pictured so clearly to Kitty in the mirror of Anna's face she saw in him. What had become of his always calm, firm manner, and the carelessly calm expression of his face? Now every time he turned to her he bent his head, as though he would have fallen at her feet, and in his eyes there was nothing but humble submission and dread. `I would not offend you,' his eyes seemed to be saying each time, `but I want to save myself, and I don't know how.' On his face was a look such as Kitty had never seen before.

They were speaking of common acquaintances, keeping up the smallest of small talk, but to Kitty it seemed that every word they said was determining their fate and hers. And strangely enough, although they were actually talking of how absurd Ivan Ivanovich was with his French, and how the Eletsky girl might have made a better match, these words were yet fraught with significance for them, and they sensed this as much as Kitty did. The whole ball, the whole world, everything seemed screened by a fog within Kitty's soul. Nothing but the stern discipline of her bringing-up supported her and forced her to do what was expected of her - that is, to dance, to answer questions, to talk, even to smile. But before the mazurka, when they were beginning to rearrange the chairs and a few couples moved out of the smaller rooms into the big room, a moment of despair and horror came for Kitty. She had refused five partners, and now she was not dancing the mazurka. She had not even a hope of being asked for it, because she was so successful in society that the idea would never occur to anyone that she had remained disengaged till now. She would have to tell her mother she felt ill and go home, yet she had not the strength to do this. She felt crushed.

She went to the farthest end of the second drawing room and sank into a low chair. Her light, transparent skirts rose like a cloud about her slender waist; one bare, thin, soft, girlish arm, hanging listlessly, was lost in the folds of her pink tunic; in the other she held her fan and with rapid, short strokes fanned her burning face. Yet, while she looked like a butterfly clinging to a blade of grass, and just about to open its rainbow wings for fresh flight, her heart ached with a horrible despair.

`But perhaps I am wrong - perhaps it was not so?' And again she recalled all she had seen.

`Kitty, what is it?' said Countess Nordstone, stepping noiselessly over the carpet toward her. `I don't understand it.'

Kitty's lower lip began to quiver; she got up quickly.

`Kitty, you're not dancing the mazurka?'

`No, no,' said Kitty in a voice shaking with tears.

`He asked her for the mazurka in my presence,' said Countess Nordstone, knowing Kitty would understand who he and her were. `She said: ``Why, aren't you going to dance it with Princess Shcherbatskaia?'''

`Oh, it doesn't matter to me!' answered Kitty.

No one but she herself understood her position; no one knew that she had refused yesterday the man whom perhaps she loved, and refused him because she had put her faith in another.

Countess Nordstone found Korsunsky, with whom she was to dance the mazurka, and told him to ask Kitty.

Kitty danced in the first couple, and luckily for her she had not to talk because Korsunsky was all the time running about, overseeing his demesne. Vronsky and Anna were sitting almost opposite her. She saw them with her farsighted eyes, and saw them, too, close by when they met in the figures, and the more she saw of them the more convinced was she that her unhappiness was consummated. She saw that they felt themselves alone in this crowded room. And on Vronsky's face, always so firm and independent, she saw the look that had struck her, of bewilderment and humble submissiveness, like the expression of an intelligent dog when it has done wrong.

Anna smiled - and her smile was reflected by him. She grew thoughtful - and he became serious. Some supernatural force drew Kitty's eyes to Anna's face. She was charming in her simple black dress; charming were her round arms with their bracelets; charming was her firm neck with its thread of pearls; charming the straying curls of her loose hair; charming the graceful, light movements of her little feet and hands, charming was that lovely face in its animation - yet there was something terrible and cruel in her charm.

Kitty admired her more than ever, and more and more acute did her suffering grow. Kitty felt crushed, and her face showed it. When Vronsky caught sight of her, coming upon her in the mazurka, he did not at once recognize her, so changed was she.

`Delightful ball!' he said to her, merely for the sake of saying something.

`Yes,' she answered.

In the middle of the mazurka, repeating a complicated figure, newly invented by Korsunsky, Anna came forward into the center of the circle, chose two gentlemen, and summoned Kitty and another lady. Kitty gazed at her in dismay as she went up. Anna looked at her with drooping eyelids, and smiled, pressing her hand. But, noticing that Kitty only responded to her smile by a look of despair and amazement, she turned away from her, and began gaily talking to the other lady.

`Yes, there is something uncanny, devilish and charming about her,' said Kitty to herself.

Anna did not want to stay for supper, but the master of the house began urging her.

`Nonsense, Anna Arkadyevna,' said Korsunsky placing her bare hand upon his coat sleeve. `I've such an idea for a cotillon! Un bijou!'

And he moved gradually on, trying to draw her along with him. Their host smiled approvingly.

`No, I'm not going to stay,' answered Anna, smiling, but, in spite of her smile, both Korsunsky and the master of the house saw from her resolute tone that she would not stay.

`No; why, as it is, I have danced more at your ball in Moscow than I have all the winter in Peterburg,' said Anna, looking round at Vronsky, who stood near her. `I must rest a little before my journey.'

`Are you definitely going tomorrow then?' asked Vronsky.

`Yes, I suppose so,' answered Anna, as though wondering at the boldness of his question; but the irrepressible, quivering brilliance of her eyes and her smile set him on fire as she said it.

Anna Arkadyevna did not stay to supper, but went home.

Chapter 24
`Yes, there must be something disgusting, repulsive about me,' reflected Levin, as he left the Shcherbatsky's, and set out on foot for his brother's lodgings. `And I don't get on with other people. Pride, they say. No, I haven't even pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put myself in such a position.' And he pictured to himself Vronsky, happy, good-natured, clever and calm - certainly never placed in the awful position in which he had been that evening. `Yes, she was bound to choose him. It must be so, and I cannot complain of anyone or anything. I am myself to blame. What right had I to imagine she would care to join her life to mine? Who am I, and what am I? A nobody, not wanted by anyone, nor of use to anybody.' And he recalled his brother Nikolai, and dwelt with pleasure on the thought of him. `Isn't he right in saying that everything in the world is bad and vile? And are we fair in our judgment, present and past, of brother Nikolai? Of course, from the point of view of Procophii, seeing him in a torn cloak and tipsy, he's a despicable person. But I know him differently. I know his soul, and know that we are alike. And I, instead of going to seek him out, went out to dinner, and then came here.' Levin walked up to a lamppost, read his brother's address, which was in his pocketbook, and called a cabby. All the long way to his brother's Levin vividly recalled all the facts, familiar to him, of his brother Nikolai's life. He remembered how his brother, while at the university, and for a year afterward, had, in spite of the jeers of his companions, lived like a monk, strictly observing all religious rites, services and fasts, and avoiding every sort of pleasure - especially women. And now, afterward, he had all at once broken out: had associated with the most horrible people, and rushed into the most senseless debauchery. He remembered later the scandal over a boy, whom he had taken from the country to bring up, and, in a fit of rage, had so violently beaten that proceedings were brought against him for personal injury. Then he remembered the scandal with a sharper, to whom he had lost money, and given a promissory note, and against whom he had himself lodged a complaint, asserting that he had cheated him. (This was the money Sergei Ivanovich had paid.) Then he remembered how he had spent a night in a police station for disorderly conduct in the street. He remembered the shameful proceedings he had instituted against his brother Sergei Ivanovich, accusing him of not having paid him, apparently, his share of his mother's estate; and the last scandal, when he had gone to a Western province in an official capacity, and there had got into trouble for assaulting a village elder.... It was all horribly vile, yet to Levin it appeared not at all as vile as it inevitably would to those who did not know Nikolai, did not know all his story, did not know his heart.
Levin remembered that when Nikolai had been in the devout stage, the period of fasts and monks and church services, when he was seeking in religion a support and a curb for his passionate temperament, everyone, far from encouraging him, had jeered at him - and Levin had, too, with the others. They had teased him, calling him Noah and Monk; yet, when he had broken out, no one had helped him, but had all turned away from him, with horror and loathing.

Levin felt that brother Nikolai, in spite of all the ugliness of his life, in his soul, in the very depths of his soul, was no more in the wrong than the people who despised him. He was not to blame for having been born with his unbridled character and some pressure upon his intellect. For he had always wanted to be good. `I will tell him everything, without reserve, and I will make him speak without reserve, too, and I'll show him that I love him, and therefore understand him,' Levin resolved to himself, as, toward eleven o'clock, he reached the hotel of which he had the address.

`At the top, twelve and thirteen,' the porter answered Levin's inquiry.

`At home?'

`Probably he is at home.'

The door of No. 12 was half open, and, together with a streak of light, there issued thick fumes of cheap, poor tobacco, and the sound of a voice, unknown to Levin; but he knew at once that his brother was there: he recognized his cough.

As he went in at the door, the unknown voice was saying:

`It all depends with how much judgment and knowledge the thing's done.'

Konstantin Levin looked in at the door, and saw that the speaker was a young man with an immense shock of hair, wearing a Russian coat, and that a pock-marked young woman in a woollen gown, without collar or cuffs, was sitting on the sofa. His brother was not to be seen. Konstantin felt a sharp pang at his heart at the thought of the strange company in which his brother spent his life. No one had heard him, and Konstantin, taking off his galoshes, listened to what the gentleman in the Russian coat was saying. He was speaking of some enterprise.

`Well, the devil flay them, these privileged classes,' his brother's voice responded, with a cough. `Masha! get us some supper, and serve up some wine, if there's any left; or else send for some.'

The woman rose, came out from behind the partition, and saw Konstantin.

`There's some gentleman here, Nikolai Dmitrievich,' she said.

`Whom do you want?' said the voice of Nikolai Levin, angrily.

`It's I,' answered Konstantin Levin, coming forward into the light.

`Who's I?' Nikolai's voice said again, still more angrily. He could be heard getting up hurriedly, stumbling against something, and Levin saw, facing him in the doorway, the big scared eyes, and the huge, gaunt, stooping figure of his brother, so familiar, and yet astonishing in its oddity and sickliness.

He was even thinner than three years before, when Konstantin Levin had seen him last. He was wearing a short coat, and his hands and big bones seemed huger than ever. His hair had grown thinner, the same straight mustache hid his lips, the same eyes gazed strangely and naively at his visitor.

`Ah, Kostia!' he exclaimed suddenly, recognizing his brother, and his eyes lighted up with joy. But the same second he looked round at the young man, and gave the nervous jerk of his head and neck that Konstantin knew so well, as if his cravat were choking him; and a quite different expression - wild, suffering and cruel - rested on his emaciated face.

`I wrote to you and Sergei Ivanovich both that I don't know you, and don't want to know you. What is it you want?'

He was not at all the same as Konstantin had been fancying him. The worst and most oppressive part of his character, which made all relations with him so difficult, had been forgotten by Konstantin Levin when he thought of him; and now, when he saw his face, and especially that nervous twitching of his head, he remembered it all.

`I didn't want to see you for anything,' he answered timidly. `I've simply come to see you.'

His brother's timidity obviously softened Nikolai. His lips twitched.

`Oh, so that's it?' he said. `Well, come in; sit down. Like some supper? Masha, bring supper for three. No, stop a minute. Do you know who this is?' he said, addressing his brother, and indicating the gentleman in the Russian coat: `This is Mr. Kritsky, a friend of my Kiev days - a very remarkable man. He's persecuted by the police, of course, since he's not a scoundrel.'

And he surveyed, as it was a habit of his, everyone in the room. Seeing that the woman standing in the doorway was starting to go, he shouted to her. `Wait a minute, I said.' And with that inability to express himself, the incoherence that Konstantin knew so well, he began, with another look round at everyone, to tell Kritsky's story to his brother: how he had been expelled from the university for starting a benevolent society for the poor students, and classes on Sunday, and how he had afterward been a teacher in a rural school, and had been driven out of that, too; and had afterward been on trial for something or other.

`You're of the Kiev University?' said Konstantin Levin to Kritsky, to break the awkward silence that followed.

`Yes - I was in Kiev,' Kritsky replied angrily, his face darkening.

`And this woman,' Nikolai Levin interrupted him, pointing to her, `is my lifemate, Marya Nikolaevna. I took her out of a dive, and he jerked his neck as he said it. `But I love her and respect her, and anyone who wants to know me,' he added, raising his voice and knitting his brows, `is requested to love her and respect her. She's precisely the same as a wife to me - precisely. So now you know whom you've got to do with. And if you think you're lowering yourself - well, there's the door, and God speed thee!'

And again his eyes traveled inquiringly over all of them.

`But how will I lower myself? I don't understand.'

`Then, Masha, tell them to bring supper; three portions, and vodka and wine... No, wait a minute... No, it doesn't matter... Go ahead.'

Chapter 25
`So you see,' pursued Nikolai Levin, painfully wrinkling his forehead and twitching.
It was obviously difficult for him to think of what to say and do.

`Here, do you see?... He pointed to some sort of short iron bars, fastened together with twine, lying in a corner of the room. `Do you see that? That's the beginning of a new enterprise we're going into. This enterprise will be an industrial association....'

Konstantin scarcely heard him. He looked into his sickly, consumptive face, and he was more and more sorry for him, and he could not force himself to listen to what his brother was telling him about the association. He saw that this association was a mere anchor to save him from self-contempt. Nikolai Levin went on talking:

`You know that capital oppresses the worker. Our workers, the mouzhiks, bear all the burden of labor, and are so placed that, no matter how much they work, they can't escape from their position of beasts of burden. All the profits of labor, on which they might improve their position, and gain leisure for themselves, and after that education - all the surplus values, are taken from them by the capitalists. And society is so constituted that the harder they work, the greater the profit of the merchants and landowners, while they stay beasts of burden to the end. And that state of things must be changed,' he finished up, and looked questioningly at his brother.

`Yes, of course,' said Konstantin, looking at the patch of red that had come out on his brother's projecting cheekbones.

`And so we're founding a locksmith's association, where all the production and profit, and the chief instruments of production - everything - will be in common.'

`Where is the association to be?' asked Konstantin Levin.

`In the village of Vozdrem, government of Kazan.'

`But why in a village? In the villages, I think, there is plenty of work as it is. Why a locksmith's association in a village?'

`Why? Because the peasants are just as much slaves as they ever were, and that's why you and Sergei Ivanovich don't like people to try and get them out of their slavery,' said Nikolai Levin, exasperated by the objection.

Konstantin Levin sighed, looking meanwhile about the cheerless and dirty room. This sigh seemed to exasperate Nikolai still more.

`I know Sergei Ivanovich's, and your, aristocratic views. I know that he applies all the power of his intellect to justify existing evils.'

`I say, why do you talk of Sergei Ivanovich?' Levin let drop, smiling.

`Sergei Ivanovich? I'll tell you why!' Nikolai Levin shrieked suddenly at the name of Sergei Ivanovich. `I'll tell you why... But what's the use of talking? There's only one thing... What did you come to me for? You look down on all this; very well, then; but go away, in God's name - go away!' he shrieked, getting up from his chair. `Go away - go away!'

`I don't look down on it at all,' said Konstantin Levin timidly. `I don't even dispute it.'

At that instant Marya Nikolaevna came back. Nikolai Levin looked round angrily at her. She went quickly to him, and whispered something.

`I'm not well; I've grown irritable,' said Nikolai Levin, getting calmer and breathing painfully; `and then you talk to me of Sergei Ivanovich and his essay. It's such rubbish, such lying, such self-deception! What can a man write about justice who knows nothing of it? Have you read his essay?' he turned to Kritsky, sitting down again at the table, and clearing a space for himself by pushing back some half-made cigarettes.

`I haven't,' Kritsky responded gloomily, obviously not desiring to enter into the conversation.

`Why not?' said Nikolai Levin, now turning with exasperation upon Kritsky.

`Because I didn't see the use of wasting my time over it.'

`Oh, if you please - how did you know it would be wasting your time? That essay's too deep for many people - that is to say, it's over their heads. But it's different with me, I see through his ideas, and I know wherein the essay's weakness lies.'

They all fell silent. Kritsky got up sluggishly and reached for his cap.

`Won't you have supper? All right, good-by! Come round tomorrow with the locksmith.'

Kritsky had hardly gone out when Nikolai Levin smiled and winked.

`He, too, is poor stuff,' he said. `For I can see...'

But at that instant Kritsky, at the door, called him.

`What do you want now?' he said, and went out to him in the passage. Left alone with Marya Nikolaevna, Levin turned to her.

`Have you been long with my brother?' he said to her.

`Yes, more than a year. His health has become very poor. He drinks a great deal,' she said.

`Just how?'

`He drinks vodka, and it's bad for him.'

`And a great deal?' whispered Levin.

`Yes,' she said, looking timidly toward the doorway, where Nikolai Levin had reappeared.

`What were you talking about?' he said, knitting his brows, and turning his scared eyes from one to the other. `What was it?'

`Oh, nothing,' Konstantin answered in confusion.

`Oh, if you don't want to say, don't. Only it's no good your talking to her. She's a wench, and you're a gentleman,' he said, with a jerk of the neck. `You understand everything, I see, and have taken stock of everything, and look with commiseration on my transgressions,' he began again, raising his voice.

`Nikolai Dmitrich, Nikolai Dmitrich,' whispered Marya Nikolaevna, again going up to him.

`Oh, very well, very well!... But where's the supper? Ah, here it is,' he said, seeing a waiter with a tray. `Here, set it here,' he added angrily, and promptly seizing the vodka, he poured out a pony and drank it greedily. `Like a drink?' he turned to his brother, and at once became better-humored. `Well, enough of Sergei Ivanovich. I'm glad to see you, anyway. After all's said and done, we're not strangers. Come, have a drink. Tell me what you're doing,' he went on, greedily munching a piece of bread, and pouring out another pony. `How are things with you?'

`I live alone in the country, as I always have. I'm busy looking after the land,' answered Konstantin, watching with horror the greediness with which his brother ate and drank, and trying to conceal that he noticed it.

`Why don't you get married?'

`No opportunity has presented itself,' Konstantin answered, reddening.

`Why not? For me now, everything's at an end! I've made a mess of my life. But this I've said, and I say still, that if my share had been given me when I needed it, my whole life would have been different.'

Konstantin made haste to change the conversation.

`Do you know your little Vania's with me - a clerk in the countinghouse at Pokrovskoe?'

Nikolai jerked his neck, and sank into thought.

`Yes, tell me what's going on at Pokrovskoe. Is the house still standing, and the birch trees, and our schoolroom? And Philip the gardener - is he living? How I remember the summerhouse and the sofa! Now mind and don't alter anything in the house, but make haste and get married, and make everything as it used to be again. Then I'll come and see you, if your wife is a fine woman.'

`Why, come to me now,' said Levin. `How snugly we could settle down!'

`I'd come and see you if I were sure I shouldn't find Sergei Ivanovich.'

`You wouldn't find him there. I live quite independently of him.'

`Yes, but say what you like, you have to choose between me and him,' he said, looking timidly into his brother's face.

This timidity touched Konstantin.

`If you want to hear my confession of faith on the subject, I tell you that in your quarrel with Sergei Ivanovich I take neither side. You're both wrong. You're rather wrong outwardly, and he, rather inwardly.'

`Ah, ah! You see that, you see that!' Nikolai shouted joyfully.

`But I personally value friendly relations with you more because...'

`Why, why?'

Konstantin could not say that he valued it more because Nikolai was unhappy, and needed affection. But Nikolai knew that this was just what he meant to say, and scowling he took to the vodka again.

`Enough, Nikolai Dmitrich!' said Marya Nikolaevna, stretching out her plump, bare arm toward the decanter.

`Let it be! Don't annoy me! I'll beat you!' he shouted.

Marya Nikolaevna smiled a sweet and good-humored smile, which was at once reflected on Nikolai's face, and whisked the decanter off.

`And do you suppose she understands nothing?' said Nikolai. `She understands everything better than all of us. Tell the truth - isn't there something good and sweet about her?'

`Were you never before in Moscow?' Konstantin said to her, for the sake of saying something.

`Only you mustn't be formal with her. It frightens her. No one ever spoke to her so but the justice of the peace who tried her for trying to get out of a house of ill fame. My God, what senselessness there is in this world!' he cried suddenly. `These new institutions, these justices of the peace, these Zemstvo - what hideousness it all is!'

And he began to enlarge on his encounters with the new institutions.

Konstantin Levin listened to him, and that disbelief in the sense of all public institutions, which he shared with him, and often expressed, was now distasteful to him, coming from his brother's lips.

`In the other world we shall understand it all,' he said lightly.

`In the other world? Ah, I don't like that other world! I don't like it,' he said, letting his scared wild eyes rest on his brother's face. `Here one would think that to get out of all the baseness and the mess, one's own and other people's, would be a good thing, and yet I'm afraid of death, awfully afraid of death.' He shuddered. `But do drink something. Would you like some champagne? Or shall we go somewhere? Let's go to the gypsies! Do you know, I've gotten very fond of the gypsies, and of Russian songs.'

His speech had begun to falter, and he skipped at random from one subject to another. Konstantin, with the help of Masha, persuaded him not to go out anywhere, and got him to bed hopelessly drunk.

Masha promised to write to Konstantin in case of need, and to persuade Nikolai to go and stay with his brother.

Chapter 26
In the morning Konstantin Levin left Moscow, and toward evening he reached home. On the journey in the train he talked to his fellow travelers about politics and the new railways, and, just as in Moscow, he was overcome by a sense of confusion of ideas, by dissatisfaction with himself, and shame of something or other. But when he got out at his own station, when he saw his one-eyed coachman Ignat, with the collar of his coat turned up; when, in the dim light falling through the station windows, he saw his own carpeted sledge, his own horses with their tails up, in their harness trimmed with rings and tassels; when the coachman Ignat, as he put in his luggage, told him the village news - that the contractor had arrived, and that Pava had calved - he felt that little by little the confusion was clearing up, and the shame and self-dissatisfaction were passing away. He felt this at the mere sight of Ignat and the horses; but he began to see what had happened to him in quite a different light, when he had put on the sheepskin coat brought for him, and, all muffled up, had taken his seat in the sleigh and started off, pondering on the work that lay before him in the village, and staring at the off horse, that had been formerly his saddle horse, overridden, but a spirited animal from the Don. He felt himself, and did not want to be anyone else. All he wanted now was to be better than before. In the first place, he resolved that from that day on he would give up hoping for the extraordinary happiness which the marriage was to afford him, and consequently he would not disdain the present so. In the second place, he would never again let himself give way to low passion, the memory of which had so tortured him when he had been making up his mind to propose. Then, remembering his brother Nikolai, he resolved that he would never allow himself to forget him, that he would watch him, and not lose sight of him, so as to be ready to help should things go ill with him. And that would be soon, he felt. Then, too, his brother's talk of communism, which he had treated so lightly at the time, now made him reflect. He considered an alteration in economic conditions nonsense; yet he had always felt the injustice of his own abundance in comparison with the poverty of the common folk, and he now determined that, in order to feel quite in the right, though he had worked hard and lived by no means luxuriously before, he would now work still harder, and would allow himself even less luxury. And all this seemed to him so easy a conquest over himself that he spent the whole drive in most pleasant reveries. With a lively feeling of hope in a new, better life, he drove up to his house about nine o'clock at night.
The snow of the little quadrangle before the house was lit up by light falling from the windows in the room of his old nurse, Agathya Mikhailovna, who performed the duties of housekeeper in his house. She was not yet asleep. Kouzma, awakened by her, sleepy and barefooted, ran out onto the steps. A setter bitch, Laska, leaped out too, almost upsetting Kouzma, and whining, rubbed against Levin's knees, jumping up and longing, yet not daring, to put her forepaws on his chest.

`You're soon returned, my dear,' said Agathya Mikhailovna.

`I grew homesick, Agathya Mikhailovna. East or West, home is best,' he answered, and went into his study.

The study was gradually lit up as the candle was brought in. The familiar details came out: the stag's horns; the bookshelves; the plain stove with its warm-hole, which had long wanted mending; his father's sofa, a large table, and, on the table, an open book, a broken ash tray, a notebook with his handwriting. As he saw all this, there came over him for an instant a doubt of the possibility of arranging the new life, of which he had been dreaming on the road. All these traces of his life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him: `No, you're not going to get away from us, and you're not going to be different - but you're going to be the same as you've always been: with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and lapses, and everlasting expectation of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you.'

But it was his things that said this to him, while another voice in his heart was telling him that he must not fall under the sway of the past, and that one can do anything with oneself. And hearing that voice, he went into the corner where stood his two dumbbells, of one pood each, and began jerking and pushing them up, trying to induce a state of well-being. There was a creak of steps at the door. He hastily put down the dumbbells.

The bailiff came in, and said that everything, thank God, was well, but also informed him that the buckwheat in the new drying machine had been a little scorched. This piece of news irritated Levin. The new drying machine had been constructed and partly invented by Levin. The bailiff had always been against this drying machine, and now it was with suppressed triumph that he announced that the buckwheat had been scorched. Levin was firmly convinced that if the buckwheat had been scorched it was only because precautions had not been taken, for which he had hundreds of times given orders. He was annoyed, and reprimanded the bailiff. But there had been an important and joyful event: Pava, his best cow, an expensive beast, bought at a show, had calved.

`Kouzma, give me my sheepskin coat. And you, do tell them to fetch a lantern - I'm going to have a look at her,' he said to the bailiff.

The cowhouse for the more valuable cows was just behind the house. Walking across the yard, passing a snowdrift by the lilac tree, he went into the cowhouse. There came a warm, steamy smell of dung when the frozen door was opened, and the cows, astonished at the unfamiliar light of the lantern, stirred on their fresh straw. He caught a glimpse of the broad, smooth, black and piebald back of a Dutch cow. Berkoot, the bull, was lying down with his ring in his lip, and seemed about to get up, but thought better of it, and only gave two snorts as they passed by him. Pava, the reddish beauty, huge as a hippopotamus, with her back turned to them, screened her calf from the arrivals and sniffed it all over.

Levin went into the stall, looked Pava over, and hefted the reddish and red-dappled calf up on its unsteady, spindly legs. Pava, uneasy, began lowing, but when Levin put the calf close to her she was soothed, and, sighing heavily, began licking her with her rough tongue. The calf fumbling, poked its nose under its mother's groin, and twirled its tiny tail.

`Bring the light here, Fiodor - bring the lantern here,' said Levin, examining the heifer. `Like the dam! though the color takes after the sire. A perfect beauty! Long, and broad in the haunch. Isn't she a beauty now, Vassilii Fiodorovich?' he addressed the bailiff, quite forgiving him for the buckwheat under the influence of his delight in the heifer.

`What bad blood could she take after? - Semion the contractor came the day after you left. You must settle with him, Konstantin Dmitrich,' said the bailiff. `And I have already told you about the machine.'

This matter alone was enough to bring Levin back to all the details of his estate, which was on a large scale, and complicated. He went straight from the cowhouse to the countinghouse, and, after a short talk with the bailiff and Semion the contractor, he went back to the house and straight upstairs to the drawing room.

Chapter 27
The house was big and old-fashioned, and Levin, though he lived alone, heated and used the whole house. He knew that this was stupid, he knew that it was even wrong, and contrary to his present new plans, but this house was a whole world to Levin. It was the world in which his father and mother had lived and died. They had lived just the life that to Levin seemed the ideal of perfection, and that he had dreamed of renewing with his wife, with his family.
Levin scarcely remembered his mother. His conception of her was for him a sacred memory, and his future wife was bound to be, in his imagination, a repetition of that exquisite, holy ideal of a woman that his mother had been.

He was so far from conceiving of love for woman apart from marriage that he positively pictured to himself first the family, and only secondarily the woman who would give him a family. His ideas of marriage were, consequently, quite unlike those of the great majority of his acquaintances, for whom getting married was merely one of the many affairs of everyday life. For Levin it was the chief affair of life, on which its whole happiness turned. And now he had to give up that!

When he had gone into the second drawing room, where he always had tea, and had settled himself in his armchair with a book, and Agathya Mikhailovna had brought him tea, and with her usual, `Well, I'll stay a while, my dear,' had taken a chair at the window, he felt that, however strange it might be, he had not parted from his daydreams, and that he could not live without them. Whether with her, or with another - it was still bound to be. He was reading his book, pondering on what he was reading, and pausing to listen to Agathya Mikhailovna, who gossiped away without flagging, and yet, with all that, all sorts of pictures of his work and a future family life rose disconnectedly before his imagination. He felt that in the depth of his soul something was steadying, settling down, and abating.

He heard Agathya Mikhailovna talking of how Prokhor had forgotten his duty to God, and, with the money Levin had given him to buy a horse, had been drinking without a letup, and had beaten his wife till he'd half-killed her. He listened, and read his book, and recalled the whole train of ideas suggested by his reading. It was Tyndall's Treatise on Heat. He recalled his own criticisms of Tyndall for his self-complacency in the cleverness of his experiments, and for his lack of philosophic insight. And suddenly there floated into his mind the joyful thought: `In two year's time I shall have two Dutch cows in my herd; Pava herself will perhaps still be alive; a dozen young daughters of Berkoot, and these three added for show - it would be marvelous!' He took up his book again. `Now well, electricity and heat are the same thing; but is it possible to substitute one quantity for the other in an equation for the solution of any problem? No. Well, then what of it? The connection between all the forces of nature is felt instinctively, anyway.... It'll be particularly pleasant when Pava's daughter will be a red-dappled cow like all the herd, to which the other three should be added! Splendid! I'll go out with my wife and visitors to meet the herd.... My wife says, ``Kostia and I looked after that heifer like a child.'' ``How can it interest you so much?'' says a visitor. ``Everything that interests him, interests me.'' But who will she be?' And he remembered what had happened at Moscow.... `Well, there's nothing to be done.... It's not my fault. But now everything shall go on in a new way. It's nonsense to pretend that life won't let one, that the past won't let one. One must struggle to live better - far better....' He raised his head, and sank into thought. Old Laska, who had not yet fully digested her delight at his return, and had run out into the yard to bark, came back wagging her tail, and crept up to him, bringing in the scent of the fresh air, put her head under his hand, and yelped plaintively, asking to be stroked.

`If she could but speak,' said Agathya Mikhailovna. `Even though it's a dog... Yet she understands that her master's come home, and that he's low-spirited.'

`Why low-spirited?'

`Do you suppose I don't see it, my dear? It's high time I should know the gentlefolk. Why, I've grown up from a little thing with them. Never mind, sir, so long as one has health and a clear conscience.'

Levin looked intently at her, surprised at how well she had fathomed his thoughts.

`Shall I fetch you another cup?' she asked and, taking his cup, went out.

Laska kept poking her head under his hand. He stroked her, and she promptly curled up at his feet, laying her head on a protruding hand-paw. And in token of all now being well and satisfactory, she opened her mouth a little, smacked her lips, and settling her sticky lips more comfortably about her old teeth, she sank into blissful respose. Levin watched her last movements attentively.

`That's what I'll do,' he said to himself; `that's what I'll do! Never mind.... All's well.'

Chapter 28
After the ball, early next morning, Anna Arkadyevna sent her husband a telegram that she was leaving Moscow the same day.
`No, I must go, I must go'; she explained the change in her plans to her sister-in-law, in a tone that suggested that she had to remember so many things that there was no enumerating them: `no, really, it had better be today!'

Stepan Arkadyevich was not dining at home, but he promised to come and see his sister off at seven o'clock.

Kitty, too, did not come, sending a note that she had a headache. Dolly and Anna dined alone with the children and the English governess. Whether it was because children are fickle, or because they have acute senses, and they felt that Anna was quite different that day from what she had been when they had taken such a fancy to her, that she was not now interested in them - they had abruptly dropped their play with their aunt, and their love for her, and were quite indifferent to her leaving. Anna was absorbed the whole morning in preparations for her departure. She wrote notes to her Moscow acquaintances, jotted down her accounts, and packed. Altogether Dolly fancied she was not in a placid state of mind, but in that worried mood which Dolly knew so well in her own case, and which does not come without cause, and for the most part covers dissatisfaction with oneself. After dinner, Anna went up to her room to dress, and Dolly followed her.

`How queer you are today!' Dolly said to her.

`I? Do you think so? I'm not queer, but I'm nasty. I am like that sometimes. I keep feeling as if I could cry. It's very stupid, but it'll pass off,' said Anna quickly, and she bent her flushed face over a tiny bag in which she was packing a nightcap and some cambric handkerchiefs. Her eyes were particularly bright, and were continually dimmed with tears. `In the same way I didn't want to leave Peterburg - and now I don't want to go away from here.'

`You came here and did a good deed,' said Dolly, looking intently at her.

Anna's eyes were wet with tears as she looked at her.

`Don't say that, Dolly. I've done nothing, and could do nothing. I often wonder why people are all in league to spoil me. What have I done, and what could I do? In your heart there was found love enough to forgive....'

If it had not been for you, God knows what would have happened! How happy you are, Anna!' said Dolly. `Everything is clear and good in your heart.'

`Every heart has its own skeleton, as the English say.'

`You have no sort of skeleton, have you? Everything is so clear in you.'

`I have!' said Anna suddenly, and, unexpectedly after her tears, a sly, mocking smile puckered her lips.

`Come, he's amusing, anyway, your skeleton, and not depressing,' said Dolly, smiling.

`No, he is depressing. Do you know why I'm going today instead of tomorrow? This is a confession that weighs on me; I want to make you its recipient,' said Anna resolutely letting herself drop into an armchair, and looking straight into Dolly's face.

And to her surprise Dolly saw that Anna was blushing up to her ears, up to the curly black ringlets on her neck.

`Yes,' Anna went on. `Do you know why Kitty didn't come to dinner? She's jealous of me. I have spoiled... I've been the cause of that ball being a torture to her instead of a pleasure. But truly, truly, it's not my fault, or only my fault a little bit,' she said, daintily drawling the words `a little bit.'

`Oh, how like Stiva you said that!' said Dolly, laughing.

Anna was hurt.

`Oh no, oh no! I'm not Stiva,' she said, knitting her brows. `That's why I'm telling you, just because I do not even for an instant permit myself to doubt about myself,' said Anna.

But at the very moment she was uttering the words, she felt that they were not true. She was not merely doubting about herself - she felt emotion at the thought of Vronsky, and was going away sooner than she had meant, solely to avoid meeting him.

`Yes, Stiva told me you danced the mazurka with him, and that he...'

`You can't imagine how absurdly it all came about. I only meant to be matchmaking, and all at once it turned out quite differently. Possibly against my own will...'

She flushed and stopped.

`Oh, they feel it immediately!' said Dolly.

`But I should be in despair if there were anything serious in it on his side,' Anna interrupted her. `And I'm certain it will all be forgotten, and Kitty will leave off hating me.'

`All the same, Anna, to tell you the truth, I'm not very anxious for this marriage for Kitty. And it's better it should come to nothing, if he, Vronsky, is capable of falling in love with you in a single day.'

`Oh, heavens, that would be too silly!' said Anna, and again a deep flush of pleasure appeared on her face, as she heard the idea that absorbed her put into words. `And so here I am, going away, having made an enemy of Kitty, whom I liked so much! Ah, how sweet she is! But you'll make it right, Dolly? Eh?'

Dolly could scarcely suppress a smile. She loved Anna, but she was pleased to see that she, too, had her weaknesses.

`An enemy? That can't be.'

`I did so want you all to care for me, as I do for you, and now I care for you more than ever,' said Anna, with tears in her eyes. `Ah, how silly I am today!'

She passed her handkerchief over her face and began dressing.

At the very moment of starting Stepan Arkadyevich arrived, late, rosy and good-humored, smelling of wine and cigars.

Anna's emotionalism infected Dolly, and when she embraced her sister-in-law for the last time, she whispered:

`Remember, Anna, what you've done for me - I shall never forget. And remember that I love you, and shall always love you as my dearest friend!'

`I don't know why,' said Anna, kissing her and hiding her tears.

`You understand me, and still understand. Good-by, my darling!'

Chapter 29
`Now, it's all over - God be praised!' was the first thought that came to Anna Arkadyevna, when she had said good-by for the last time to her brother, who had stood blocking up the entrance to the carriage till the third bell rang. She sat down on her lounge beside Annushka, and looked about her in the twilight of the sleeping carriage. `Thank God! tomorrow I shall see Seriozha and Alexei Alexandrovich, and my life, good and familiar, will go on in the old way.'
Still in the same anxious frame of mind in which she had been all that day, Anna took a meticulous pleasure in making herself comfortable for the journey. With her tiny, deft hands she opened and shut her little red bag, took out a cushion, laid it on her knees, and, carefully wrapping up her feet, settled herself comfortably. An invalid lady had already lain down to sleep. Two other ladies began talking to Anna, and a stout elderly lady tucked up her feet, and made observations about the heating of the train. Anna answered the ladies in a few words, but not foreseeing any entertainment from the conversation, she asked Annushka to get a small lantern, hooked it on the arm of her seat, and took from her bag a paper knife and an English novel. At first she could not get interested in her reading. The fuss and stir were disturbing; then, when the train had started, she could not help listening to the noises; then the snow beating on the left window and sticking to the pane, and the sight of the muffled guard passing by, covered with snow on one side, and the conversations about the terrible blizzard raging outside, distracted her attention. And after that everything was the same and the same: the same jouncing and rattling, the same snow lashing the window, the same rapid transitions from steaming heat to cold, and back again to heat, the same flitting of the same faces in the half-murk, and the same voices; and then Anna began to read, and to grasp what she read. Annushka was already dozing, the red bag on her lap, clutched by her broad hands, in gloves, of which one was torn. Anna Arkadyevna read and grasped the sense, yet it was annoying to her to read - that is, to follow the reflection of other people's lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. If she read that the heroine of the novel were nursing a sick man, she longed to move with noiseless steps about his sickroom; if she read of a member of Parliament delivering a speech, she longed to deliver it; if she read of how Lady Mary had ridden after the hounds, and had provoked her sister-in-law, and had surprised everyone by her daring - she, too, longed to be doing the same. But there was no chance of doing anything; and, her little hands toying with the smooth paper knife, she forced herself to read.

The hero of the novel was already beginning to attain his English happiness, a baronetcy, and an estate, and Anna was feeling a desire to go with him to his estate, when she suddenly felt that he ought to feel ashamed, and that she was ashamed of the same thing. But what was it he was ashamed of? `What have I to be ashamed of?' she asked herself in injured surprise. She abandoned the book and sank against the back of her chair, tightly gripping the paper knife in both hands. There was nothing to be ashamed of. She went over all her Moscow recollections. All were fine, pleasant. She recalled the ball, recalled Vronsky and his enamored, submissive face; she recalled all her conduct with him - there was nothing shameful. Yet, with all that, at this very point in her reminiscences, the feeling of shame was intensified, as though some inner voice, precisely here, when she recalled Vronsky, were saying to her: `Warm, very warm - hot!' `Well, what is it?' she said to herself resolutely, shifting on her seat. `What does it mean? Am I afraid to look at this without blinking? Well, what is it? Can it be that between me and this boy-officer there exist, or can exist, any other relations than such as are common with every acquaintance?' She laughed contemptuously and took up her book again; but now she was absolutely unable to make sense of what she read. She passed the paper knife over the windowpane, then laid its smooth, cool surface to her cheek, and almost laughed aloud at the unreasoning joy that all at once possessed her. She felt that her nerves, like strings, were being tautened more and more upon some kind of tightening peg. She felt her eyes opening wider and wider, her fingers and toes twitching nervously, something within stopping her breathing, while all images and sounds seemed in the swaying half-murk to strike her with extraordinary vividness. Moments of doubt were continually besetting her: was the car going forward, or back, or was it standing absolutely still? Was it really Annushka at her side, or a stranger? `What's that on the arm of the chair - a fur cloak or some beast? And what am I myself: is it I, or some other woman?' She was afraid of yielding to this trance - but something was drawing her into it, and, at will, she could yield to it or resist it. She got up to rouse herself, and slipped off her plaid and the cape of warm dress. For a moment she regained her self-possession, and realized that the thin peasant who had come in wearing a long nankeen overcoat, with a button missing from it, was the fireman, that he was looking at the thermometer, that the wind and snow had burst in after him through the door; but then everything grew confused again.... That peasant with the long waist took to gnawing something within the wall; the little crone started stretching her legs the whole length of the car and filled it with a black cloud; then there was a dreadful screeching and banging, as though someone were being rent into pieces; then a red blaze blinded her eyes, and, at last, everything was screened by a wall. Anna felt that she had plunged downward. Yet all this was not terrible, but joyful. The voice of a man muffled up and covered with snow shouted something in her very ear. She arose and came to, realizing that they had come to a station, and that this was the conductor. She requested Annushka to hand her the cape she had taken off, and her shawl, put them on, and went toward the door.

`Do you wish to get out?' asked Annushka.

`Yes, I want to get a breath of air. It's very hot in here.'

And she opened the door. The blizzard and the wind rushed to meet her and began to contend with her for the door. And even this seemed joyful to her. She opened the door and stepped out. This seemed to be all that the wind had been lying in wait for; it set up a gleeful whistle and was about to snatch her up and whirl her away, but she clutched the cold doorpost and, holding on to her shawl, descended to the platform and the shelter of the car. The wind had been mighty on the steps, but on the platform, in the lee of the train, there was a lull. With enjoyment she drew deep breaths of the snowy, frosty air and, standing near the car, looked about the platform and the lighted station.

Chapter 30
The frightful storm raged and whistled between the wheels of the cars, along the posts, around the corner of the station. The cars, posts, people - everything in sight - were covered with snow on one side, and were getting more and more snowed under. For a moment there would come a lull in the storm, but then it would again swoop down with such gusts that it seemed impossible to withstand it. Meanwhile some men or other were dashing about, gaily talking to one another, making the boards of the platform creak and ceaselessly opening and shutting the big doors. A stooping human shadow glided by at her feet, and she heard a hammer tapping upon iron. `Let's have the telegram!' came an angry voice out of the stormy murk on the other side. `This way! No. 28!' other voices were also shouting, and muffled figures scurried by, plastered with snow. Two gentlemen passed by her, cigarettes glowing in their mouths. She drew in one more deep breath, and had just taken her hand out of her muff to grasp the doorpost and enter the car, when still another man in a military overcoat, quite close beside her, stepped between her and the flickering light of a lantern. She looked round, and the same instant recognized Vronsky's face. Putting his hand to the peak of his cap, he bowed to her and asked if there weren't anything she wanted, whether he could not be of some service to her? She gazed rather long at him, without any answer, and, in spite of the shadow in which he was standing, she saw (or fancied she saw) the expression both of his face and his eyes. It was again that expression of reverent rapture which had affected her so yesterday. More than once she had told herself during the past few days, and only just now, that Vronsky was for her only one of the hundreds of young men, forever exactly the same, that one meets everywhere; that she would never permit herself even to think of him; yet now at the first flush of meeting him, she was seized by an emotion of joyous pride. She had no need to ask why he was here. She knew, as surely as if he had told her, that he was here only to be where she was.
`I didn't know you were going. And why are you going?' she said, letting fall the hand which had grasped the doorpost. And irrepressible joy and animation shone in her face.

`Why am I going?' he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. `You know that I am going to be where you are,' he said; `I cannot do otherwise.'

And at this very point, as though it had overcome all obstacles, the wind scattered the snow from the car roofs, and began to flutter some sheet of iron it had torn off, while the low-pitched whistle of the engine set up a roar in front, dismal and lamenting. All the awesomeness of the blizzard now seemed still more splendid to her. He had uttered precisely what her soul yearned for, but which her reason dreaded. She made no answer, and in her face he beheld a struggle.

`Forgive me, if what I have said displeases you,' he said humbly.

He had spoken courteously, deferentially, yet so firmly, so obdurately that, for long, she could find no answer.

`What you say is wrong, and I beg of you, if you are a good man, to forget what you have said, even as I shall forget it,' she said at last.

`Not a single word of yours, nor a single gesture, shall I ever forget - nor could I forget....'

`Enough, enough!' she cried, vainly attempting to give a stern expression to her face, which he was avidly scrutinizing. Clutching at the cold doorpost, she clambered up the steps and quickly entered the corridor of the car. But in this little corridor she paused, reviewing in her imagination all that had occurred. Without recalling her own words or his, she realized instinctively that that conversation had brought them fearfully closer; and she was both frightened and made happy thereby. After standing thus a few seconds, she went into the car and sat down in her place. That tensed state which had tormented her at first was not only renewed, but grew greater and reached such a pitch that she was afraid that, at any moment, something would snap within her from the excessive tension. She did not sleep all night. But in that nervous tension, and in the reveries that filled her imagination, there was nothing unpleasant or gloomy; on the contrary, there was something joyous, glowing and exhilarating. Toward morning Anna dozed off as she sat, and when she awoke it was already light, and the train was nearing Peterburg. At once thoughts of home, of her husband and son, and the details of the day ahead, and days to follow, came thronging upon her.

At Peterburg, as soon as the train stopped and she got out, the first face that attracted her attention was that of her husband. `Oh, my God! What has happened to his ears?' she thought looking at his frigid and imposing figure, and especially the ears, that struck her so now, as they propped up the brim of his round hat. Catching sight of her he went to meet her, pursing his lips into their habitual mocking smile, and fixing her with his big, tired eyes. Some unpleasant sensation contracted her heart as she met his obdurate and tired glance, as though she had expected to see him a different man. She was particularly struck by that feeling of dissatisfaction with herself which she experienced on meeting him. This was an intimate, familiar feeling, like that state of dissimulation which she experienced in her relations with her husband; but hitherto she had not taken note of the feeling; now she was clearly and painfully aware of it.

`Yes, as you see, your tender spouse, as devoted as he was during the second year after marriage, was consumed by the desire of seeing you,' he said in his dilatory, high-pitched voice, and in that tone which he almost always used to her - a tone of bantering at anyone who should speak thus in earnest.

`Is Seriozha quite well?' she asked.

`And is this all the reward,' said he, `for my ardor? He's well - quite well....'

Chapter 31
Vronsky had not even attempted to fall asleep all that night. He sat in his armchair, his eyes fixed before him or scanning the people who got in and out, and if he had indeed, on previous occasions, struck and aroused people who did not know him by his air of unshakable calmness, he now seemed prouder and more self-sufficient than ever. He regarded people as if they were things. A nervous young man, a clerk in a law court, who had the seat opposite his, conceived a hatred for him because of this air. The young man asked him for a light, and entered into conversation with him, and even jostled him, to make him feel that he was not a thing, but a man. But Vronsky kept on regarding him as if he were a lamppost, and the young man grimaced, feeling that he was losing his self-possession under the oppressiveness of this refusal to recognize him as a human being.
Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself a king, not because he believed that he had made any impression on Anna - he did not yet believe that - but because the impression she had made on him afforded him happiness and pride.

What would come of it all he did not know, or even think. He felt that all his forces, hitherto dissolute, scattered, were centered on one thing, and bent with fearful energy toward one blissful goal. And therein lay his happiness. He did but know that he had told her the truth, that he had come where she was, that all the happiness of life, the sole meaning in life for him, now lay in seeing her and hearing her voice. And when he got out of his car at Bologovo to get some seltzer water, and had caught sight of Anna, his very first word had involuntarily told her his very thoughts. And he was glad he had told her, that she knew now, and was thinking of it. He did not sleep all night. Back in his compartment, he incessantly kept ruminating upon every posture in which he had seen her, every word she had uttered; and, in his imagination, making his heart swoon, floated pictures of a possible future.

When he got out of the train at Peterburg, he felt after his sleepless night as lively and fresh as after a cold bath. He paused near his car, waiting for her to emerge. `Once more,' he said to himself, smiling unconsciously, `once more I shall see her walk, her face; she may say something, turn her head, glance, smile, perhaps.' But before he caught sight of her, he saw her husband, whom the stationmaster was deferentially escorting through the crowd. `Ah, yes. The husband.' Only now, for the first time, did Vronsky realize clearly the fact that there was someone attached to her - a husband. He had known that she had a husband, but had hardly believed in his existence, and only now, when he saw him, did he fully believe in him, with his head, and shoulders, and his black-trousered legs; especially when he saw this husband placidly take her arm, with a consciousness of proprietorship.

Seeing Alexei Alexandrovich with his spick-and-span Peterburg face and austerely self-confident figure, in his round hat, with his rather prominent spine, he believed in him, and was aware of a disagreeable sensation, such as might be felt by a man who, tortured by thirst, finds, on reaching a spring, a dog, a sheep or a pig therein that has not only drunk of it, but also muddied the water. Alexei Alexandrovich's manner of walking, gyrating his whole pelvis and his flat feet, was especially offensive to Vronsky. He could recognize in no one but himself an indubitable right to love her. But she was still the same, and the sight of her affected him the same way, physically reviving him, stirring him, and filling his soul with happiness. He told his German valet, who ran up to him from the second class, to take his things and go on, he himself went up to her. He saw the first meeting between the husband and wife, and noted, with a lover's insight, the sign of the slight embarrassment with which she spoke to her husband. `No, she does not love him, and cannot love him,' he decided to himself.

At the very moment that he was approaching Anna Arkadyevna from the back, he noticed with joy that she was conscious of his drawing near, and that she looked round; after which, seeing him, she turned again to her husband.

`Have you had a good night?' he said, bowing both to her and to her husband, and leaving it to Alexei Alexandrovich to accept the bow on his own account, and to return it or not, as he might see fit.

`Thank you - a very good one,' she answered.

Her face seemed tired, and lacking in that play of animation which usually hovered between her smile and her eyes; but for a single instant, as she glanced at him, something flashed in her eyes, and although this flash died away at once, he was made happy by that moment. She glanced at her husband, to find out whether he knew Vronsky. Alexei Alexandrovich was regarding Vronsky with displeasure, absent-mindedly trying to recall who he was. Vronsky's calmness and self-confidence had here run up, like a scythe against a stone, on the frigid self-confidence of Alexei Alexandrovich.

`Count Vronsky,' said Anna.

`Ah! We are acquainted, I believe,' said Alexei Alexandrovich apathetically, proffering his hand. `You set out with the mother and return with the son,' he said to Anna, articulating distinctly, as though each word were a coin of high value bestowed by him on his hearers. - `You're back from leave, I suppose?' he said, and without waiting for a reply, he addressed his wife in his bantering tone: `Well, were a great many tears shed in Moscow at parting?'

By addressing his wife thus he meant Vronsky to perceive that he wished to be left alone, and, turning slightly toward him, he touched his hat; but Vronsky turned to Anna Arkadyevna:

`I hope to have the honor of calling on you,' he said.

Alexei Alexandrovich glanced with his weary eyes at Vronsky.

`Delighted,' he said coldly. `We're at home Mondays.' Then, dismissing Vronsky entirely, he said to his wife: `I am rather lucky to have just half an hour to meet you, so that I can prove to you my fondness,' he went on, in the same bantering tone.

`You lay too great a stress on your fondness for me to value it very much,' she responded in the same bantering tone, involuntarily listening to the sound of Vronsky's steps behind them. `But what have I to do with that?' she said to herself, and began questioning her husband as to how Seriozha had got on without her.

`Oh, capitally! Mariette says he has been a very darling boy, and... I must disappoint you... But he has not languished for you as your husband has. But once more merci, my dear, for bestowing a whole day upon me. Our dear Samovar will be enraptured.' (He called the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, well known in society, a samovar, because she was bubbling over with excitement on any and every occasion.) `She has been asking for you. And, d'you know, if I may venture to advise you, you ought to go to see her today. You know how she takes everything to heart. Just now, with all her own cares, she's anxious about the reconciliation of the Oblonskys.'

The Countess Lidia Ivanovna was a friend of her husband's, and the center of that one of the coteries of the Peterburg beau monde with which Anna was, through her husband, in the closest rapport.

`But I wrote to her.'

`Yes, but she must have full details. Go to see her, if you're not too tired, my dear. Well, Kondratii will take you in the carriage, while I go to my committee. Once more I shall not be alone at dinner,' Alexei Alexandrovich continued, but no longer in a jesting tone. `You wouldn't believe how I've grown used to you....'

And, with a prolonged pressure of her hand, and a particular smile, he helped her into her carriage.

Chapter 32
The first person to meet Anna at home was her son. He dashed down the stairs to her, in spite of the governes'ss call, and with frenzied rapture shrieked: `Mother! mother!' Running up to her, he hung on her neck.
`I told you it was mother!' he shouted to the governess. `I knew it!'

And her son, like her husband, aroused in Anna a feeling akin to disappointment. In her imagination he had been better than he was in reality. She had to descend to reality to enjoy him as he was. But, even so, he was charming, with his fair curls, his blue eyes and his chubby, graceful little legs in tightly pulled-up stockings. Anna experienced an almost physical delight in the sensation of his nearness, and his caresses; and a moral reassurance, when she met his ingenuous, trusting and loving glance, and heard his naive questions. Anna took out the presents Dolly's children had sent him, and told her son about Tania, a little girl in Moscow, and how Tania could read, and even taught the other children.

`Why, am I not as good as she?' asked Seriozha.

`To me you're better than anyone else in the whole world.'

`I know that,' said Seriozha, smiling.

Anna had scarcely drunk her coffee when the Countess Lidia Ivanovna was announced. The Countess Lidia Ivanovna was a tall, fleshy woman, with an unwholesomely yellow complexion and beautiful, pensive black eyes. Anna liked her, but today she seemed, for the first time, to see her with all her shortcomings.

`Well, my friend, were you the bearer of the olive branch?' asked Countess Lidia Ivanovna, the minute she entered the room.

`Yes, it's all over, but it was not at all as serious as we thought,' answered Anna. `My belle-soeur is, in general, much too categorical.'

But Countess Lidia Ivanovna, who was interested in everything that did not concern her, had a habit of never listening to what interested her; she interrupted Anna:

`Yes, there's plenty of sorrow and evil in the world - and I am so fatigued today!'

`Oh, why?' asked Anna, trying to repress a smile.

`I'm beginning to weary of vainly breaking lances for the truth, and at times I'm altogether unstrung. The affair with our Dear Sisters [this was a religiously patriotic, philanthropic institution] started off splendidly, but it's impossible to do anything with such people,' added Countess Lidia Ivanovna, with a mocking submissiveness to fate. `They pounced on the idea, and mangled it, and afterward they thrash it out so pettily and trivially. Two or three people, your husband among them, grasp all the significance of this affair but the others merely degrade it. Yesterday Pravdin wrote to me...'

Pravdin was a well-known Pan-Slavist abroad, and Countess Lidia Ivanovna told the gist of his letter.

Next the Countess spoke of other unpleasantnesses and intrigues against the work of the unification of the churches, and departed in haste, since that day she had to attend the meeting of another society, and also a Slavonic committee.

`All this is as it has always been; but how is it I didn't notice it before?' Anna asked herself. `Or has she been very much irritated today? It's really ludicrous: her object is to do good; she's a Christian; yet she's forever angry, and forever having enemies - and always enemies in the name of Christianity and doing good.'

After Countess Lidia Ivanovna another friend came, the wife of a director of the Department, who told her all the news of the town. At three o'clock she too went away, promising to come to dinner. Alexei Alexandrovich was at the Ministry. Anna, left alone, spent the time till dinner in lending her presence to her son's dinner (he dined apart from his parents), in putting her things in order, and in reading and answering the notes and letters which had accumulated on her escritoire.

The feeling of unreasoning shame, which she had felt during the journey, and her agitation, had completely vanished. In the accustomed conditions of her life she again felt herself firm and irreproachable.

She recalled with wonder her state of mind only yesterday. `What was it? Nothing. Vronsky said something silly, which it was easy to put an end to, and I answered just as I should have. To speak of it to my husband would be unnecessary and impermissible. To speak of it would be to attach importance to that which has none.' She remembered how she had told her husband of what was almost declaration made her in Peterburg by a young man, a subordinate of her husband's, and how Alexei Alexandrovich had answered that every woman of the world was exposed to this sort of thing, but that he had the fullest confidence in her tact, and would never permit himself to degrade her and himself by jealousy. `So then, there's no reason to say anything? And, thank God, there isn't anything to say,' she told herself.

Chapter 33
Alexei Alexandrovich came back from the Ministry at four o'clock, but as often happened, had no chance to drop in at her room. He went into his study to see the people waiting for him with petitions, and to sign certain papers brought him by his head clerk. At dinnertime (there were always at least three people dining with the Karenins) there arrived an old lady, a cousin of Alexei Alexandrovich; the director of the Department and his wife; and a young man who had been recommended to Alexei Alexandrovich for a post. Anna went into the drawing room to entertain these guests. Precisely at five o'clock, before the bronze Peter the First clock had finished the fifth stroke, Alexei Alexandrovich made his entry, in white tie and evening coat with two stars, as he had to go out directly after dinner. Every minute of Alexei Alexandrovich's life was taken up and apportioned. And in order to accomplish all that each day held for him, he adhered to the strictest orderliness. `Nor haste nor rest,' was his device. He entered the dining hall, bowed to all, and hurriedly sat down, smiling to his wife:
`Yes, my solitude is over. You wouldn't believe how uncomfortable [he laid stress on the word uncomfortable] it is to dine alone.'

At dinner he chatted with his wife about things at Moscow, and asked, with his mocking smile, about Stepan Arkadyevich; but the conversation was for the most part general, dealing with the official and public news of Peterburg. After dinner he spent half an hour with his guests, and, again with a smile, pressed his wife's hand, withdrew, and drove off to the Council. Anna went that evening neither to the Princess Betsy Tverskaia, who, hearing of her return, had invited her, nor to the theater, where she had a box for that evening. Her principal reason for not going out was because the dress she had expected to wear was not ready. All in all, Anna was exceedingly annoyed when she started to dress for the evening after the departure of her guests. Before her departure for Moscow she, who was generally a mistress of the art of dressing well yet inexpensively, had given her dressmaker three dresses to make over. The dresses were to be made over so that their old selves would be unrecognizable, and they should have been ready three days ago. It turned out that two dresses were nowhere near ready, while the other one had not been made over to Anna's liking. The dressmaker came to explain, asserting that her way was best, and Anna had become so heated that she blushed at the recollection. To regain her composure fully she went into the nursery and spent the whole evening with her son, putting him to bed herself, making the sign of the cross over him, and tucking him in. She was glad she had not gone out anywhere, and had spent the evening so well. She felt so lighthearted and calm, she saw so clearly that all that had seemed to her so significant on her railway journey was merely one of the ordinary trivial incidents of fashionable life, and that she had no cause to feel ashamed before anyone else or before herself. Anna sat down near the fireplace with an English novel and waited for her husband. Exactly at half-past nine she heard his ring, and he entered the room.

`Here you are at last!' she observed, extending her hand to him.

He kissed her hand and sat down beside her.

`All in all, I can see your trip was a success,' he said to her.

`Yes, very much so,' said she, and she began telling him everything from the beginning: her journey with Countess Vronskaia, her arrival, the accident at the station. Then she described the pity she had felt, first for her brother, and, afterward, for Dolly.

`I do not suppose there is any excuse for such a man, even though he is your brother,' said Alexei Alexandrovich sternly.

Anna smiled. She knew that he said this precisely to show that family considerations could not prevent him from expressing his sincere opinion. She knew this trait in her husband and liked it.

`I am glad everything has ended so well, and that you have returned,' he went on. `Well, and what do they say there about the new bill I have got passed in the Council?'

Anna had heard nothing of this bill, and she felt conscience-stricken that she could so readily forget what was to him of such importance.

`Here, on the other hand, this has created a great deal of talk,' said he, with a self-satisfied smile.

She saw that Alexei Alexandrovich wanted to tell her something that pleased him about it, and she brought him by questions to telling it. With the same self-satisfied smile he told her of the ovations he had received as a consequence of the bill he had passed.

`I was very, very happy. It shows that at last an intelligent and firm view of the matter is forming among us.'

After his second cup of tea, with cream and bread, Alexei Alexandrovich got up, and went toward his study.

`And you went nowhere this evening? Weren't You really bored?' he said.

`Oh, no!' she answered, getting up after him and accompanying him across the room to his study. `What are you reading now?' she asked.

`Just now I'm reading Duc de Lille - Poésie des enfers,' he answered. `A most remarkable book.'

Anna smiled, as people smile at the weaknesses of those they love, and, putting her hand in his, she kept him company to the door of his study. She knew his habit, now become a necessity, of reading in the evening. She knew, too, that in spite of his official duties, which engrossed almost all his time, he deemed it his duty to keep up with everything of note that appeared in the intellectual sphere. She knew, too, that his actual interest lay in books dealing with politics, philosophy and theology, that art was utterly foreign to his nature; but, in spite of this - or rather, in consequence of it - Alexei Alexandrovich never missed anything which created a sensation in the world of art, but made it his duty to read everything. She knew that in politics, in philosophy, in theology, Alexei Alexandrovich was a doubter and a seeker; yet in matters of art and poetry - and, above all, of music, of which he was totally devoid of understanding - he had the most definite and decided opinions. He was fond of discoursing on Shakespeare, Raphael, Beethoven, on the significance of new schools of poetry and music, all of which were classified by him with most obvious consistency.

`Well, God be with you,' she said at the door of the study, where a shaded candle and a decanter of water were already placed near his armchair. `As for me, I'm going to write to Moscow.'

He squeezed her hand, and again kissed it.

`Still, he's a good man; truthful, kindhearted, and remarkable in his own sphere,' Anna said to herself, back in her room, as though defending him before someone who accused him, saying that one could not love him. `But why is it his ears stick out so queerly? Or has he had his hair cut?...'

Exactly at twelve, as Anna was still sitting at her desk finishing a letter to Dolly, she heard the sound of measured, slippered steps, and Alexei Alexandrovich, washed and combed, a book under his arm, approached her.

`Come, come,' said he, with a particular smile, and passed on into their bedroom.

`And what right had he to look at him like that?' reflected Anna, recalling how Vronsky had looked at Alexei Alexandrovich.

Having disrobed, she went into the bedroom; but her face had none of the animation which, during her stay at Moscow, had fairly spurted from her eyes and her smile; on the contrary, now the fire seemed extinct in her, or hidden somewhere far away.

Chapter 34
Upon his departure from Peterburg Vronsky had left his large apartments on Morskaia to his friend and favorite comrade Petritsky.
Petritsky was a young lieutenant, not particularly well-connected, and not merely not wealthy, but in debt all around. Toward evening he was always drunk, and he had often found himself in the guardhouse because of sorts of ludicrous and disgraceful scrapes, but he was a favorite both of his comrades and his superior officers. At twelve o'clock, as Vronsky was driving up from the station to his quarters, he saw, near the entrance of the house, a hired carriage familiar to him. Even as he rang he heard, beyond the door, masculine laughter, the twitter of a feminine voice, and Petritsky's shout: `If that's one of the villains, don't let him in!' Vronsky told the servant not to announce him, and slipped noiselessly into the first room. Baroness Shilton, a friend of Petritsky's, with a rosy little face and flaxen-fair, resplendent in a lilac satin gown, and filling the whole room, like a canary, with her Parisian accents, sat at a round table, brewing coffee. Petritsky, in his overcoat, and the cavalry captain Kamerovsky, in full uniform, probably just come from duty, were sitting near her.

`Bravo! Vronsky!' shouted Petritsky, jumping up, scraping his chair. `Our host himself! Baroness, some coffee for him out of the new coffeepot. There, we didn't expect you! I Hope you're satisfied with the adornment of your study,' he said, indicating the Baroness. `You know each other, of course?'

`I should say so!' said Vronsky, with a bright smile, squeezing the Barones'ss little hand. `Why, we're old friends.'

`You've just returned after traveling,' said the Baroness, `so I'll run along. Oh, I'll be off this minute, if I'm in the way!'

`You're home, wherever you are, Baroness,' said Vronsky. `How do you do, Kamerovsky?' he added, coldly shaking hands with Kamerovsky.

`There, you can never say such charming things,' said the Baroness, turning to Petritsky.

`No - why not? After dinner even I can say things quite as good.'

`After dinner there's no merit in them! Well, then, I'll give you some coffee; go wash and tidy up,' said the Baroness, sitting down again, and anxiously turning a gadget in the new coffee urn. `Pierre, give me the coffee,' she said, addressing Petritsky, whom she called Pierre, playing on his surname, making no secret of her relations with him. `I want to put some more in.'

`You'll spoil it!'

`No, I won't spoil it! Well, and how is your wife?' said the Baroness suddenly, interrupting Vronsky's conversation with his comrade. `We've been marrying you off here. Have you brought your wife along?'

`No, Baroness. I was born a gypsy, and a gypsy I'll die.'

`So much the better - so much the better. Shake hands on it.'

And the Baroness, detaining Vronsky, began telling him, interspersing her story with many jokes, about her latest plans of life, and seeking his counsel.

`He persists in refusing to give me a divorce! Well, what am I to do?' (He was her husband.) `Now I want to begin a suit against him. What would you advise? Kamerovsky, look after the coffee - it's boiled out; you can see I'm taken up with business! I want a lawsuit, because I must have my property. You can understand the stupidity of his saying that I am unfaithful to him,' she said contemptuously, `yet through it he wants to get the benefit of my fortune.'

Vronsky heard with pleasure this lighthearted prattle of a pretty woman, said yes to everything, gave her half-joking counsel, and altogether dropped at once into the tone habitual to him in talking to such women. In his Peterburg world all people were divided into two utterly opposed kinds. One, the lower, consisted of vulgar, stupid and, above all, ridiculous people, who believe that one husband ought to live with the one wife whom he has lawfully wedded; that a girl should be innocent, a woman modest, and a man manly, self-controlled, and strong; that one ought to bring up one's children, earn one's bread and pay one's debts; and various similar absurdities. Those people were of an old-fashioned and ridiculous kind. But there was another kind of people - real people, to which they all belonged, and here the chief thing was to be elegant, magnanimous, daring, gay, and to abandon oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything else.

For the first moment only, Vronsky was startled, after the impressions of a quite different world that he had brought with him from Moscow; but immediately, as though he had thrust his feet into old slippers, he stepped into his former lighthearted, pleasant world.

The coffee was really never made, but spluttered over everyone and boiled away, doing just what was required of it - that is, providing cause for much noise and laughter, and spoiling a costly rug and the Barones'ss gown.

`Well, good-by now - or else you'll never get washed, and I shall have on my conscience the worst offense any decent person can commit - uncleanliness. So you would advise a knife at his throat?'

`Absolutely - and in such a way that your little hand may not be far from his lips. He'll kiss it, and all will end well,' answered Vronsky.

`So, the Français tonight!' and, with a rustle of her skirts, she vanished.

Kamerovsky got up too, and Vronsky, without waiting for him to go, shook hands and went off to his dressing room. While he was washing, Petritsky briefly outlined to him his position, as far as it had changed since Vronsky's departure from Peterburg. No money whatsoever. His father said he wouldn't give him any, nor pay his debts. His tailor was trying to get him locked up, and another fellow, too, was threatening to do so without fail. The colonel of his regiment had announced that if these scandals did not cease a resignation would be inevitable. As for the Baroness, he was fed up with her, particularly because she was forever wanting to give him money. But there was another girl - he intended showing her to Vronsky - a marvel, exquisite, in the strict Oriental , `genre of the slave Rebecca, you see.' He had had a row, too, with Berkoshev, and the latter intended sending seconds, but, of course, it would all come to nothing. Altogether everything was going splendidly and was most jolly. And, without letting his comrade enter into further details of his position, Petritsky proceeded to tell him all the interesting news. As he listened to Petritsky's familiar stories, in the familiar setting of the rooms he had spent the last three years in, Vronsky felt the delightful sensation of coming back to the insouciant and customary life of Peterburg.

`Impossible!' he cried, releasing the pedal of the wash basin in which he had been sousing his stalwart red neck. `Impossible!' he cried, at the news that Laura had dropped Fertinghof and had tied up with Mileev. `And is he as stupid and satisfied as ever? Well, and what's Buzulukov doing?'

`Oh, Buzulukov got into a scrape - simply lovely!' cried Petritsky. `You know his passion for balls - and he never misses a single one at court. He went to a big ball in a new casque. Have you seen the new casques? Very good, and lighter. Well, he's standing... No - do listen.'

`I am listening,' answered Vronsky, rubbing himself with a rough towel.

`The Grand Duchess passes by with some ambassador or other, and, as ill luck would have it, their talk veers to the new casques. And so the Grand Duchess wanted to show the new casque to the ambassador.... Just then they catch sight of our dear boy standing there.' (Petritsky mimicked him, standing with his casque.) `The Grand Duchess requested him to give her the casque - he doesn't do so. What's up? Well, they all wink at him, and nod and frown - give it to her, do! He still doesn't. Just stands there, stock-still. You can picture it to yourself!... Well, this... what's his name... tries to take the casque from him... He won't give it up!... This chap tore it from him, and hands it to the Grand Duchess. `This is the new casque,' says the Grand Duchess. She turned the casque over, and - just picture it! - bang went a pear and candy out of it - two pounds of candy!... He'd collected all that - our dear boy!'

Vronsky rolled with laughter. And, long afterward, even when he was talking of other things, he would go off into peals of his hearty laughter baring his strong, closely set teeth, whenever he thought of the casque.

Having learned all the news, Vronsky, with the assistance of his valet, got into his uniform, and went off to report himself. He intended, afterward, to go to his brother and to Betsy, and to pay several visits, as an entering wedge into that society where he might meet Madame Karenina. As always in Peterburg, he left home without any intention of returning before very late at night.

PART TWO
Chapter 1
Toward the end of winter, in the house of the Shcherbatskys, a consultation was being held, which was to determine the state of Kitty's health, and what was to be done to restore her failing strength. She had been ill, and, as spring came on, she grew worse. The family doctor gave her cod-liver oil, then iron, then lunar caustic; but since neither the first, nor the second, nor the third availed, and since his advice was to go abroad before the beginning of the spring, a celebrated doctor was called in. The celebrated doctor, not yet old and a very handsome man, demanded an examination of the patient. He maintained, with special satisfaction, it seemed, that maiden modesty is merely a relic of barbarism, and that nothing could be more natural than for a man who was not yet old to handle a young girl in the nude. He deemed this natural, because he did it every day, and neither felt nor thought, as it seemed to him, anything evil as he did it and, consequently, he considered girlish modesty not merely as a relic of barbarism, but, as well, an insult to himself.
It was necessary to submit, for, although all the doctors studied in the same school, all using the same textbooks, and all learned in the same science, and though some people said this celebrated doctor was but a poor doctor, in the Princess's household and circle it was for some reason held that this celebrated doctor alone had some peculiar knowledge, and that he alone could save Kitty. After thorough examination and tapping of the patient, distraught and dazed with shame, the celebrated doctor, having painstakingly washed his hands, was standing in the drawing room talking to the Prince. The Prince frowned and coughed as he listened to the doctor. As a man who had seen something of life, and neither a fool nor an invalid, he had no faith in medicine, and at soul was wrought up with all this comedy, especially as he was probably the only one who fully understood the cause of Kitty's illness. `You're barking up the wrong tree,' he mentally applied this phrase from the hunter's vocabulary to the celebrated doctor, as he listened to the latter's patter about the symptoms of his daughter's complaint. The doctor, for his part, found difficulty in restraining the expression of his contempt for this old grandee, as well as in condescending to the low level of his comprehension. He perceived that it was useless to talk to the old man, and that the head of this house was the mother - and she it was before whom he intended to scatter his pearls. It was at this point that the Princess entered the drawing room with the family doctor. The Prince retreated, doing his best not to betray how ridiculous he regarded the whole comedy. The Princess was distraught, and did not know what to do. She felt herself at fault before Kitty.

`Well, doctor, decide our fate,' said the Princess. `Tell me everything.' - `Is there any hope?' was what she had wanted to say, but her lips quivered, and she could not utter this question. `Well, doctor?'

`Immediately, Princess - I will discuss the matter with my colleague, and then have the honor of laying my opinion before you.'

`Then we had better leave you?'

`As you please.'

The Princess, with a sigh, stepped outside.

When the doctors were left alone, the family doctor began timidly explaining his opinion, that there was an incipient tubercular process, but... and so on. The celebrated doctor listened to him, and in the middle of the other's speech looked at his big gold watch.

`That is so,' said he. `But...'

The family doctor respectfully ceased in the middle of his speech.

`As you know, we cannot determine the incipience of the tubercular process; until the appearance of vomicae there is nothing determinate. But we may suspect it. And there are indications: malnutrition, nervous excitability, and so on. The question stands thus: if we suspect a tubercular process, what must we do to maintain nutrition?'

`But then, you know, there are always moral, spiritual causes at the back of these cases,' the family doctor permitted himself to interpolate with a subtle smile.

`Yes, that's to be taken for granted,' retorted the celebrated doctor, again glancing at his watch. `Beg pardon - but is the Iauzsky bridge finished yet, or must one still make a detour?' he asked. `Ah! It is finished. Well, in that case I can make it in twenty minutes. As we were saying, the question may be posited thus: the nutrition must be maintained and the nerves improved. The one is bound with the other; one must work upon both sides of this circle.'

`But what about the trip abroad?' asked the family doctor.

`I am a foe to trips abroad. And take notice: if there is any incipient tubercular process, which we cannot know, a trip abroad will not help. We must have a remedy that would improve nutrition, and do no harm.'

And the celebrated doctor expounded his plan of treatment with Soden waters, in designating which his main end was evidently their harmlessness.

The family doctor heard him out attentively and respectfully.

`But in favor of foreign travel I would urge the change of habits, the removal from conditions which evoke memories. And then - the mother wishes it,' he added.

`Ah! Well, in that case, one might go; well, let them go; but those German charlatans may do harm.... Our instructions ought to be followed.... Well, let them go then.'

He again glanced at his watch.

`Oh! it's time to go,' and he went to the door.

The celebrated doctor informed the Princess (prompted by a feeling of propriety) that he must see the patient once more.

`What! Another examination!' the mother exclaimed in horror.

`Oh, no - I merely need certain details, Princess.'

`Come this way.'

And the mother, followed by the doctor, went into the drawing room to Kitty. Wasted and blushing, with a peculiar glitter in her eyes - a consequence of the shame she had gone through, Kitty was standing in the middle of the room. When the doctor came in she turned crimson, and her eyes filled with tears. All her illness and its treatment seemed to her a thing so stupid - even funny! Treatment seemed to her as funny as reconstructing the pieces of a broken vase. It was her heart that was broken. Why, then, did they want to cure her with pills and powders? But she could not hurt her mother - all the more so since her mother considered herself to blame.

`May I trouble you to sit down, Princess?' the celebrated doctor said to her.

Smiling, he, sat down facing her, felt her pulse, and again started in with his tiresome questions. She answered him, and suddenly, becoming angry, got up.

`You must pardon me, doctor - but really, this will lead us nowhere. You ask me the same things, three times running.'

The celebrated doctor did not take umbrage.

`Sickly irritability,' said he to the Princess, when Kitty had left the room. `However, I had finished....'

And the doctor scientifically defined to the Princess, as to an exceptionally clever woman, the condition of the young Princess, and concluded by explaining the mode of drinking the unnecessary waters. When the question of going abroad came up, the doctor was plunged into profound considerations, as though deciding a weighty problem. Finally his decision was given: they might go abroad, but must put no faith in charlatans, but turn to him in everything.

It seemed as though some cheerful influence had sprung up after the doctor's departure. The mother grew more cheerful when she returned to her daughter, while Kitty too pretended to be more cheerful. She had frequent, almost constant, occasions to be pretending now.

`Really, I'm quite well, maman. But if you want to go abroad, let's!' she said, and, trying to show that she was interested in the proposed trip, she began talking of the preparations for the departure.

Chapter 2
Right after the doctor Dolly arrived. She knew that the consultation was scheduled for that day, and, despite the fact that she had only recently gotten up from her lying-in (she had had another little girl at the end of the winter), despite her having enough trouble and cares of her own, she had left her breast baby and an ailing girl to come and learn Kitty's fate, which was being decided that day.
`Well, what's what?' said she, entering into the drawing room, without taking off her hat. `You're all in good spirits. That means good news, then?'

An attempt was made to tell her what the doctor had said, but it proved that, even though the doctor had talked coherently and long, it was utterly impossible to convey what he had said. The only point of interest was that going abroad was definitely decided upon.

Dolly could not help sighing. Her dearest friend, her sister, was going away. And her life was far from gay. Her relations with Stepan Arkadyevich after their reconciliation had become humiliating. The welding Anna had made proved not at all solid, and family concord had broken down again at the same point. There was nothing definite, but Stepan Arkadyevich was hardly ever at home; also, there was hardly ever any money, and Dolly was constantly being tortured by suspicions of infidelities, and by now she drove them away from her, dreading the agony of jealousy she had already experienced. The first explosion of jealousy, once lived through, could never return, and even the discovery of infidelities could never affect her now as it had the first time. Such a discovery now would only mean breaking up her family habits, and she permitted him to deceive her, despising him - and still more herself - for this weakness. Besides this, the cares of her large family were a constant torment to her: now the nursing of her breast baby did not go well; now the nurse would leave, now (as at the present time) one of the children would fall ill.

`Well, how's everybody in your family?' asked her mother.

`Ah, maman, we have enough trouble of our own. Lili has taken ill, and I'm afraid it's scarlatina. I have come here now to find out about Kitty, and then I shall shut myself up entirely, if - God forbid - it really be scarlatina.'

The old Prince too had come in from his study after the doctor's departure, and, after offering his cheek to Dolly, and chatting awhile with her, he turned to his wife:

`What have you decided - are you going? Well, and what do you want to do with me?'

`I think you had better stay here, Alexandre,' said his wife.

`Just as you wish.'

`Maman, why shouldn't father come with us?' said Kitty. `He'll feel better, and so will we.'

The old Prince got up and stroked Kitty's hair. She lifted her head and looked at him with a forced smile. It always seemed to her that he understood her better than anyone else in the family did, though he spoke but little with her. Being the youngest, she was her father's favorite, and she fancied that his love for her gave him insight. When now her gaze met his blue, kindly eyes, scrutinizing her intently, it seemed to her that he saw right through her, and understood all the evil things that were at work within her. Reddening, she was drawn toward him, expecting a kiss; but he merely patted her hair and said:

`These silly chignons! One can't as much as get near one's real daughter, but simply stroke the hair of defunct females. Well Dolinka,' he turned to his elder daughter, `what's your ace up to now?'

`Nothing, papa,' answered Dolly, who knew that this referred to her husband. `He's always out; I hardly ever see him,' she could not resist adding with a mocking smile.

`Why, hasn't he gone into the country yet - about the sale of the forest?'

`No; he's still getting ready.'

`Oh, that's it!' said the Prince. `And so I'm to be getting ready, too? At your service,' he said to his wife, sitting down. `And as for you, Katia,' he went on, addressing his younger daughter, `you must wake up one fine day and say to yourself: Why, I'm quite well, and merry, and I'm going out again with papa for an early morning stroll in the frost. Eh?'

What her father said seemed simple enough, yet at these words Kitty grew confused and upset, like a criminal caught red-handed. `Yes, he knows all, he understands all, and in these words he's telling me that though I'm ashamed, I must live through my shame.' She could not pluck up spirit enough to make any answer. She made an attempt but suddenly burst into tears, and ran out of the room.

`See what comes of your jokes!' the Princess pounced on her husband. `You're always...' she launched into her reproachful speech.

The Prince listened to the Princess's reproaches rather a long while and kept silent, but his face grew more and more glowering.

`She's so much to be pitied, poor thing, so much to be pitied, yet you don't feel how it pains her to hear the least hint as to the cause of it all. Ah! to be so mistaken in people!' said the Princess, and by the change in her tone both Dolly and the Prince knew she meant Vronsky. `I don't know why there aren't laws against such vile, dishonorable people.'

`Ah, I oughtn't to listen to you!' said the Prince glumly, getting up from his chair, as if to go, yet pausing in the doorway. `There are laws, my dear, and since you've challenged me to it, I'll tell you who's to blame for it all: you - you, you alone. Laws against such young gallants have always existed, and still exist! Yes, if there weren't anything that ought not to have been, I, old as I am, would have called him out to the barrier, this swell. Yes, and now go ahead and physic her, and call in these charlatans.'

The Prince, it seemed, had plenty more to say, but no sooner had the Princess caught his tone than she subsided at once, and became penitent, as was always the case in serious matters.

`Alexandre, Alexandre,' she whispered, approaching him and bursting into tears.

As soon as she began to weep the Prince, too, calmed down. He went up to her.

`There, that's enough, that's enough! You feel badly too, I know. Nothing can be done about it! It's not so very bad. God is merciful... thanks...' he said, without knowing himself what he was saying now, responding to the moist kiss of the Princess that he felt on his hand. And the Prince went out of the room.

No sooner had Kitty gone out of the room, in tears, than Dolly, with her motherly, domestic habit, had promptly perceived that here a woman's work lay before her, and got ready for it. She took off her hat, and, morally speaking, tucked up her sleeves and got ready for action. While her mother was attacking her father, she tried to restrain her mother, so far as daughterly reverence would allow. During the Prince's outburst she was silent; she felt ashamed for her mother and tender toward her father for so quickly being kind again. But when her father left, she made ready for what was most necessary - to go to Kitty and compose her.

`I've intended long since to tell you something, maman: did you know that Levin meant to propose to Kitty when he was here last? He told Stiva so.'

`Well, what of it? I don't understand...'

`Why, perhaps Kitty refused him?... Did she say nothing to you?'

`No, she said nothing to me either of the one or the other; she's too proud. But I know it's all on account of this...'

`Yes, but suppose she has refused Levin - and she wouldn't have refused him if it hadn't been for the other, I know. And then, this fellow has deceived her so horribly.'

It was too frightful for the Princess to think how much at fault she was before her daughter, and she grew angry.

`Oh, now I really understand nothing! Nowadays everybody thinks to live after his own way; a mother isn't told a thing, and then you have...'

`Maman, I'll go to her.'

`Do. Am I forbidding you?'

Chapter 3
When she went into Kitty's little sanctum, a pretty, rosy little room, full of knickknacks in vieux saxe, as youthful and rosy and gay as Kitty herself had been only two months ago, Dolly recalled how they had together decorated the room the year before, with what gaiety and love. Her heart turned cold when she beheld Kitty sitting on the low chair nearest the door, her eyes fixed immovably on a corner of the rug. Kitty glanced at her sister, and the cold, rather austere expression of her face did not change.
`I'm going now, and shall entrench myself at home, and you won't be able to come to see me,' said Darya Alexandrovna sitting down beside her. `I want to talk to you.'

`What about?' Kitty asked swiftly, lifting her head in fright.

`What should it be, save what's grieving you?'

`I have no grief.'

`Come, Kitty. Do you possibly think I cannot know? I know all. And, believe me, this is so insignificant... We've all been through it.'

Kitty did not speak, and her face had a stern expression.

`He's not worth your suffering on his account,' pursued Darya Alexandrovna, coming straight to the point.

`Yes - because he has disdained me,' said Kitty, in a jarring voice. `Don't say anything! Please, don't say anything!'

`But whoever told you that? No one has said that. I'm certain he was in love with you, and remained in love with you, but...'

`Oh, the most awful thing of all for me are these condolences!' cried out Kitty, in a sudden fit of anger. She turned round on her chair, turned red, and her fingers moved quickly, as she pinched the buckle of the belt she held, now with one hand, now with the other. Dolly knew this trick her sister had of grasping something in turn with each of her hands, when in excitement; she knew that, in a moment of excitement Kitty was capable of forgetting herself and saying a great deal too much and much that was unpleasant, and Dolly would have calmed her; but it was already too late.

`What - what is it you want to make me feel, eh?' said Kitty quickly. `That I've been in love with a man who didn't even care to know me, and that I'm dying for love of him? And this is said to me by my own sister, who imagines that... that... that she's sympathizing with me!... I don't want these condolences and hypocrisies!'

`Kitty, you're unjust.'

`Why do you torment me?'

`But I... On the contrary... I can see you're hurt....'

But Kitty in her heat did not hear her.

`I've nothing to despair over and be comforted about. I'm sufficiently proud never to allow myself to care for a man who does not love me.'

`Why, I don't say anything of the kind... Only, tell me the truth,' said Darya Alexandrovna, taking her by the hand, `tell me - did Levin speak to you?...'

The mention of Levin seemed to deprive Kitty of the last vestige of self-control. She leaped up from her chair, and, flinging the buckle to the ground, gesticulating rapidly with her hands, she said:

`Why bring Levin in too? I can't understand - what you want to torture me for? I've told you, and I repeat it - I have some pride, and never, never would I do what you're doing - going back to a man who's deceived you, who has come to love another woman. I can't understand this! You may - but I can't do it!'

And, having said these words, she glanced at her sister, and seeing that Dolly sat silent, her head mournfully bowed, Kitty, instead of leaving the room, as she had intended, sat down near the door, and, hiding her face in her shawl, let her head drop.

The silence lasted for two minutes. Dolly's thoughts were of herself. That humiliation of which she was always conscious came back to her with special pain when her sister reminded her of it. She had not expected such cruelty from her sister, and was resentful. But suddenly she heard the rustle of a skirt, and, simultaneously, an outburst of smothered sobbing, and felt arms clasping her neck from below. Kitty was on her knees before her.

`Dolinka, I am so, so unhappy!' she whispered penitently.

And the endearing face, covered with tears, hid itself in Darya Alexandrovna's skirt.

It was as if tears were the indispensable oil without which the machinery of mutual communion could not run smoothly between the two sisters; the sisters, after their tears, discussed everything but that which engrossed them; but, even in talking of outside matters, they understood one another. Kitty knew that what she had uttered in anger about her husband's infidelity and her humiliating position had struck her poor sister to the very depths of her heart, but she also knew that the latter had forgiven her. Dolly for her part had comprehended all she had wanted to find out. She had become convinced that her surmises were correct; that Kitty's misery, her incurable misery, was due precisely to the fact that Levin had proposed to her and she had refused him, while Vronsky had deceived her, and that she stood ready to love Levin and to hate Vronsky. Kitty said no word of this; she spoke of nothing save her own spiritual state.

`I have nothing to grieve over,' she said, calming down, `but you could understand that everything has become loathsome, hateful, coarse to me - and I myself most of all. You can't imagine what loathsome thoughts I have about everything.'

`Why, whatever loathsome thoughts can you have?' asked Dolly, smiling.

`Most, most loathsome and coarse: I couldn't tell you. This is not melancholy, nor boredom, but far worse. As if everything of good that I had were gone out of sight, while only that which was most loathsome were left. Well, how shall I put it to you?' she went on, seeing incomprehension in her sister's eyes. `Papa began saying something to me just now... It seems to me he thinks all I need is to marry. If mamma takes me to a ball - it seems to me she takes me only to marry me off as fast as possible, and get me off her hands. I know this isn't so, but I can't drive away such thoughts. These suitors so called - I can't bear the sight of them. It seems to me as if they're always taking stock of me. Formerly, to go anywhere in a ball dress was a downright joy to me; I used to admire myself; now I feel ashamed, in at ease. Well, take any example you like... This doctor... Now...'

Kitty hesitated; she wanted to say further that ever since this change had taken place in her, Stepan Arkadyevich had become unbearably repulsive to her, and that she could not see him without imagining the grossest and most hideous things.

`Well now, everything appears to me, in the coarsest, most loathsome aspect,' she went on. `That is my ailment. Perhaps all this will pass...'

`Try not to think of such things...'

`I can't help it. I feel well only when I am with the children, at your house.'

`What a pity you can't visit me!'

`Oh, yes, I'll come. - I've had scarlatina, and I'll persuade maman to let me come.'

Kitty insisted on having her way, and went to stay at her sister's and nursed the children all through the scarlatina - for it really proved to be scarlatina. The two sisters brought all the six children successfully through it; Kitty's health, however, did not improve, and in Lent the Shcherbatskys went abroad.

Chapter 4
There is really only one circle of Peterburg upper society: everyone knows everyone else, even visits each other. But this great circle has subdivisions of its own. Anna Arkadyevna Karenina had friends and close ties in three different circles. One circle was her husband's set of civil servants and officials, consisting of his colleagues and subordinates, brought together in a most diversified and capricious manner, yet separated by social conditions. Anna could now recall only with difficulty the feeling of almost pious reverence which she had at first borne for these persons. Now she knew all of them, as people know one another in a provincial town; she knew their habits and weaknesses, and where the shoe pinched each one of them. She knew their attitudes toward one another and to the chief center; knew who backed whom, and how and wherewithal each one maintained his position, and who agreed or disagreed with whom; but this circle of political, masculine interests could not interest her, and, in spite of Countess Lidia Ivanovna's suggestions, she avoided it.
Another small circle, with which Anna was intimate, was the one by means of which Alexei Alexandrovich had made his career. The center of this circle was the Countess Lidia Ivanovna. This was a circle of elderly, homely, virtuous and pious women, and clever, learned and ambitious men. One of the clever people belonging to this small circle had called it `the conscience of Peterburg society.' Alexei Alexandrovich appreciated this circle very much, and Anna, who knew so well how to get on with all, had in the early days of her life in Peterburg found friends even in this circle. But now, upon her return from Moscow, this set had become unbearable to her. It seemed to her that both she and all of them were dissimulating, and she experienced such boredom and lack of ease in their society that she tried to visit the Countess Lidia Ivanovna as infrequently as possible.

And, finally, the third circle with which Anna had ties was the really fashionable world - the world of balls, of dinners, of sumptuous dresses; the world that hung on to the court with one hand, in order not to sink to the level of the demimonde, which the members of the fashionable world believed they despised - yet the tastes of both were not only similar, but precisely the same. Her connection with this circle was maintained through Princess Betsy Tverskaia, her cousin's wife, who had an income of a hundred and twenty thousand roubles, and who had taken a great liking to Anna ever since she first came out, looking after her and drawing her into her own circle, poking fun at that of Countess Lidia Ivanovna.

`When I'm old and shall have lost my looks, I'll be the same,' Betsy used to say; `but for a young and pretty woman like you it's much too early to join that Old Ladies' Home.'

Anna had at first avoided, as much as she could, Princess Tverskaia's world, because it necessitated expenditures above her means - and, besides, at soul she preferred the first circle; but after her trip to Moscow, things fell out quite the other way. She avoided her moral friends, and went out into the fashionable world. There she would meet Vronsky, and experienced an agitating joy at such meetings. Especially often did she meet Vronsky at Betsy's, for Betsy was a Vronsky by birth, and his cousin. Vronsky went everywhere where he might meet Anna, and, at every chance he had, spoke to her of his love. She offered him no encouragement, yet every time she met him there was kindled in her soul that same feeling of animation which had come upon her that day in the railway carriage when she had seen him for the first time. She felt herself that her delight shone in her eyes and puckered her lips into a smile - and she could not quench the expression of this delight.

At first Anna had sincerely believed that she was displeased with him for daring to pursue her; but not long after her return from Moscow, on arriving at a soiree where she had anticipated meeting him, yet not finding him there, she realized clearly, from the feeling of sadness which overcame her, that she had been deceiving herself, and that this pursuit was not merely not distasteful to her, but that it constituted all the interest of her life.

It was the second performance of a celebrated cantatrice, and all the fashionable world was in the theater. Vronsky, seeing his cousin from his seat in the front row, did not wait till the entr'acte, but went to her box.

`Why didn't you come to dinner?' she said to him. `I marvel at this clairvoyance of lovers,' she added with a smile, so that no one but he could hear, `she wasn't there. But do come after the opera.'

Vronsky looked inquiringly at her. She nodded. He thanked her by a smile, and sat down beside her.

`But how I remember your jeers!' continued Princess Betsy, who took special delight in following up the progress of this passion. `What's become of all that? You're caught, my dear fellow.'

`That's my one desire - to be caught,' answered Vronsky, with his calm, good-natured smile. `If I complain at all, it's only that I'm not caught enough, if the truth were told. I begin to lose hope.'

`Why, whatever hope can you expect?' said Betsy, offended on behalf of her friend. `Entendons nous....' But in her eyes flitted gleams of light, which proclaimed that she understood very well, even as much as he did, what hope he might entertain.

`None whatever,' said Vronsky, laughing and showing his closely set teeth. `Excuse me,' he added, taking the binoculars out of her hand, and proceeding to scrutinize, over her bare shoulder, the row of boxes opposite them. `I'm afraid I'm becoming ridiculous.'

He was very well aware that he ran no risk of being ridiculous in the eyes of Betsy and all other fashionable people. He was very well aware that in the eyes of these people the role of the hapless lover of a girl, or in general, of any woman free to marry, might be ridiculous; but the role of a man pursuing a married woman, and, regardless of everything, staking his life on drawing her into adultery - that role has something beautiful and majestic about it, and can never be ridiculous, and so it was with a proud and gay smile under his mustaches that he lowered the binoculars and looked at his cousin.

`But why didn't you come to dinner?' she said, admiring him.

`I must tell you about that. I was busy - and with what, do you suppose? I'll give you a hundred guesses, a thousand... you'd never guess. I've been reconciling a husband with a man who'd insulted his wife. Yes, really!'

`Well, did you reconcile them?'

`Almost.'

`You really must tell me about it,' she said, getting up. `Come to me in the next entr'acte.'

`I can't; I'm going to the French theater.'

`Leaving Nilsson?' Betsy queried in horror, though she could not herself have distinguished Nilsson from any chorus girl.

`What can I do? I've an appointment there, all because of my mission of peace.'

`'Blessed are the peacemakers;'' ``they shall be saved',' said Betsy, recalling something of that sort she had heard from somebody or other. `Very well, then, sit down, and tell me what it's all about.'

And she resumed her seat.

Chapter 5
`This is rather indiscreet, but it's so charming that one is awfully tempted to tell the story,' said Vronsky, looking at her with laughing eyes. `I don't intend to mention any names.'
`But I shall guess them - so much the better.'

`Listen, then: two festive young men were driving along...'

`Officers of your regiment, of course?'

`I didn't say they were officers - just two young men who had been lunching.'

`In other words, drinking.'

`Possibly. They were driving on their way to dinner with a friend in the gayest of moods. And they catch sight of a pretty woman in a hired sleigh, who overtakes them, looks back at them, and - so it seemed to them, at any rate - nods to them and laughs. They, of course, follow her - galloping at full speed. To their amazement, the fair one alights at the entrance of the very house to which they were going. The fair one darts upstairs to the top floor. All they got was a glimpse of rosebud lips under a short veil, and of exquisite little feet.'

`You tell this with such feeling that it seems to me you yourself must have been one of the two.'

`But what did you tell me just now?... Well, the young men enter their comrade's apartment - he was giving a farewell dinner. There they certainly did take a drop too much, as is always the case at farewell dinners. And at dinner they inquire who lives at the top in that house. No one knows; only their host's valet, in answer to their inquiry whether any ``young ladies' are living on the top floor, answered that there were a great many of them. After dinner the two young men go into their host's study, and write a letter to the fair unknown. They composed a passionate epistle, really a declaration, and then carry the letter upstairs themselves, so as to explain whatever might prove not altogether clear in the letter.'

`Why do you tell me such nasty things? And then?'

`They ring. A maidservant opens the door, they hand her the letter, and assure her that they're both so enamored that they'll die on the spot at the door. The maid, stupefied, carries on the negotiations. Suddenly a gentleman appears - with side whiskers like country sausages, he is as red as a lobster and, informing them that there is no one living in that flat except his wife, he sends them both packing.'

`How do you know he had side whiskers like sausages, as you put it?'

`Ah, do but listen. Recently I went to make peace between them.'

`Well, and what was the upshot?'

`That's the most interesting part. This couple turned out to be a most happy one - a government clerk and his lady. The government clerk lodges a complaint, whereupon I become a mediator - and what a mediator!... I assure you Talleyrand was a nobody compared to me.'

`Just what was the difficulty?'

`Ah, do but listen.... We make fitting apologies: ``We are in despair; we entreat forgiveness for the unfortunate misunderstanding.'' The government clerk with the country sausages begins to melt, and he, too, desires to express his sentiments, but no sooner does he begin to express them than he gets heated and says nasty things, and again I'm obliged to trot out all my diplomatic talents. ``I agree that their action was bad, but I beg of you to take into consideration the misunderstanding, and their youth; besides, the young men had just come from their lunch. You understand. Their repentance is heartfelt and they beg you to forgive their misbehavior.'' The government clerk was softened once more. ``I consent, Count, and am ready to forgive but you must understand that my wife - my wife! - a respectable woman is subjected to annoyances, and insults, and impertinences by certain milksops, scou-...'' Yet, you understand, the milksop is present, and it is up to me to make peace between them. Again I trot out all my diplomacy, and again, just as the matter is about to be concluded, our friend the government clerk gets heated and turns red while his country sausages bristle up, and I once more exert diplomatic finesse.'

`Ah, you must hear this story!' said Betsy, laughing, to a lady who was entering the box. `He has made me laugh so much... Well, bonne chance!' she added, giving Vronsky the one finger free from holding her fan, and with a shrug of her shoulders letting down the bodice of her gown, that had worked up, so as to be fittingly and fully nude as she moved forward, toward the footlights, into the lights of the gas, and within the ken of all.

Vronsky drove to the French theater, where he really had to see the colonel of his regiment, who never missed a single performance there; he wanted to talk over his peacemaking, which had been occupying and amusing him for the last three days. Petritsky, whom he liked, was implicated in the affair, as well as another fine fellow and excellent comrade, who had lately joined the regiment - the young Prince Kedrov. But, mainly, the interests of the regiment were involved as well.

Both culprits were in Vronsky's squadron. The colonel of the regiment had received a call from the government clerk, Venden, with a complaint against his officers, who had insulted his wife. His young wife, as Venden told the story - he had been married half a year - had been at church with her mother, and, suddenly feeling indisposed, due to her interesting condition, found that she could not remain standing and drove home in the first sleigh with the mettlesome coachman she came across. It was then that the officers set off in pursuit of her; she was alarmed, and, feeling still worse, ran home up the staircase. Venden himself, on returning from his office, had heard a ring at their bell and voices, had stepped out, and seeing the intoxicated officers with a letter, he had pushed them out. He was asking that the culprits be severely punished.

`You may say what you will,' said the colonel to Vronsky, whom he had invited to come and see him. `Petritsky is becoming impossible. Not a week goes by without some scrape. This clerk chap won't let matters drop - he'll go on with the thing.'

Vronsky saw all the thanklessness of the business, and that a duel was out of the question here; that everything must be done to soften this government clerk, and hush the matter up. The colonel had called in Vronsky precisely because he knew him to be an honorable and intelligent man, but, above all, one to whom the honor of the regiment was dear. They talked it over, and decided that Petritsky and Kedrov must go with Vronsky to this government clerk and apologize. The colonel and Vronsky were both fully aware that Vronsky's name and insignia of aide-de-camp were bound to go a long way toward softening the government clerk. And these two influences proved in fact not without effect; though the result of the mediation remained, as Vronsky had described, uncertain.

On reaching the French theater, Vronsky retired to the foyer with the colonel, and reported to him his success - or lack of it. The colonel, thinking it all over, decided not to go on with the matter; but then, for his own delectation, proceeded to question Vronsky about the details of his interview and for a long while could not restrain his laughter as he listened to Vronsky's story of how the government clerk, after subsiding for a while, would suddenly flare up again, as he recalled the details, and how Vronsky, at the last half-word of conciliation, had skillfully maneuvered a retreat, shoving Petritsky out before him.

`It's a disgraceful scrape, but a killing one. Kedrov really can't fight this gentleman! So he was awfully wrought up?' he asked again, laughing. `But what do you think of Claire today? She's a wonder!' he went on, speaking of a new French actress. `No matter how often you see her, she's different each time. It's only the French who can do that.'

Chapter 6
Princess Betsy drove home from the theater without waiting for the end of the last act. She had just time enough to go into her dressing room, sprinkle her long, pale face with powder, rub it off, set her dress to rights, and order tea in the big drawing room, when one after another carriages drove up to her huge house on the Bolshaia Morskaia. Her guests dismounted at the wide entrance, and the stout porter, who used to read newspapers mornings behind the glass door, to the edification of the passers-by, noiselessly opened the immense door, letting the visitors pass by him into the house.
Almost at the same instant that the hostess, with freshly arranged coiffure and freshened face, entered at one door, her guests entered at the other, into the drawing room, a large room with dark walls, downy rugs and a brightly lighted table, gleaming with the light of candles, the whiteness of napery, the silver of the samovar and the tea service of transparent porcelain.

The hostess sat down at the samovar and took off her gloves. Chairs were set with the aid of footmen, moving almost imperceptibly about the room; the party settled itself, divided into two groups: one round the samovar near the hostess, the other at the opposite end of the drawing room, round the handsome wife of an ambassador, in black velvet, with sharply defined black eyebrows. In both groups conversation wavered, as it always does, for the first few minutes, broken up by meetings, salutations, offers of tea, and, as it were, seeking for some point in common.

`She's exceptionally fine as an actress; one can see she's studied Kaulbach,' said a diplomatist in the circle of the ambassador's wife. `Did you notice how she fell down?...'

`Oh, please, don't let us talk about Nilsson! No one can possibly say anything new about her,' said a fat, red-faced, flaxen-headed lady, without eyebrows and without chignon, wearing an old silk dress. This was Princess Miaghkaia, noted for her simplicity and the roughness of her manners, and nicknamed enfant terrible. Princess Miaghkaia was seated halfway between the two groups, and, listening to both, took part in the conversation first of one and then of the other. `Three people have used that very phrase about Kaulbach to me today, just as though they had conspired. And I don't know why that phrase should be so much to their liking.'

The conversation was cut short by this observation, and again a new subject had to be thought of.

`Do tell us something amusing, yet not spiteful,' said the ambassador's wife, a great proficient in the art of that elegant conversation called by the English small talk. She addressed the diplomatist, who was now at a loss just what to begin upon.

`That is said to be a difficult task - only that which is spiteful is supposed to be amusing,' he began with a smile. `However, I'll make the attempt. Give me a theme. it's all a matter of the theme. If the theme be but given, it's easy enough to embroider it. I often think that the celebrated conversationalists of the last century would find it difficult to talk cleverly now. Everything clever has become such a bore....'

`That has been said long ago,' the ambassador's wife interrupted him, laughing.

The conversation had begun amiably, but just because it was too amiable, it came to a stop again. They had to have recourse to the sure, never-failing remedy - malicious gossip.

`Don't you think there's something Louis Quinze about Tushkevich?' he said, glancing toward a handsome, fair-haired young man, standing at the table.

`Oh, yes! He's in the same  as the drawing room, and that's why it is he's so often here.'

This conversation was kept up, since it depended on allusions to what could not be talked of in that room - that is to say, of the relations of Tushkevich with their hostess.

Round the samovar and the hostess the conversation having, in the meanwhile, vacillated in precisely the same way between the three inevitable topics - the latest piece of public news, the theater, and censuring the fellow creature - had finally come to rest on the last topic - that is, malicious gossip.

`Have you heard that even the Maltishcheva - the mother, not the daughter - has ordered a costume in diable rose color?'

`Impossible! No, that's just charming!'

`I wonder that with her sense - for after all she's no fool - she doesn't see how funny she is.'

Every one had something to say in censure or ridicule of the hapless Maltishcheva, and the conversation crackled merrily, like a blazing bonfire.

The husband of Princess Betsy, a good-natured corpulent man, an ardent collector of engravings, hearing that his wife had visitors, had come into the drawing room before leaving for his club. Stepping noiselessly over the thick rugs, he approached Princess Miaghkaia.

`How did you like Nilsson?' he asked.

`Oh, how can you steal up on anyone like that! How you startled me!' she responded. `Please don't talk to me about the opera; you know nothing about music. I'd rather come down to your own level, and discuss with you your majolica and engravings. Come, now, what treasure have you been buying lately at the rag fair?'

`Would you like me to show you? But you don't understand such things.'

`Yes, show me. I've been learning about them at those - what's their names?... those bankers... They have some splendid engravings. They showed them to us.'

`Why, have you been at the Schutzburgs?' asked the hostess from behind the samovar.

`Yes, ma chère. They asked my husband and myself to dinner, and I was told that the sauce at that dinner cost a thousand roubles,' Princess Miaghkaia said, speaking loudly, conscious that all were listening; `and very nasty sauce it was - some green mess. We had to ask them, and I made a sauce for eighty-five kopecks, and everybody was very much pleased with it. I can't afford thousand-rouble sauces.'

`She's unique!' said the lady of the house.

`Amazing!' somebody else added.

The effect produced by Princess Miaghkaia's speeches was always the same, and the secret of the effect she produced lay in the fact that though she spoke not always appropriately, as now, she said homely truths, not devoid of sense. In the society in which she lived such utterances had the same result as the most pungent wit. Princess Miaghkaia could never see why it had that result, but she knew it had, and took advantage of it.

Since everyone had been listening while Princess Miaghkaia spoke, and the conversation around the ambassador's wife had dropped, Princess Betsy tried to bring the whole party together, and she addressed the ambassador's wife.

`Really won't you have tea? Do come and join us.'

`No, we're very comfortable here,' the ambassador's wife responded with a smile, and went on with the interrupted conversation.

It was a most agreeable conversation. They were censuring the Karenins, husband and wife.

`Anna is quite changed since her stay in Moscow. There's something strange about her,' said one of her feminine friends.

`The great change is that she has brought back with her the shadow of Alexei Vronsky,' said the ambassador's wife.

`Well, what of it? There's a fable of Grimm's about a man without a shadow - a man deprived of his shadow. As a punishment for something or other. I never could understand just how this was a punishment. Yet a woman must probably feel uncomfortable without a shadow.'

`Yes, but women followed by a shadow usually come to a bad end,' said Anna's friend.

`Bite your tongue!' said Princess Miaghkaia suddenly. `Karenina is a splendid woman. I don't like her husband - but her I like very much.'

`Why don't you like her husband? He's such a remarkable man,' said the ambassador's wife. `My husband says there are few statesmen like him in Europe.'

`And my husband tells me just the same, but I don't believe it,' said Princess Miaghkaia. `If our husbands didn't talk to us, we should see the facts as they are. Alexei Alexandrovich, to my thinking, is simply a fool. I say it in a whisper.... But doesn't it really make everything clear? Before, when I was told to consider him clever, I kept looking for his ability, and thought myself a fool for not seeing it; but directly I said, he's a fool, though only in a whisper, everything became clear - isn't that so?'

`How spiteful you are today!'

`Not a bit. I'd no other way out of it. One of us two had to be the fool. And, as you know, one could never say that of oneself.'

`No one is satisfied with his fortune, and everyone is satisfied with his wit,' the diplomatist repeated the French saying.

`That's it - that's just it,' Princess Miaghkaia turned to him promptly. `But the point is that I won't abandon Anna to your mercies. She's such a dear, so charming. How can she help it if they're all in love with her, and follow her about like shadows?'

`Oh, I had no idea of censuring her,' Anna's friend said in self-defense.

`If we have no shadows following us, it does not prove that we've any right to blame her.'

And, having duly disposed of Anna's friend, the Princess Miaghkaia got up, and, together with the ambassador's wife, joined the group at the table, where the general conversation had to do with the king of Prussia.

`What were you gossiping so maliciously about?' asked Betsy.

`About the Karenins. The Princess gave us a character sketch of Alexei Alexandrovich,' said the ambassador's wife with a smile, as she sat down at the table.

`Pity we didn't hear it!' said Princess Betsy, glancing toward the door. `Ah, here you are at last!' she said, turning with a smile to Vronsky who was entering.

Vronsky was not merely acquainted with all the persons whom he was meeting here; he saw them all every day; and so he came in with the quiet manner with which one enters a room full of people whom one had left only a short while ago.

`Where do I come from?' he repeated the question of the ambassador's wife. `Well, there's no help for it - I must confess. From the opera bouffe. I do believe I've seen it a hundred times, and always with fresh enjoyment. It's exquisite! I know it's disgraceful, but I go to sleep at the opera, yet I sit out the opera bouffe to the last minute, and enjoy it. This evening...'

He mentioned a French actress, and was about to tell something about her; but the ambassador's wife, with playful trepidation, cut him short.

`Please, don't tell us about that horror.'

`Very well, I won't - especially as everyone knows those horrors.'

`And we should all go to see them if it were accepted as the correct thing, like the opera,' chimed in Princess Miaghkaia.