第240章

`If you are you can get in, as the horses are quiet and walking.'

But it was not worth-while to get in; they were quite near the place, and all walked on together.

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TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 6, Chapter 04[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] Chapter 4 Varenka, with her white kerchief on her black hair, surrounded by the children, gaily and good-humoredly looking after them, and at the same time visibly excited at the possibility of receiving a declaration from the man she cared for, was very attractive. Sergei Ivanovich walked beside her, and never left off admiring her. Looking at her, he recalled all the delightful things he had heard from her lips, all the good he knew about her, and became more and more conscious that the feeling he had for her was something special that he had felt long, long ago, and only once, in his early youth.

The feeling of happiness in being near her continually grew, and at last reached such a point that, as he put a huge, slender-stalked mushroom with rolled brims, in her basket, he looked straight into her face, and noticing the flush of glad and alarmed excitement that overspread her face, he was confused himself, and smiled to her in silence a smile that said too much.

`If so,' he said to himself, `I ought to think it over and make up my mind, and not give way like a boy to the impulse of a moment.'

`I'm going to pick by myself apart from all the rest, or else my efforts will make no show,' he said, and he left the edge of the forest where they were walking on low silky grass between old birch trees standing far apart, and went more into the heart of the wood, where between the white birch trunks there were gray trunks of aspen and dark bushes of hazel.

Walking some forty paces away, Sergei Ivanovich, knowing he was out of sight, stood still behind a bushy spindle tree in full flower with its rosy-red catkins. It was perfectly still all round him. Only overhead, in the birches under which he stood, the flies, like a swarm of bees, buzzed unceasingly, and from time to time the children's voices floated across to him. All at once he heard, not far from the edge of the wood, the sound of Varenka's contralto voice, calling Grisha, and a smile of delight passed over Sergei Ivanovich's face. Conscious of this smile, he shook his head disapprovingly at his own state and, taking out a cigar, he began lighting it. For a long while he could not get a match to light against the trunk of a birch tree. The soft pellicle of the white bark stuck around the phosphorus, and the light went out. At last one of the matches burned, and the fragrant cigar smoke, hovering uncertainly in flat, wide coils, stretched away forward and upward over a bush under the overhanging branches of a birch tree.

Watching the streak of smoke, Sergei Ivanovich walked gently on, deliberating on his position.

`Why not?' he thought. `If it were only a flash in the pan, or a passion, if it were only this attraction - this mutual attraction (Ican call it a mutual attraction), yet if I felt that it was in contradiction with the whole bent of my life; if I felt that in giving way to this attraction I should be false to my vocation and my duty... But it's not so. The only thing I can say against it is that, when I lost Marie, I said to myself that I would remain faithful to her memory. That's the only thing I can say against my feeling.... That's a great thing,' Sergei Ivanovich said to himself, feeling at the same time that this consideration had not the slightest importance for him personally, but would only perhaps detract from his romantic character in the eyes of others. `But apart from that, however much I searched, I should never find anything to say against my feeling. If I were choosing by considerations of intellect alone, I could not have found anything better.'