第297章

`Give it to me, Anna Arkadyevna,' said Vorkuev, indicating the book. `It's well worth taking up.'

`Oh, no, it's all so sketchy.'

`I told him about it,' Stepan Arkadyevich said to his sister, nodding at Levin.

`You shouldn't have. My writing is something after the fashion of those little baskets and carvings which Liza Mertsalova used to sell me from the prisons. She had the direction of the prison department in that society,' she turned to Levin; `and they were miracles of patience, the work of those poor wretches.'

And Levin saw a new trait in this woman, who attracted him so extraordinarily. Besides wit, grace, and beauty, she had truth. She had no wish to hide from him all the bitterness of her position. As she said that she sighed, and her face, suddenly assuming a hard expression, looked, as it were, turned to stone. With that expression on her face she was more beautiful than ever; but the expression was new; it was utterly unlike that expression, radiant with happiness and creating happiness, which had been caught by the painter in her portrait. Levin looked more than once at the portrait and at her figure, as taking her brother's arm she walked with him to the high doors, and he felt for her a tenderness and pity at which he wondered himself.

She asked Levin and Vorkuev to go into the drawing room, while she stayed behind to say a few words to her brother. `About her divorce, about Vronsky, and what he's doing at the club, about me?' wondered Levin.

And he was so keenly interested by the question of what she was saying to Stepan Arkadyevich, that he scarcely heard what Vorkuev was telling him of the qualities of the story for children Anna Arkadyevna had written.

At tea the same pleasant sort of talk, full of interesting matter, continued. There was not a single instant when a subject for conversation was to seek; on the contrary, it was felt that one had hardly time to say what one had to say, and eagerly held back to hear what the others were saying. And all that was said, not only by her, but by Vorkuev and Stepan Arkadyevich - all, so it seemed to Levin, gained peculiar significance from her attention to him and her criticism.

While he followed this interesting conversation, Levin was all the time admiring her - her beauty, her intelligence, her culture, and at the same time her directness and her cordiality. He listened and talked, and all the while he was thinking of her inner life, trying to divine her feelings. And though he had judged her so severely hitherto, now by some strange chain of reasoning he was justifying her and also was sorry for her, and afraid that Vronsky did not fully understand her. At ten o'clock, when Stepan Arkadyevich got up to go (Vorkuev had left earlier), it seemed to Levin that he had only just come. Regretfully Levin too rose.

`Good-by,' she said, holding his hand and glancing into his face with a winning look. `I am very glad que la glace est rompue .'

She dropped his hand, and half-closed her eyes.

`Tell your wife that I love her as before, and that if she cannot pardon me my position, then my wish for her is that she may never pardon me. To pardon it, one must go through what I have gone through, and may God spare her that.'

`Certainly, yes, I will tell her...' Levin said, blushing.

[Next Chapter] [Table of Contents]

TOLSTOY: Anna Karenina Part 7, Chapter 11[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] Chapter 11 `What a marvelous, sweet and unhappy woman!' he was thinking, as he stepped out into the frosty air with Stepan Arkadyevich.

`Well, didn't I tell you?' said Stepan Arkadyevich, seeing that Levin had been completely won over.

`Yes,' said Levin pensively, `an extraordinary woman! It's not her cleverness, but she has such wonderful depth of feeling. I'm awfully sorry for her!'

`Now, please God everything will soon be settled. Well, well, don't be hard on people in future,' said Stepan Arkadyevich, opening the carriage door. `Good-by; we don't go the same way.'

Still thinking of Anna, of everything, even the simplest phrase in their conversation with her, and recalling the minutest changes in her expression, entering more and more into her position, and feeling sympathy for her, Levin reached home.

At home Kouzma told Levin that Katerina Alexandrovna was quite well, and that her sisters had just gone, and he handed him two letters.

Levin read them at once in the hall, that he might not overlook them later.

One was from Sokolov, his bailiff. Sokolov wrote that the wheat could not be sold, that the price was only five and a half roubles, and that he did not know where he had to get the money. The other letter was from his sister.

She scolded him for her business being still unsettled.

`Well, we must sell it at five and a half if we can't get more,'

Levin decided on the spot the first question which had always before seemed such a weighty one, with extraordinary facility. `It's extraordinary how all one's time is taken up here,' he thought, considering the second letter.

He felt himself to blame for not having got done what his sister had asked him to do for her. `Today, again, I've not been to court, but today I've certainly not had time.' And resolving that he would not fail to do it next day, he went up to his wife. As he went in, Levin mentally ran rapidly through the day he had spent. All the events of the day were conversations:

conversations he had heard and taken part in. All the conversations were upon subjects which, if he had been alone in the country, he would never have taken up, but here they were very interesting. And all these conversations were right enough, only in two places there was something not quite right.

One was what he had said about the carp, the other was something not quite the thing in the tender sympathy he was feeling for Anna.

Levin found his wife low-spirited and dull. The dinner of the three sisters had gone off very well, but then they had waited and waited for him, all of them had felt dull, the sisters had departed, and she had been left alone.