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_ She had risen to meet him, not concealing her pleasure at seeing
him; and in the quiet ease withwhich she held out her little
vigorous hand, introduced him to Vorkuev and indicated a
red-haired, pretty little girl who was sitting at work, calling
her her pupil, Levin recognized and liked the manners of a woman
of the great world, always self-possessed and natural.
"I am delighted, delighted," she repeated, and on her lips these
simple words took for Levin's ears a special significance. "I
have known you and liked you for a long while, both from your
friendship with Stiva and for your wife's sake.... I knew her for
a very short time, but she left on me the impression of an
exquisite flower, simply a flower. And to think she will soon be
a mother!"
She spoke easily and without haste, looking now and then from
Levin to her brother, and Levin felt that the impression he was
making was good, and he felt immediately at home, simple and
happy with her, as though he had known her from childhood.
"Ivan Petrovitch and I settled in Alexey's study," she said in
answer to Stepan Arkadyevitch's question whether he might smoke,
"just so as to be able to smoke"--and glancing at Levin, instead
of asking whether he would smoke, she pulled closer a
tortoise-shell cigar-case and took a cigarette.
"How are you feeling to-day?" her brother asked her.
"Oh, nothing. Nerves, as usual."
"Yes, isn't it extraordinarily Me?" said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
noticing that Levin was scrutinizing the picture.
"I have never seen a better portrait."
"And extraordinarily like, isn't it?" said Vorkuev.
Levin looked from the portrait to the original. A peculiar
brilliance
lighted up Anna's face when she felt his eyes on her. Levin
flushed, and to cover his confusion would have asked whether she
had seen Darya Alexandrovna lately; but at that moment Anna
spoke. "We were just talking, Ivan Petrovitch and I, of
Vashtchenkov's last pictures. Have you seen them?"
"Yes, I have seen them," answered Levin.
"But, I beg your pardon, I interrupted you ...you were
saying?..."
Levin asked if she had seen Dolly lately.
"She was here yesterday. She was very indignant with the high
school people on Grisha's account. The Latin teacher, it seems,
had been unfair to him."
"Yes, I have seen his pictures. I didn't care for them very
much," Levin went back to the subject she had started.
Levin talked now not at all with that purely businesslike
attitude to the subject with which he had been talking all the
morning. Every word in his conversation with her had a special
significance. And talking to her was pleasant; still pleasanter
it was to listen to her.
Anna talked not merely naturally and cleverly, but cleverly and
carelessly, attaching no value to her own ideas and giving great
weight to the ideas of the person she was talking to.
The conversation turned on the new movement in art, on the new
illustrations of the Bible by a French artist. Vorkuev attacked
the artist for a realism carried to the point of coarseness.
Levin said that the French had carried conventionality further
than any one, and that consequently they see a great merit in the
return to realism. In the fact of not Iying they see poetry.
Never had anything clever said by Levin given him so much
pleasure as this remark. Anna's face lighted up at once, as at
once she appreciated the thought. She laughed.
"I laugh," she said, "as one laughs when one sees a very true
portrait. What you said so perfectly hits off French art now,
painting and literature too, indeed--Zola, Daudet. But perhaps it
is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious,
conventional types, and then-- all the combinaisons made--they
are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more
natural, true figures."
"That's perfectly true," said Vorkuev.
"So you've been at the club?" she said to her brother.
"Yesr yes, this is a woman!" Levin thought, forgetting himself
and staring persistently at her lovely, mobile face, which at
that moment was all at once completely transformed. Levin did not
hear what she was talking of as she leaned over to her brother,
but he was struck by the change of her expression. Her face--so
handsome a moment before in its repose--suddenly wore a look of
strange curiosity, anger, and pride. But this lasted only an
instant. She dropped her eyelids, as though recollecting
something.
"Oh, well, but that's of no interest to any one," she said, and
she turned to the English girl.
"Please order the tea in the drawing-room," she said in English.
The girl got up and went out.
"Well, how did she get through her examination?" asked Stepan
Arkadyevitch.
"Splendidly! She's a very gifted child and a sweet character."
"It will end in your loving her more than your own."
"There a man speaks. In love there's no more nor less. I love my
daughter with one love, and her with another."
"I was just telling Anna Arkadyevna," said Vorkuev, "that if she
were to put a hundredth part of the energy she devotes to this
English girl to the public question of the education of Russian
children, she would be doing a great and useful work."
"Yes, but I can't help it; I couldn't do it. Count Alexey
Kirillovitch urged me very much" (as she uttered the words Count
Alexey Kirillovitch she glanced with appealing timidity at Levin,
and he unconsciously responded with a respectful and reassuring
look); "he urged me to take up the school in the village. I
visited it several times. The children were very nice, but I
could not feel drawn to the work. You speak of energy. Energy
rests upon love; and come as it will, there's no forcing it. I
took to this child--I could not myself say why."
And she glanced again at Levin. And her smile and her glance--all
told him that it was to him only she was addressing her words,
valuing his good opinion, and at the same time sure beforehand
that they understood each other.
"I quite understand that," Levin answered. "It's impossible to
give one's heart to a school or such institutions in general, and
I believe that that's just why philanthropic institutions always
give such poor results."
She was silent for a while, then she smiled.
"Yes, yes," she agreed; "I never could. Je n'ai pas le coeur
assez large to love a whole asylum of horrid little girls. Cela
ne m'a jamais riussi. There are so many women who have made
themselves une position sociale in that way. And now more than
ever," she said with a mournful, confiding expression, ostensibly
addressing her brother, but unmistakably intending her words only
for Levin, "now when I have such need of some occupation, I
cannot." And suddenly frowning (Levin saw that she was frowning
at herself for talking about herself) she changed the subject. "I
know about you," she said to Levin; "that you're not a
public-spirited citizen, and I have defended you to the best of
my ability."
"How have you defended me?"
"Oh, according to the attacks made on you. But won't you have
some tea?" She rose and took up a book bound in morocco.
"Give it to me, Anna Arkadyevna," said Vorkuev, indicating the
book. "It's well worth taking up."
"Oh, no, it's all so sketchy."
"I told him about it," Stepan Arkadyevitch said to his sister,
nodding at Levin.
"You shouldn't have. My writing is something after the fashion of
those little baskets and carving 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
taking 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 Arkadyevitch, 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 Arkadyevitch--all, so
it seemed to Levin, gained peculiar significance from her
appreciation 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 genuine depth of feeling. 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 was also sorry for her, and afraid that
Vronsky did not fully understand her. At eleven o'clock, when
Stepan Arkadyevitch got up to go (Vorknev had left earlier), it
seemed to Levin that he had only just come. Regretfully Levin too
rose.
"Good-bye," she said, holding his hand and glancing into his face
with a winning look. "I am very glad que la glare 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 it.
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. _
Read next: Part Seven: Chapter 11
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