Part I   
Chapter XIX   
     
WHEN Anna went into the room, Dolly was sitting in the little drawing-room with a white-headed fat little boy, already like his father, giving him a lesson in French reading. As the boy read, he kept twisting and trying to tear off a button that was nearly off his jacket. His mother had several times taken his hand from it, but the fat little hand went back to the button again. His mother pulled the button off and put it in her pocket.      1   
  ‘Keep your hands still, Grisha,’ she said, and she took up her work, a coverlet she had long been making. She always set to work on it at depressed moments, and now she knitted at it nervously, twitching her fingers and counting the stitches. Though she had sent word the day before to her husband that it was nothing to her whether his sister came or not, she had made everything ready for her arrival, and was expecting her sister-in-law with emotion.      2   
  Dolly was crushed by her sorrow, utterly swallowed up by it. Still she did not forget that Anna, her sister-in-law, was the wife of one of the most important personages in Petersburg, and was a Petersburg grande dame. And, thanks to this circumstance, she did not carry out her threat to her husband—that is to say, she remembered that her sister-in-law was coming. ‘And, after all, Anna is in no wise to blame,’ thought Dolly. ‘I know nothing of her except the very best, and I have seen nothing but kindness and affection from her towards myself.’ It was true that as far as she could recall her impressions at Petersburg at the Karenins’, she did not like their household itself; there was something artificial in the whole framework of their family life. ‘But why should I not receive her? If only she doesn’t take it into her head to console me!’ thought Dolly. ‘All consolation and counsel and Christian forgiveness, all that I have thought over a thousand times, and it’s all no use.’      3   
  All these days Dolly had been alone with her children. She did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of outside matters. She knew that in one way or another she would tell Anna everything, and she was alternately glad at the thought of speaking freely, and angry at the necessity of speaking of her humiliation with her, his sister, and of hearing her ready-made phrases of good advice and comfort. She had been on the look-out for her, glancing at her watch every minute, and, as often happens, let slip just that minute when her visitor arrived, so that she did not hear the bell.      4   
  Catching a sound of skirts and light steps at the door, she looked round, and her careworn face unconsciously expressed not gladness, but wonder. She got up and embraced her sister-in-law.      5   
  ‘What, here already!’ she said as she kissed her.      6   
  ‘Dolly, how glad I am to see you!’      7   
  ‘I am glad too,’ said Dolly, faintly smiling, and trying by the expression of Anna’s face to find out whether she knew. ‘Most likely she knows,’ she thought, noticing the sympathy in Anna’s face. ‘Well, come along, I’ll take you to your room,’ she went on, trying to defer as long as possible the moment of confidences.      8   
  ‘Is this Grisha? Heavens, how he’s grown!’ said Anna; and kissing him, never taking her eyes off Dolly, she stood still and flushed a little. ‘No, please, let us stay here.’      9   
  She took off her kerchief and her hat, and catching it in a lock of her black hair, which was a mass of curls, she tossed her head and shook her hair down.     10   
  ‘You are radiant with health and happiness!’ said Dolly, almost with envy.     11   
  ‘I? … Yes,’ said Anna. ‘Merciful heavens, Tanya! You’re the same age as my Seryozha,’ she added, addressing the little girl as she ran in. She took her in her arms and kissed her. ‘Delightful child, delightful! Show me them all.’     12   
  She mentioned them, not only remembering the names, but the years, months, characters, illnesses of all the children, and Dolly could not but appreciate that.     13   
  ‘Very well, we will go to them,’ she said. ‘It’s a pity Vassya’s asleep.’     14   
  After seeing the children, they sat down, alone now, in the drawing-room, to coffee. Anna took the tray, and then pushed it away from her.     15   
  ‘Dolly,’ said she, ‘he has told me.’     16   
  Dolly looked coldly at Anna; she was waiting now for phrases of conventional sympathy, but Anna said nothing of the sort.     17   
  ‘Dolly, dear,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to speak for him to you, nor to try to comfort you; that’s impossible. But, darling, I’m simply sorry, sorry from my heart for you!’     18   
  Under the thick lashes of her shining eyes tears suddenly glittered. She moved nearer to her sister-in-law and took her hand in her vigorous little hand. Dolly did not shrink away, but her face did not lose its frigid expression. She said—     19   
  ‘To comfort me’s impossible. Everything’s lost after what has happened, everything’s over!’     20   
  And directly she had said this, her face suddenly softened. Anna lifted the wasted, thin hand of Dolly, kissed it and said—     21   
  ‘But, Dolly, what’s to be done, what’s to be done? How is it best to act in this awful position—that’s what you must think of.’     22   
  ‘All’s over, and there’s nothing more,’ said Dolly. ‘And the worst of it all is, you see, that I can’t cast him off: there are the children, I am tied. And I can’t live with him; it’s a torture to me to see him.’     23   
  ‘Dolly, darling, he has spoken to me, but I want to hear it from you: tell me all about it.’     24   
  Dolly looked at her inquiringly.     25   
  Sympathy and love unfeigned were visible on Anna’s face.     26   
  ‘Very well,’ she said all at once. ‘But I will tell you it from the beginning. You know how I was married. With the education mamma gave us I was more than innocent, I was stupid. I knew nothing. I know they say men tell their wives of their former lives, but Stiva—’ she corrected herself—‘Stepan Arkadyevitch told me nothing. You’ll hardly believe it, but till now I imagined that I was the only woman he had known. So I lived eight years. You must understand that I was so far from suspecting infidelity, I regarded it as impossible, and then—try to imagine it—with such ideas to find out suddenly all the horror, all the loath-someness…. You must try and understand me. To be fully convinced of one’s happiness, and all at once…’ continued Dolly, holding back her sobs, ‘to get a letter … his letter to his mistress, my governess. No, it’s too awful!’ She hastily pulled out her handkerchief and hid her face in it. ‘I can understand being carried away by feeling,’ she went on after a brief silence, ‘but deliberately, slyly deceiving me … and with whom? … To go on being my husband together with her … it’s awful! You can’t understand…’     27   
  ‘Oh yes, I understand! I understand! Dolly, dearest, I do understand,’ said Anna, pressing her hand.     28   
  ‘And do you imagine he realises all the awfulness of my position?’ Dolly resumed. ‘Not the slightest! He’s happy and contented.’     29   
  ‘Oh no!’ Anna interposed quickly. ‘He’s to be pitied, he’s weighed down by remorse…’     30   
  ‘Is he capable of remorse?’ Dolly interrupted, gazing intently into her sister-in-law’s face.     31   
  ‘Yes. I know him. I could not look at him without feeling sorry for him. We both know him. He’s good-hearted, but he’s proud, and now he’s so humiliated. What touched me most…’ (and here Anna guessed what would touch Dolly most) ‘he’s tortured by two things: that he’s ashamed for the children’s sake, and that, loving you—yes, yes, loving you beyond everything on earth,’ she hurriedly interrupted Dolly, who would have answered—‘he has hurt you, pierced you to the heart. “No, no, she cannot forgive me,” he keeps saying.’     32   
  Dolly looked dreamily away beyond her sister-in-law as she listened to her words.     33   
  ‘Yes, I can see that his position is awful; it’s worse for the guilty than the innocent,’ she said, ‘if he feels that all the misery comes from his fault. But how am I to forgive him, how am I to be his wife again after her? For me to live with him now would be torture, just because I love my past love for him…’     34   
  And sobs cut short her words. But as though of set design, each time she was softened she began to speak again of what exasperated her.     35   
  ‘She’s young, you see, she’s pretty,’ she went on. ‘Do you know, Anna, my youth and my beauty are gone, taken by whom? By him and his children. I have worked for him, and all I had has gone in his service, and now of course any fresh, vulgar creature has more charm for him. No doubt they talked of me together, or, worse still, they were silent. Do you understand?’     36   
  Again her eyes glowed with hatred.     37   
  ‘And after that he will tell me … What! can I believe him? Never! No, everything is over, everything that once made my comfort, the reward of my work, and my sufferings.… Would you believe it, I was teaching Grisha just now: once this was a joy to me, now it is a torture. What have I to strive and toil for? Why are the children here? What’s so awful is that all at once my heart’s turned, and instead of love and tenderness, I have nothing but hatred for him; yes, hatred. I could kill him.’     38   
  ‘Darling Dolly, I understand, but don’t torture yourself. You are so distressed, so overwrought, that you look at many things mistakenly.’     39   
  Dolly grew calmer, and for two minutes both were silent.     40   
  ‘What’s to be done? Think for me, Anna, help me. I have thought over everything, and I see nothing.’     41   
  Anna could think of nothing, but her heart responded instantly to each word, to each change of expression of her sister-in-law.     42   
  ‘One thing I would say,’ began Anna. ‘I am his sister, I know his character, that faculty of forgetting everything, everything’ (she waved her hand before her forehead), ‘that faculty for being completely carried away, but for completely repenting too. He cannot believe it, he cannot comprehend now how he can have acted as he did. ’     43   
  ‘No; he understands, he understood!’ Dolly broke in. ‘But I … you are forgetting me … does it make it easier for me?’     44   
  ‘Wait a minute. When he told me, I will own I did not realise all the awfulness of your position. I saw nothing but him, and that the family was broken up. I felt sorry for him, but after talking to you, I see it, as a woman, quite differently. I see your agony, and I can’t tell you how sorry I am for you! But Dolly, darling, I fully realise your sufferings, only there is one thing I don’t know: I don’t know … I don’t know how much love there is still in your heart for him. That you know—whether there is enough for you to be able to forgive him. If there is, forgive him!’     45   
  ‘No,’ Dolly was beginning, but Anna cut her short, kissing her hand once more.     46   
  ‘I know more of the world than you do,’ she said. ‘I know how men like Stiva look at it. You speak of his talking of you with her. That never happened. Such men are unfaithful, but their own home and wife are sacred to them. Somehow or other these women are still looked on with contempt by them, and do not touch on their feeling for their family. They draw a sort of line that can’t be crossed between them and their families. I don’t understand it, but it is so.     47   
  ‘Yes, but he has kissed her…’     48   
  ‘Dolly, hush, darling. I saw Stiva when he was in love with you. I remember the time when he came to me and cried, talking of you, and all the poetry and loftiness of his feeling for you, and I know that the longer he has lived with you the loftier you have been in his eyes. You know we have sometimes laughed at him for putting in at every word: “Dolly’s a marvellous woman.” You have always been a divinity for him, and you are that still, and this has not been an infidelity of the heart….’     49   
  ‘But if it is repeated?’     50   
  ‘It cannot be, as I understand it.…’     51   
  ‘Yes, but could you forgive it?’     52   
  ‘I don’t know, I can’t judge…. Yes, I can,’ said Anna, thinking a moment; and grasping the position in her thought and weighing it in her inner balance, she added: ‘Yes, I can, I can, I can. Yes, I could forgive it. I could not be the same, no; but I could forgive it, and forgive it as though it had never been, never been at all.…’     53   
  ‘Oh, of course,’ Dolly interposed quickly, as though saying what she had more than once thought, ‘else it would not be forgiveness. If one forgives, it must be completely, completely. Come, let us go; I’ll take you to your room,’ she said, getting up, and on the way she embraced Anna. ‘My dear, how glad I am you came. It has made things better, ever so much better.’

Part I   
Chapter XX   
     
THE WHOLE of that day Anna spent at home, that’s to say at the Oblonskys’, and received no one, though some of her acquaintances had already heard of her arrival, and came to call the same day. Anna spent the whole morning with Dolly and the children. She merely sent a brief note to her brother to tell him that he must not fail to dine at home. ‘Come, God is merciful,’ she wrote.      1   
  Oblonsky did dine at home: the conversation was general, and his wife, in speaking to him, addressed him as ‘Stiva,’ as she had not done before. In the relations of the husband and wife the same estrangements still remained, but there was no talk now of separation, and Stepan Arkadyevitch saw the possibility of explanation and reconciliation.      2   
  Immediately after dinner Kitty came in. She knew Anna Arkadyevna, but only very slightly, and she came now to her sister’s with some trepidation, at the prospect of meeting this fashionable Petersburg lady, whom every one spoke so highly of. But she made a favourable impression on Anna Arkadyevna—she saw that at once. Anna was unmistakably admiring her loveliness and her youth: before Kitty knew where she was she found herself not merely under Anna’s sway, but in love with her, as young girls do fall in love with older and married women.      3   
  Anna was not like a fashionable lady, nor the mother of a boy eight years old. In the elasticity of her movements, the freshness and the unflagging eagerness which persisted in her face, and broke out in her smile and her glance, she would rather have passed for a girl of twenty, had it not been for a serious and at times mournful look in her eyes, which struck and attracted Kitty. Kitty felt that Anna was perfectly simple and was concealing nothing, but that she had another higher world of interests inaccessible to her, complex and poetic.      4   
  After dinner, when Dolly went away to her own room, Anna rose quickly and went up to her brother, who was just lighting a cigar.      5   
  ‘Stiva,’ she said to him, winking gaily, crossing him, and glancing towards the door, ‘go, and God help you.’      6   
  He threw down the cigar, understanding her, and departed through the doorway.      7   
  When Stepan Arkadyevitch had disappeared, she went back to the sofa where she was sitting, surrounded by the children. Either because the children saw that their mother was fond of this aunt, or that they felt a special charm in her themselves, the two elder ones, and the younger following their lead, as children so often do, had clung about their new aunt since before dinner, and would not leave her side. And it had become a sort of game among them to sit as close as possible to their aunt, to touch her, hold her little hand, kiss it, play with her ring, or even touch the flounce of her skirt.      8   
  ‘Come, come, as we were sitting before,’ said Anna Arkadyevna, sitting down in her place.      9   
  And again Grisha poked his little face under her arm, and nestled with his head on her gown, beaming with pride and happiness.     10   
  ‘And when is your next ball?’ she asked Kitty.     11   
  ‘Next week, and a splendid ball. One of those balls where one always enjoys oneself.’     12   
  ‘Why, are there balls where one always enjoys oneself?’ Anna said, with tender irony.     13   
  ‘It’s strange, but there are. At the Bobrishtchevs’ one always enjoys oneself, and at the Nikitins’ too, while at the Mezhkovs’ it’s always dull. Haven’t you noticed it?’     14   
  ‘No, my dear, for me there are no balls now where one enjoys oneself,’ said Anna, and Kitty detected in her eyes that mysterious world which was not open to her. ‘For me there are some less dull and tiresome.’     15   
  ‘How can you be dull at a ball?’     16   
  ‘Why should not I be dull at a ball?’ inquired Anna.     17   
  Kitty perceived that Anna knew what answer would follow.     18   
  ‘Because you always look nicer than any one.’     19   
  Anna had the faculty of blushing. She blushed a little, and said—     20   
  ‘In the first place it’s never so; and secondly, if it were, what difference would it make to me?’     21   
  ‘Are you coming to this ball?’ asked Kitty.     22   
  ‘I imagine it won’t be possible to avoid going. Here, take it,’ she said to Tanya, who was pulling the loosely-fitting ring off her white, slender-tipped finger.     23   
  ‘I shall be so glad if you go. I should so like to see you at a ball.’     24   
  ‘Any way, if I do go, I shall comfort myself with the thought that it’s a pleasure to you…. Grisha, don’t pull my hair. It’s untidy enough without that,’ she said, putting up a straying lock, which Grisha had been playing with.     25   
  ‘I imagine you at the ball in lilac.’     26   
  ‘And why in lilac precisely?’ asked Anna, smiling. ‘Now, children, run along, run along. Do you hear? Miss Hoole is calling you to tea,’ she said, tearing the children from her, and sending them off to the dining-room.     27   
  ‘I know why you press me to come to the ball. You expect a great deal of this ball, and you want every one to be there to take part in it.’     28   
  ‘How do you know? Yes.’     29   
  ‘Oh! what a happy time you are at,’ pursued Anna. ‘I remember, and I know that blue haze like the mist on the mountains in Switzerland. That mist which covers everything in that blissful time when childhood is just ending, and out of that vast circle, happy and gay, there is a path growing narrower and narrower, and it is delightful and alarming to enter the ballroom, bright and splendid as it is.… Who has not been through it?’     30   
  Kitty smiled without speaking. ‘But how did she go through it? How I should like to know all her love-story!’ thought Kitty, recalling the unromantic appearance of Alexey Alexandrovitch, her husband.     31   
  ‘I know something. Stiva told me, and I congratulate you, I liked him so much,’ Anna continued. ‘I met Vronsky at the railway station.’     32   
  ‘Oh, was he there?’ asked Kitty, blushing. ‘What was it Stiva told you?’     33   
  ‘Stiva gossiped about it all. And I should be so glad … I travelled yesterday with Vronsky’s mother,’ she went on; and his mother talked without a pause of him, he’s her favourite. I know mothers are partial, but…’     34   
  ‘What did his mother tell you?’     35   
  ‘Oh, a great deal! And I know that he’s her favourite; still one can see how chivalrous he is … Well, for instance, she told me that he had wanted to give up all his property to his brother, that he had done something extraordinary when he was quite a child, saved a woman out of the water. He’s a hero, in fact,’ said Anna, smiling and recollecting the two hundred roubles he had given at the station.     36   
  But she did not tell Kitty about the two hundred roubles. For some reason it was disagreeable to her to think of it. She felt that there was something that had to do with her in it, and something that ought not to have been.     37   
  ‘She pressed me very much to go and see her,’ Anna went on; ‘and I shall be glad to go to see her to-morrow. Stiva is staying a long while in Dolly’s room, thank God,’ Anna added; changing the subject, and getting up, Kitty fancied, displeased with something.     38   
  ‘No, I’m first! No, I!’ screamed the children, who had finished tea, running up to their Aunt Anna.     39   
  ‘All together!’ said Anna, and she ran laughing to meet them, and embraced and swung round all the throng of swarming children, shrieking with delight.

Part I   
Chapter XXI   
     
DOLLY came out of her room to the tea of the grown-up people. Stepan Arkadyevitch did not come out. He must have left his wife’s room by the other door. ‘I am afraid you’ll be cold upstairs,’ observed Dolly, addressing Anna; ‘I want to move you downstairs, and we shall be nearer.’      1   
  ‘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.      2   
  ‘It will be lighter for you here,’ answered her sister-in-law.      3   
  ‘I assure you that I sleep everywhere, and always like a marmot.’      4   
  ‘What’s the question?’ inquired Stepan Arkadyevitch, coming out of his room and addressing his wife.      5   
  From his tone both Kitty and Anna knew that a reconciliation had taken place.      6   
  ‘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.      7   
  ‘God knows whether they are fully reconciled,’ thought Anna, hearing her tone, cold and composed.      8   
  ‘Oh, nonsense, Dolly, always making difficulties,’ answered her husband. ‘Come, I’ll do it all, if you like…’      9   
  ‘Yes, they must be reconciled,’ thought Anna.     10   
  ‘I know how you do everything,’ answered Dolly. ‘You tell Matvey 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.     11   
  ‘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.     12   
  ‘Not at all. Why do you always look down on me and Matvey?’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling hardly perceptibly, and addressing his wife.     13   
  The whole evening Dolly was, as always, a little mocking in her tone to her husband, while Stepan Arkadyevitch was happy and cheerful, but not so as to seem as though, having been forgiven, he had forgotten his offence.     14   
  At half-past nine o’clock a particularly joyful and pleasant family conversation over the tea-table at the Oblonskys’ was broken up by an apparently simple incident. But this simple incident for some reason struck every one as strange. Talking about common acquaintances in Petersburg, Anna got up quickly.     15   
  ‘She is in my album,’ she said; ‘and by the way, I’ll show you my Seryozha,’ she added, with a mother’s smile of pride.     16   
  Towards 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 Seryozha. 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.     17   
  Just as she was leaving the drawing-room, a ring was heard in the hall.     18   
  ‘Who can that be?’ said Dolly.     19   
  ‘It’s early for me to be fetched, and for any one else it’s late,’ observed Kitty.     20   
  ‘Sure to be some one with papers for me,’ put in Stepan Arkadyevitch. 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 recognised Vronsky, and a strange feeling of pleasure and at the same time of dread of something stirred in her heart. He was standing still, not taking off his coat, pulling something out of his pocket. At the instant, when she was just facing the stairs, he raised his eyes, caught sight of her, and into the expression of his face there passed a shade of embarrassment and dismay. With a slight inclination of her head she passed, hearing behind her Stepan Arkadyevitch’s loud voice calling him to come up, and the quiet, soft, and composed voice of Vronsky refusing.     21   
  When Anna returned with the album, he was already gone, and Stepan Arkadyevitch was telling them that he had called to inquire about the dinner they were giving next day to a celebrity who had just arrived. ‘And nothing would induce him to come up. What a queer fellow he is!’ added Stepan Arkadyevitch.     22   
  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.’     23   
  All of them looked at each other, saying nothing, and began to look at Anna’s album.     24   
  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, but it seemed strange to all of them. Above all, it seemed strange and not right to Anna.

Part I   
Chapter XXII   
     
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 hum, as from a hive, and the rustle of movement; and while on the landing between trees they gave last touches to their hair and dresses before the mirror, they heard from the ballroom the careful, distinct notes of the fiddles of the orchestra beginning the first waltz. A little old man in civilian dress, arranging his grey curls before another mirror, and diffusing an odour 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 Shtcherbatsky called ‘young bucks,’ 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 moustache, admired rosy Kitty.      1   
  Although her dress, her coiffure, and all the preparations for the ball had cost Kitty great trouble and consideration, at this moment she walked into the ballroom in her elaborate tulle dress over a pink slip as easily 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 that tulle and lace, with her hair done up high on her head, and a rose and two leaves on the top of it.      2   
  When, just before entering the ballroom, the princess, her mother, tried to turn right side out the ribbon of her sash. Kitty had drawn back a little. She felt that everything must be right of itself, and graceful, and nothing could need setting straight.      3   
  It was one of Kitty’s best days. Her dress was not uncomfortable anywhere; her lace berthe did not droop anywhere; her rosettes were not crushed nor torn off; her pink slippers with high, hollowed-out heels did not pinch, but gladdened her feet; and the thick rolls of fair chignon kept up on her head as if they were her own hair. All the three buttons buttoned up without tearing on the long glove that covered her hand without concealing its lines. The black velvet of her locket nestled with special softness round her neck. That velvet was delicious; at home, looking at her neck in the looking-glass, Kitty had felt that that velvet was speaking. About all the rest there might be doubt, but the velvet was delicious. Kitty smiled here too, at the ball, when she glanced at it in the glass. Her bare shoulders and arms gave Kitty a sense of chill marble, a feeling she particularly liked. Her eyes sparkled, and her rosy lips could not keep from smiling from the consciousness of her own attractiveness. She had scarcely entered the ballroom and reached the throng of ladies, all tulle, ribbons, lace, and flowers, 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 director of dances, a married man, handsome and well-built, Yegorushka Korsunsky. He had only just left the Countess Banin, with whom he had danced the first half of the waltz, and scanning his kingdom—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 directors of balls. Without even asking her if she cared to dance, he put out his arm to encircle her slender waist. She looked round for some one to give her fan to, and their hostess, smiling to her, took it.      4   
  ‘How nice you’ve come in good time,’ he said to her, embracing her waist; ‘such a bad habit to be late.’ Bending her left hand, 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.      5   
  ‘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 exquisite—such lightness, precision.’ He said to her the same thing he said to almost all his partners whom he knew well.      6   
  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 cream of society gathered together. There—incredibly naked—was the beauty Lidi, Korsunsky’s wife; there was the lady of the house; there shone the bald head of Krivin, always to be found where 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 exquisite 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 long-sighted eyes she knew him at once, and was even aware that he was looking at her.      7   
  ‘Another turn, eh? You’re not tired?’ said Korsunsky, a little out of breath.      8   
  ‘No, thank you!’      9   
  ‘Where shall I take you?’     10   
  ‘Madame Karenin’s here, I think … take me to her.’     11   
  ‘Wherever you command.’     12   
  And Korsunsky began waltzing with measured steps straight towards 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 throat and shoulders, that looked as though carved in old ivory, and her rounded arms, with tiny, slender wrists. 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 bouquet of the same in the black ribbon of her sash among white lace. Her coiffure was not striking. All that was noticeable was the little wilful tendrils of her curly hair that would always break free about her neck and temples. Round her well-cut, strong neck was a thread of pearls.     13   
  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 seen her charm. She saw her now as some one quite new and surprising to her. Now she understood that Anna could not have been in lilac, and that her charm was just 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 eager.     14   
  She was standing, holding herself, as always, very erect, and when Kitty drew near the group she was speaking to the master of the house, her head slightly turned towards him.     15   
  ‘No, I don’t throw stones,’ 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 towards Kitty. With a flying, 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.     16   
  ‘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 balls happy and successful. Anna Arkadyevna, a waltz?’ he said, bending down to her.     17   
  ‘Why, have you met?’ inquired their host.     18   
  ‘Is there any one we have not met? My wife and I are like white wolves—every one knows us,’ answered Korsunsky.     19   
  ‘A waltz, Anna Arkadyevna?’     20   
  ‘I don’t dance, when it’s possible not to dance,’ she said.     21   
  ‘But to-night it’s impossible,’ answered Korsunsky.     22   
  At that instant Vronsky came up.     23   
  ‘Well, since it’s impossible to-night, let us start,’ she said, not noticing Vronsky’s bow, and she hastily put her hand on Korsunsky’s shoulder.     24   
  ‘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 that he had not seen her all this time. Kitty gazed in admiration at Anna waltzing, and listened to him. She expected him to ask her for a waltz, but he did not, and she glanced wonderingly at him. He flushed slightly, and hurriedly asked her to waltz, but he had only just put his arm round her 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 afterwards—for several years after—that look, full of love, to which he made no response, cut her to the heart with an agony of shame.     25   
  ‘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 himself.

Part I   
Chapter XXIII   
     
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 Nordston 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 town theatre; and only once the conversation touched her to the quick, when he asked her about Levin, whether he was here, and added that he liked him so much. But Kitty did not expect much from the quadrille. She looked forward with a thrill at her heart to the mazurka. She fancied that in the mazurka everything must be decided. The fact that he did not during the quadrille ask her for the mazurka did not trouble her. She felt sure she would dance the mazurka 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 colours, 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 again since the beginning of the evening, and now again she saw her suddenly 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 playing on her lips, and the deliberate grace, precision, and lightness of her movements.      1   
  ‘Who?’ she asked herself. ‘All or one?’ And not assisting the harassed young man she was dancing with in the conversation, the thread of which he had 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 chaîne, and at the same time she kept watch with a growing pang at her heart. ‘No, it’s not the admiration of the crowd 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, not to show these signs of delight, but they came out on her face of themselves. ‘But what of him?’ Kitty looked at him and was filled with terror. What was pictured so clearly to Kitty in the mirror of Anna’s face she saw in him. What had become of his always self-possessed resolute manner, and the carelessly serene 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 every time to be saying, ‘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.      2   
  They were speaking of common acquaintances, keeping up the most trivial conversation, but to Kitty it seemed that every word they said was determining their fate and hers. And strange it was that they were actually talking of how absurd Ivan Ivanovitch was with his French, and how the Eletsky girl might have made a better match, yet these words had all the while consequence for them, and they were feeling just as Kitty did. The whole ball, the whole world, everything seemed lost in fog in 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 any one that she had remained disengaged till now. She would have to tell her mother she felt ill and go home, but she had not the strength to do this. She felt crushed. She went to the furthest end of the little 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. But 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.      3   
  ‘But perhaps I am wrong, perhaps it was not so?’ And again she recalled all she had seen.      4   
  ‘Kitty, what is it?’ said Countess Nordston, stepping noiselessly over the carpet towards her. ‘I don’t understand it;      5   
  Kitty’s lower lip began to quiver; she got up quickly.      6   
  ‘Kitty, you’re not dancing the mazurka?’      7   
  ‘No, no,’ said Kitty in a voice shaking with tears.      8   
  ‘He asked her for the mazurka before me,’ said Countess Nordston, knowing Kitty would understand who were ‘he’ and ‘her.’ ‘She said: “Why, aren’t you going to dance it with Princess Shtcherbatsky?”’      9   
  ‘Oh, I don’t care!’ answered Kitty.     10   
  No one but she herself understood her position; no one knew that she had just refused the man whom perhaps she loved, and refused him because she had put her faith in another.     11   
  Countess Nordston found Korsunsky, with whom she was to dance the mazurka, and told him to ask Kitty.     12   
  Kitty danced in the first couple, and luckily for her she had not to talk, because Korsunsky was all the time running about directing the figure. Vronsky and Anna sat almost opposite her.     13   
  She saw them with her long-sighted eyes, and saw them, too, close by, when they met in the figures, and the more she saw them the more convinced was she that her unhappiness was complete. She saw that they felt themselves alone in that crowded room. And on Vronsky’s face, always so firm and independent, she saw that look that had struck her, of bewilderment and humble submissiveness, like the expression of an intelligent dog when it has done wrong.     14   
  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 fascinating in her simple black dress, fascinating were her round arms with their bracelets, fascinating was her firm neck with its thread of pearls, fascinating the straying curls of her loose hair, fascinating the graceful, light movements of her little feet and hands, fascinating was that lovely face in its eagerness, but there was something terrible and cruel in her fascination.     15   
  Kitty admired her more than ever, and more and more acute was her suffering. Kitty felt overwhelmed, and her face showed it. When Vronsky saw her, coming across her in the mazurka, he did not at once recognise her, she was so changed.     16   
  ‘Delightful ball!’ he said to her, for the sake of saying something.     17   
  ‘Yes,’ she answered.     18   
  In the middle of the mazurka, repeating a complicated figure, newly invented by Korsunsky, Anna came forward into the centre of the circle, chose two gentlemen, and summoned a lady and Kitty. 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.     19   
  ‘Yes, there is something uncanny, devilish and fascinating in her,’ Kitty said to herself.     20   
  Anna did not mean to stay to supper, but the master of the house began to press her to do so.     21   
  ‘Nonsense, Anna Arkadyevna,’ said Korsunsky, drawing her bare arm under the sleeve of his dress coat, ‘I’ve such an idea for a cotillon! Un bijou!’     22   
  And he moved gradually on, trying to draw her along with him. Their host smiled approvingly.     23   
  ‘No, I am 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.     24   
  ‘No; why, as it is, I have danced more at your ball in Moscow than I have all the winter in Petersburg,’ said Anna, looking round at Vronsky, who stood near her. ‘I must rest a little before my journey.’     25   
  ‘Are you certainly going to-morrow then?’ asked Vronsky.     26   
  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ answered Anna, as it were 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.     27   
  Anna Arkadyevna did not stay to supper, but went home.

Part I   
Chapter XXIV   
     
‘YES, there is something in me hateful, repulsive,’ thought Levin, as he came away from the Shtcherbatskys’, and walked in the direction of his brother’s lodgings. ‘And I don’t get on with other people. Pride, they say. No, I have no 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 self-possessed certainly never placed in the awful position in which he had been that evening. ‘Yes, she was bound to choose him. So it had to be, and I cannot complain of any one 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 any one, nor of use to anybody.’ And he recalled his brother Nikolay, and dwelt with pleasure on the thought of him. ‘Isn’t he right that everything in the world is base and loathsome? And are we fair in our judgment of brother Nikolay? Of course, from the point of Prokofy, 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 like him. And I, instead of going to seek him out, went out to dinner, and came here.’ Levin walked up to a lamp-post, read his brother’s address, which was in his pocket-book, and called a sledge. All the long way to his brother’s, Levin vividly recalled all the facts familiar to him of his brother Nikolay’s life. He remembered how his brother, while at the university, and for a year afterwards, 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 afterwards, how he had all at once broken out: he had associated with 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 unlawfully wounding. Then he recalled 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 Sergey Ivanovitch had paid.) Then he remembered how he had spent a night in the lock-up for disorderly conduct in the street. He remembered the shameful proceedings he had tried to get up against his brother Sergey Ivanovitch, accusing him of not having paid him his share of his mother’s fortune, 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 disgusting, yet to Levin it appeared not at all in the same disgusting light as it inevitably would to those who did not know Nikolay, did not know all his story, did not know his heart.      1   
  Levin remembered that when Nikolay 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, every one, far from encouraging him, had jeered at him, and he, too, with the Others. They had teased him, called him Noah, and monk, and, when he had broken out, no one had helped him, but every one had turned away from him with horror and disgust.      2   
  Levin felt that, in spite of all the ugliness of his life, his brother Nikolay, 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 temperament and his somehow limited intelligence. But 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 so understand him,’ Levin resolved to himself, as, towards eleven o’clock, he reached the hotel of which he had the address.      3   
  ‘At the top, 12 and 13,’ the porter answered Levin’s inquiry.      4   
  ‘At home?’      5   
  ‘Sure to be at home.’      6   
  The door of No. 12 was half open, and there came out into the streak of light 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 heard his cough.      7   
  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.’      8   
  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 jerkin, and that a pock-marked 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 goloshes, listened to what the gentleman in the jerkin was saying. He was speaking of some enterprise.      9   
  ‘Well, the devil flay them, the privileged classes,’ his brother’s voice responded, with a cough. ‘Masha! get us some supper and some wine if there’s any left; or else go and get some.’     10   
  The woman rose, and came out from behind the screen, and saw Konstantin.     11   
  ‘There’s some gentleman, Nikolay Dmitritch,’ she said.     12   
  ‘Whom do you want?’ said the voice of Nikolay Levin, angrily.     13   
  ‘It’s I, answered Konstantin Levin, coming forward into the light.     14   
  ‘Who’s I?’ Nikolay’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, thin, stooping figure of his brother, so familiar, and yet astonishing in its weirdness and sickliness.     15   
  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 moustaches hid his lips, the same eyes gazed strangely and naively at his visitor.     16   
  ‘Ah, Kostya!’ he exclaimed suddenly, recognising 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 neckband hurt him; and a quite different expression, wild, suffering, and cruel, rested on his emaciated face.     17   
  ‘I wrote to you and Sergey Ivanovitch both that I don’t know you and don’t want to know you. What is it you want?’     18   
  He was not at all the same as Konstantin had been fancying him. The worst and most tiresome part of his character, what 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.     19   
  ‘I didn’t want to see you for anything,’ he answered timidly.     20   
  ‘I’ve simply come to see you.’     21   
  His brother’s timidity obviously softened Nikolay. His lips twitched.     22   
  ‘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 jerkin: ‘This is Mr. Kritsky, my friend from Kiev, a very remarkable man. He’s persecuted by the police, of course, because he’s not a scoundrel.’     23   
  And he looked round in the way he always did at every one in the room. Seeing that the woman standing in the doorway was moving to go, he shouted to her, ‘Wait a minute, I said.’ And with the inability to express himself, the incoherence that Konstantin knew so well, he began, with another look round at every one, to tell his brother Kritsky’s story: how he had been expelled the university for starting a benefit society for the poor students and Sunday-schools; and how he had afterwards been a teacher in a peasant school, and how he had been driven out of that too, and had afterwards been condemned for something.     24   
  ‘You’re of the Kiev university?’ said Konstantin Levin to Kritsky, to break the awkward silence that followed.     25   
  ‘Yes, I was of Kiev,’ Kritsky replied angrily, his face darkening.     26   
  ‘And this woman,’ Nikolay Levin interrupted him, pointing to her, ‘is the partner of my life, Marya Nikolaevna. I took her out of a bad house,’ and he jerked his neck saying this; ‘but I love her and respect her, and any one who wants to know me,’ he added, raising his voice and knitting his brows, ‘I beg to love her and respect her. She’s just the same as my wife, just the same. So now you know whom you’ve got to do with. And if you think you’re lowering yourself, well, here’s the floor, there’s the door.’     27   
  And again his eyes travelled inquiringly over all of them.     28   
  ‘Why I should be lowering myself, I don’t understand.’     29   
  ‘Then, Masha, tell them to bring supper; three portions, spirits and wine…. No, wait a minute…. No, it doesn’t matter…. Go along.’

Part I   
Chapter XXV   
     
SO you see,’ pursued Nikolay Levin, painfully wrinkling his forehead and twitching. It was obviously difficult for him to think of what to say and do.      1   
  ‘Here, do you see?’ … He pointed to some sort of iron bars, fastened together with strings, lying in a corner of the room. ‘Do you see that? That’s the beginning of a new thing we’re going into. It’s a productive association….’      2   
  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. Nikolay Levin went on talking—      3   
  ‘You know that capital oppresses the labourer. The labourers with us, the peasants, bear all the burden of labour, and are so placed that however much they work they can’t escape from their position of beasts of burden. All the profits of labour, 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’s 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 he looked questioningly at his brother.      4   
  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Konstantin, looking at the patch of red that had come out on his brother’s projecting cheekbones.      5   
  ‘And so we’re founding a locksmith’s association, where all the production and profit and the chief instruments of production will be in common.’      6   
  ‘Where is the association to be?’ asked Konstantin Levin.      7   
  ‘In the village of Vozdrem, Kazan government.’      8   
  ‘But why in a village? In the villages, I think, there is plenty of work as it is. Why a locksmiths’ association in a village?’ ‘Why? Because the peasants are just as much slaves as they ever were, and that’s why you and Sergey Ivanovitch don’t like people to try and get them out of their slavery,’ said Nikolay Levin, exasperated by the objection.      9   
  Konstantin Levin sighed, looking meanwhile about the cheerless and dirty room. This sigh seemed to exasperate Nikolay still more.     10   
  ‘I know your and Sergey Ivanovitch’s aristocratic views. I know that he applies all the power of his intellect to justify existing evils.’     11   
  ‘No; and what do you talk of Sergey Ivanovitch for?’ said Levin, smiling.     12   
  ‘Sergey Ivanovitch? I’ll tell you what for!’ Nikolay Levin shrieked suddenly at the name of Sergey Ivanovitch. ‘I’ll tell you what for…. But what’s the use of talking? There’s only one thing…. What did you come to me for? You look down on this, and you’re welcome to,—and go away, in God’s name go away!’ he shrieked, getting up from his chair. ‘And go away, and go away!’     13   
  ‘I don’t look down on it at all,’ said Konstantin Levin timidly. ‘I don’t even dispute it.’     14   
  At that instant Marya Nikolaevna came back. Nikolay Levin looked round angrily at her. She went quickly to him, and whispered something.     15   
  ‘I’m not well; I’ve grown irritable,’ said Nikolay Levin, getting calmer and breathing painfully; ‘and then you talk to me of Sergey Ivanovitch and his article. It’s such rubbish, such lying, such self-deception. What can a man write of justice who knows nothing of it? Have you read his article?’ he asked Kritsky, sitting down again at the table, and moving back off half of it the scattered cigarettes, so as to clear a space.     16   
  ‘I’ve not read it,’ Kritsky responded gloomily, obviously not desiring to enter into the conversation.     17   
  ‘Why not?’ said Nikolay Levin, now turning with exasperation upon Kritsky.     18   
  ‘Because I didn’t see the use of wasting my time over it.’     19   
  ‘Oh, but excuse me, how did you know it would be wasting your time? That article’s too deep for many people—that’s to say it’s over their heads. But with me, it’s another thing; I see through his ideas, and I know where its weakness lies.’     20   
  Every one was mute. Kritsky got up deliberately and reached his cap.     21   
  ‘Won’t you have supper? All right, good-bye! Come round to-morrow with the locksmith.’     22   
  Kritsky had hardly gone out when Nikolay Levin smiled and winked.     23   
  ‘He’s no good either,’ he said. ‘I see, of course…’     24   
  But at that instant Kritsky, at the door, called him.     25   
  ‘What do you want now?’ he said, and went out to him in the passage. Left alone with Marya Nikolaevna, Levin turned to her.     26   
  ‘Have you been long with my brother?’ he said to her.     27   
  ‘Yes, more than a year. Nikolay Dmitritch’s health has become very poor. Nikolay Dmitritch drinks a great deal,’ she said.     28   
  ‘That is … how does he drink?’     29   
  ‘Drinks vodka, and it’s bad for him.’     30   
  ‘And a great deal?’ whispered Levin.     31   
  ‘Yes,’ she said, looking timidly towards the doorway, where Nikolay Levin had reappeared.     32   
  ‘What were you talking about?’ he said, knitting his brows, and turning his scared eyes from one to the other. ‘What was it?’     33   
  ‘Oh, nothing,’ Konstantin answered in confusion.     34   
  ‘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 shortcomings,’ he began again, raising his voice.     35   
  ‘Nikolay Dmitritch, Nikolay Dmitritch,’ whispered Marya Nikolaevna, again going up to him.     36   
  ‘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 glassful and drank it greedily. ‘Like a drink?’ he turned to his brother, and at once became better humoured.     37   
  ‘Well, enough of Sergey Ivanovitch. 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 glassful. ‘How are you living?’     38   
  ‘I live alone in the country, as I used to. 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.     39   
  ‘Why don’t you get married?’     40   
  ‘It hasn’t happened so,’ Konstantin answered, reddening a little.     41   
  ‘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.’     42   
  Konstantin made haste to change the conversation.     43   
  ‘Do you know your little Vanya’s with me, a clerk in the counting-house at Pokrovsky.’     44   
  Nikolay jerked his neck, and sank into thought.     45   
  ‘Yes, tell me what’s going on at Pokrovsky. Is the house standing still, and the birch-trees, and our schoolroom? And Philip the gardener, is he living? How I remember the arbour and the seat! 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 nice.’     46   
  ‘But come to me now,’ said Levin. ‘How nicely we would arrange it!’     47   
  ‘I’d come and see you if I were sure I should not find Sergey Ivanovitch.’     48   
  ‘You wouldn’t find him there. I live quite independently of him.’     49   
  ‘Yes, but say what you like, you will have to choose between me and him,’ he said, looking timidly into his brother’s face.     50   
  This timidity touched Konstantin.     51   
  ‘If you want to hear my confession of faith on the subject, I tell you that in your quarrel with Sergey Ivanovitch I take neither side. You’re both wrong. You’re more wrong externally, and he inwardly.’     52   
  ‘Ah, ah! You see that, you see that!’ Nikolay shouted joyfully.     53   
  ‘But I, personally, value friendly relations with you more because…’     54   
  ‘Why, why?’     55   
  Konstantin could not say that he valued it more because Nikolay was unhappy, and needed affection. But Nikolay knew that this was just what he meant to say, and scowling he took up the vodka again.     56   
  ‘Enough, Nikolay Dmitritch!’ said Marya Nikolaevna, stretching out her plump, bare arm toward the decanter.     57   
  ‘Let it be! Don’t insist! I’ll beat you!’ he shouted.     58   
  Marya Nikolaevna smiled a sweet and good-humoured smile, which was at once reflected on Nikolay’s face, and she took the bottle.     59   
  ‘And do you suppose she understands nothing?’ said Nikolay. ‘She understands it all better than any of us. Isn’t it true there’s something good and sweet in her?’     60   
  ‘Were you never before in Moscow?’ Konstantin said to her, for the sake of saying something.     61   
  ‘Only you mustn’t be polite and stiff with her. It frightens her. No one ever spoke to her so but the justices of the peace who tried her for trying to get out of a house of ill-fame. Mercy on us, the senselessness in the world!’ he cried suddenly. ‘These new institutions, these justices of the peace, rural councils, what hideousness it all is!’     62   
  And he began to enlarge on his encounters with the new institutions.     63   
  Konstantin Levin heard him, and the disbelief in the sense of all public institutions, which he shared with him, and often expressed, was distasteful to him now from his brother’s lips.     64   
  ‘In another world we shall understand it all,’ he said lightly.     65   
  ‘In another world! Ah, I don’t like that other world! I don’t like it,’ he said, letting his scared eyes rest on his brother’s eyes. ‘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 have got so fond of the Gypsies and Russian songs.’     66   
  His speech had begun to falter, and he passed abruptly 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.     67   
  Masha promised to write to Konstantin in case of need, and to persuade Nikolay Levin to go and stay with his brother.

   
Part I   
Chapter XXVI   
     
IN the morning Konstantin Levin left Moscow, and towards evening he reached home. On the journey in the train he talked to his neighbours about politics and the new railways, and, just as in Moscow, he was overcome by a sense of confusion of ideas, dissatisfaction with himself, 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 reflected by the station fires, he saw his own sledge, his own horses with their tails tied 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 when he had put on the sheepskin brought for him, had sat down wrapped up in the sledge, and had driven off pondering on the work that lay before him in the village, and staring at the side-horse, who had been his saddle-horse, past his prime now, but a spirited beast from the Don, he began to see what had happened to him in quite a different light. He felt himself, and did not want to be any one else. All he wanted now was to be better than before. In the first place he resolved that from that day he would give up hoping for any extraordinary happiness, such as marriage must have given him, and consequently he would not so disdain what he really had. Secondly, 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 make an offer. Then remembering his brother Nikolay, he resolved to himself that he would never allow himself to forget him, that he would follow him up, and not lose sight of him, so as to be ready to help when things should 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 think. He considered a revolution in economic conditions nonsense. But he always felt the injustice of his own abundance in comparison with the poverty of the peasants and now he determined that so as 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 the pleasantest day-dreams. With a resolute feeling of hope in a new, better life, he reached home before nine o’clock at night.      1   
  The snow of the little quadrangle before the house was lit up by a light in the bedroom windows of his old nurse, Agafea Mihalovna, who performed the duties of housekeeper in his house. She was not yet asleep. Kouzma, waked up by her, came sliding sleepily out on to the steps. A setter bitch, Laska, ran out too, almost upsetting Kouzma, and whining, turned round about Levin’s knees jumping up and longing, but not daring, to put her forepaws on his chest.      2   
  ‘You’re soon back again, sir,’ said Agafea Mihalovna.      3   
  ‘I got tired of it, Agafea Mihalovna. With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better,’ he answered, and went into his study.      4   
  The study was slowly lit up as the candle was brought in. The familiar details came out: the stag’s horns, the bookshelves, the looking-glass, the stove with its ventilator, which had long wanted mending, his father’s sofa, a large table, on the table an open book a broken ash-tray, a manuscript-book 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 falls, and everlasting expectation of a happiness which you won’t get, and which isn’t possible for you.’      5   
  This the things said to him, but 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 heavy dumb-bells, and began brandishing them like a gymnast, trying to restore his confident temper. There was a creak of steps at the door. He hastily put down the dumb-bells.      6   
  The bailiff came in, and said that everything, thank God, was doing well; but 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 the 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 the 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.      7   
  ‘Kouzma, give me my sheepskin. And you tell them to take a lantern. I’ll come and look at her,’ he said to the bailiff.      8   
  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 was the warm, steamy smell of dung when the frozen door was opened, and the cows, astonished at the unfamiliar light of the lantern, stirred on the fresh straw. He caught a glimpse of the broad, smooth, black and piebald back of Hollandka. 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, a perfect beauty, huge as a hippopotamus, with her back turned to them, prevented their seeing the calf, as she sniffed her all over.      9   
  Levin went into the pen, looked Pava over, and lifted the red and spotted calf on to her long, tottering 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 her nose under her mother’s udder, and stiffened her tail out straight.     10   
  ‘Here, bring the light, Fyodor, this way,’ said Levin, examining the calf. ‘Like the mother! though the colour takes after the father; but that’s nothing. Very good. Long and broad in the haunch. Vassily Fedorovitch, isn’t she splendid?’ he said to the bailiff, quite forgiving him for the buckwheat under the influence of his delight in the calf.     11   
  ‘How could she fail to be? Oh, Semyon the contractor came the day after you left. You must settle with him, Konstantin Dmitritch,’ said the bailiff. ‘I did inform you about the machine.’     12   
  This question was enough to take Levin back to all the details of his work on the estate, which was on a large scale, and complicated. He went straight from the cowhouse to the counting-house, and after a little conversation with the bailiff and Semyon the contractor, he went back to the house and straight upstairs to the drawing-room.

Part I   
Chapter XXVII   
     
THE HOUSE was big and old fashioned, and Levin, though he lived alone, had the whole house heated and used. He knew that this was stupid, he knew that it was positively not right, 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 beginning with his wife, his family.      1   
  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.      2   
  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 one of the numerous facts of social life. For Levin it was the chief affair of life, on which its whole happiness turned. And now he had to give up that.      3   
  When he had gone into the little drawing-room, where he always had tea, and had settled himself in his armchair with a book, and Agafea Mihalovna had brought him tea, and with her usual, ‘Well, I’ll stay a while, sir,’ had taken a chair in the window, he felt that, however strange it might be, he had not parted from his day-dreams and that he could not live without them. Whether with her, or with another, still it would be. He was reading a book, and thinking of what he was reading, and stopping to listen to Agafea Mihalovna, who gossiped away without flagging, and yet with all that, all sorts of pictures of family life and work in the future rose disconnectedly before his imagination. He felt that in the depth of his soul something had been put in its place, settled down, and laid to rest.      4   
  He heard Agafea Mihalovna talking of how Prohor had forgotten his duty to God, and with the money Levin had given him to buy a horse, had been drinking without stopping, 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 complacent satisfaction 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 years’ time I shall have two Dutch cows; Pava herself will perhaps still be alive, a dozen young daughters of Berkoot and the three others—how lovely!’      5   
  He took up his book again. ‘Very good, electricity and heat are the same thing; but is it possible to substitute the one quantity for the other in the equation for the solution of any problem? No. Well then, what of it? The connection between all the forces of nature is felt instinctively…. It’s particularly nice if Pava’s daughter should be a red-spotted cow, and all the herd will take after her, and the other three, too! Splendid! To go out with my wife and visitors to meet the herd…. My wife says, “Kostya and I looked after that calf 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, much better….’ He raised his head, and fell to dreaming. 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 whined plaintively, asking to be stroked.      6   
  ‘There, who’d have thought it?’ said Agafea Mihalovna.      7   
  ‘The dog now … , why, she understands that her master’s come home, and that he’s low-spirited.’      8   
  ‘Why low-spirited?’      9   
  ‘Do you suppose I don’t see it, sir? It’s high time I should know the gentry. Why, I’ve grown up from a little thing with them. It’s nothing, sir, so long as there’s health and a clear conscience.’     10   
  Levin looked intently at her, surprised at how well she knew his thought.     11   
  ‘Shall I fetch you another cup?’ said she, and taking his cup she went out.     12   
  Laska kept poking her head under his hand. He stroked her, and she promptly curled up at his feet, laying her head on a hind-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 repose. Levin watched all her movements attentively.     13   
  ‘That’s what I’ll do,’ he said to himself; ‘that’s what I’ll do! Nothing’s amiss…. All’s well.’     14

Part I   
Chapter XXVIII   
     
AFTER the ball, early next morning, Anna Arkadyevna sent her husband a telegram that she was leaving Moscow the same day.      1   
  ‘No, I must go, I must go’; she explained to her sister-in-law the change in her plans in a tone that suggested that she had to remember so many things that there was no enumerating them: ‘no, it had really better be to-day!’      2   
  Stepan Arkadyevitch was not dining at home, but he promised to come and see his sister off at seven o’clock.      3   
  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 that the children were fickle, or that they had acute senses, and 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,—but they had abruptly dropped their play with their aunt, and their love for her, and were quite indifferent that she was going away. Anna was absorbed the whole morning in preparations for her departure. She wrote notes to her Moscow acquaintances, put 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 well with herself, and which does not come without cause, and for the most part covers dissatisfaction with self.      4   
  After dinner, Anna went up to her room to dress, and Dolly followed her.      5   
  ‘How queer you are to-day!’ Dolly said to her.      6   
  ‘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 peculiarly bright, and were continually swimming with tears. ‘In the same way I didn’t want to leave Petersburg, and now I don’t want to go away from here.’      7   
  ‘You came here and did a good deed,’ said Dolly, looking intently at her.      8   
  Anna looked at her with eyes wet with tears.      9   
  ‘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…’     10   
  ‘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.’     11   
  ‘Every heart has its own skeletons, as the English say.’     12   
  ‘You have no sort of skeleton, have you? Everything is so clear in you.’     13   
  ‘I have!’ said Anna suddenly, and, unexpectedly after her tears, a sly, ironical smile curved her lips.     14   
  ‘Come, he’s amusing, anyway, your skeleton, and not depressing,’ said Dolly, smiling.     15   
  ‘No, he’s depressing. Do you know why I’m going to-day instead of to-morrow? It’s a confession that weighs on me; I want to make it to you,’ said Anna, letting herself drop definitely into an armchair, and looking straight into Dolly’s face.     16   
  And to her surprise Dolly saw that Anna was blushing up to her ears, up to the curly black ringlets on her neck.     17   
  ‘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.’     18   
  ‘Oh, how like Stiva you said that!’ said Dolly, laughing.     19   
  Anna was hurt.     20   
  ‘Oh no, oh no! I’m not Stiva,’ she said, knitting her brows. ‘That’s why I’m telling you, just because I could never let myself doubt myself for an instant,’ said Anna.     21   
  But at the very moment she was uttering the words, she felt that they were not true. She was not merely doubting of herself, she felt emotion at the thought of Vronsky, and was going away sooner than she had meant, simply to avoid meeting him.     22   
  ‘Yes, Stiva told me you danced the mazurka with him, and that he…’     23   
  ‘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…’     24   
  She crimsoned and stopped.     25   
  ‘Oh, they feel it directly!’ said Dolly.     26   
  ‘But I should be in despair if there were anything serious in it on his side,’ Anna interrupted her. ‘And I am certain it will all be forgotten, and Kitty will leave off hating me.’     27   
  ‘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.’     28   
  ‘Oh, heavens, that would be too silly!’ said Anna, and again a deep flush of pleasure came out on her face, when 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?’     29   
  Dolly could scarcely suppress a smile. She loved Anna, but she enjoyed seeing that she too had her weaknesses.     30   
  ‘An enemy? That can’t be.’     31   
  ‘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 to-day!’     32   
  She passed her handkerchief over her face and began dressing.     33   
  At the very moment of starting Stepan Arkadyevitch arrived, late, rosy and good-humoured, smelling of wine and cigars.     34   
  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!’     35   
  ‘I don’t know why,’ said Anna, kissing her and hiding her tears.     36   
  ‘You understood me, and you understand. Good-bye, my darling!’     37