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not bring himself to the point, and could not find the words or the
moment in which to put it. Stepan Arkadyevitch had gone down to his
room, undressed, again washed, and attired in a nightshirt with goffered
frills, he had got into bed, but Levin still lingered in his room, talking of
various trifling matters, and not daring to ask what he wanted to know.
“How wonderfully they make this soap,” he said gazing at a piece
of soap he was handling, which Agafea Mihalovna had put ready for
the visitor but Oblonsky had not used. “Only look; why, it’s a work of
art.”
“Yes, everything’s brought to such a pitch of perfection nowadays,”
said Stepan Arkadyevitch, with a moist and blissful yawn. “The the-
ater, for instance, and the entertainments... a—a—a!” he yawned. “The
electric light everywhere...a—a—a!”
“Yes, the electric light,” said Levin. “Yes. Oh, and where’s Vronsky
now?” he asked suddenly, laying down the soap.
“Vronsky?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, checking his yawn; “he’s in
Petersburg. He left soon after you did, and he’s not once been in
Moscow since. And do you know, Kostya, I’ll tell you the truth,” he
went on, leaning his elbow on the table, and propping on his hand his
handsome ruddy face, in which his moist, good-natured, sleepy eyes
shone like stars. “It’s your own fault. You took fright at the sight of your
rival. But, as I told you at the time, I couldn’t say which had the better
chance. Why didn’t you fight it out? I told you at the time that....” He
yawned inwardly, without opening his mouth.
“Does he know, or doesn’t he, that I did make an offer?” Levin
wondered, gazing at him. “Yes, there’s something humbugging, diplo-
matic in his face,” and feeling he was blushing, he looked Stepan
Arkadyevitch straight in the face without speaking.
“If there was anything on her side at the time, it was nothing but a
superficial attraction,” pursued Oblonsky. “His being such a perfect
aristocrat, don’t you know, and his future position in society, had an
influence not with her, but with her mother.”
Levin scowled. The humiliation of his rejection stung him to the
heart, as though it were a fresh wound he had only just received. But
he was at home, and the walls of home are a support.
“Stay, stay,” he began, interrupting Oblonsky. “You talk of his
being an aristocrat. But allow me to ask what it consists in, that aristoc-
racy of Vronsky or of anybody else, beside which I can be looked down
upon? You consider Vronsky an aristocrat, but I don’t. A man whose
father crawled up from nothing at all by intrigue, and whose mother—
God knows whom she wasn’t mixed up with.... No, excuse me, but I
consider myself aristocratic, and people like me, who can point back in
the past to three or four honorable generations of their family, of the
highest degree of breeding (talent and intellect, of course that’s an-
other matter), and have never curried favor with anyone, never de-
pended on anyone for anything, like my father and my grandfather.
And I know many such. You think it mean of me to count the trees in
my forest, while you may Ryabinin a present of thirty thousand; but
you get rents from your lands and I don’t know what, while I don’t and
so I prize what’s come to me from my ancestors or been won by hard
work.... We are aristocrats, and not those who can only exist by favor of
the powerful of this world, and who can be bought for twopence
halfpenny.”
“Well, but whom are you attacking? I agree with you,” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, sincerely and genially; though he was aware that in the
class of those who could be bought for twopence halfpenny Levin was
reckoning him too. Levin’s warmth gave him genuine pleasure. “Whom
are you attacking? Though a good deal is not true that you say about