432 433
always disliked him, and so it has turned out.”
Levin recalled Kitty’s answer. She had said: “No, that cannot be...”
“Darya Alexandrovna,” he said dryly, “I appreciate your confi-
dence in me; I believe you are making a mistake. But whether I am
right or wrong, that pride you so despise makes any thought of Katerina
Alexandrovna out of the question for me,— you understand, utterly
out of the question.”
“I will only say one thing more: you know that I am speaking of my
sister, whom I love as I love my own children. I don’t say she cared for
you, all I meant to say is that her refusal at that moment proves noth-
ing.”
“I don’t know!” said Levin, jumping up. “If you only knew how you
are hurting me. It’s just as if a child of yours were dead, and they were
to say to you: He would have been like this and like that, and he might
have lived, and how happy you would have been in him. But he’s dead,
dead, dead!...”
“How absurd you are!” said Darya Alexandrovna, looking with
mournful tenderness at Levin’s excitement. “Yes, I see it all more and
more clearly,” she went on musingly. “So you won’t come to see us, then,
when Kitty’s here?”
“No, I shan’t come. Of course I won’t avoid meeting Katerina
Alexandrovna, but as far as I can, I will try to save her the annoyance
of my presence.”
“You are very, very absurd,” repeated Darya Alexandrovna, look-
ing with tenderness into his face. “Very well then, let it be as though
we had not spoken of this. What have you come for, Tanya?” she said
in French to the little girl who had come in.
“Where’s my spade, mamma?”
“I speak French, and you must too.”
The little girl tried to say it in French, but could not remember the
French for spade; the mother prompted her, and then told her in French
where to look for the spade. And this made a disagreeable impression
on Levin.
Everything in Darya Alexandrovna’s house and children struck
him now as by no means so charming as a little while before. “And
what does she talk French with the children for?” he thought; “how
unnatural and false it is! And the children feel it so: Learning French
and unlearning sincerity,” he thought to himself, unaware that Darya
Alexandrovna had thought all that over twenty times already, and yet,
even at the cost of some loss of sincerity, believed it necessary to teach
her children French in that way.
“But why are you going? Do stay a little.”
Levin stayed to tea; but his good-humor had vanished, and he felt
ill at ease.
After tea he went out into the hall to order his horses to be put in,
and, when he came back, he found Darya Alexandrovna greatly dis-
turbed, with a troubled face, and tears in her eyes. While Levin had
been outside, an incident had occurred which had utterly shattered all
the happiness she had been feeling that day, and her pride in her
children. Grisha and Tanya had been fighting over a ball. Darya
Alexandrovna, hearing a scream in the nursery, ran in and saw a ter-
rible sight. Tanya was pulling Grisha’s hair, while he, with a face hid-
eous with rage, was beating her with his fists wherever he could get at
her. Something snapped in Darya Alexandrovna’s heart when she saw
this. It was as if darkness had swooped down upon her life; she felt
that these children of hers, that she was so proud of, were not merely
most ordinary, but positively bad, ill-bred children, with coarse, brutal
propensities—wicked children.