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reviewed all his past with her, recalling the awkward words in which,
after long wavering, he had made her an offer.
“But how have I been to blame?” he said to himself. And this
question always excited another question in him—whether they felt
differently, did their loving and marrying differently, these Vronskys
and Oblonskys...these gentlemen of the bedchamber, with their fine
calves. And there passed before his mind a whole series of these
mettlesome, vigorous, self- confident men, who always and everywhere
drew his inquisitive attention in spite of himself. He tried to dispel
these thoughts, he tried to persuade himself that he was not living for
this transient life, but for the life of eternity, and that there was peace
and love in his heart.
But the fact that he had in this transient, trivial life made, as it
seemed to him, a few trivial mistakes tortured him as though the eter-
nal salvation in which he believed had no existence. But this tempta-
tion did not last long, and soon there was reestablished once more in
Alexey Alexandrovitch’s soul the peace and the elevation by virtue of
which he could forget what he did not want to remember.
Chapter 26.
“Well, Kapitonitch?” said Seryozha, coming back rosy and good-
humored from his walk the day before his birthday, and giving his
overcoat to the tall old hall porter, who smiled down at the little person
from the height of his long figure. “Well, has the bandaged clerk been
here today? Did papa see him?”
“He saw him. The minute the chief secretary came out, I an-
nounced him,” said the hall porter with a good-humored wink. “Here,
I’ll take it off.”
“Seryozha!” said the tutor, stopping in the doorway leading to the
inner rooms. “Take it off yourself.” But Seryozha, though he heard his
tutor’s feeble voice, did not pay attention to it. He stood keeping hold
of the hall porter’s belt, and gazing into his face.
“Well, and did papa do what he wanted for him?”
The hall porter nodded his head affirmatively. The clerk with his
face tied up, who had already been seven times to ask some favor of
Alexey Alexandrovitch, interested both Seryozha and the hall porter.
Seryozha had come upon him in the hall, and had heard him plain-
tively beg the hall porter to announce him, saying that he and his
children had death staring them in the face.
Since then Seryozha, having met him a second time in the hall, took
great interest in him.