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ing! I am so glad he can’t bear me,” she used to say of him.
She was right, for Levin actually could not bear her, and despised
her for what she was proud of and regarded as a fine characteristic—
her nervousness, her delicate contempt and indifference for everything
coarse and earthly.
The Countess Nordston and Levin got into that relation with one
another not seldom seen in society, when two persons, who remain
externally on friendly terms, despise each other to such a degree that
they cannot even take each other seriously, and cannot even be of-
fended by each other.
The Countess Nordston pounced upon Levin at once.
“Ah, Konstantin Dmitrievitch! So you’ve come back to our corrupt
Babylon,” she said, giving him her tiny, yellow hand, and recalling what
he had chanced to say early in the winter, that Moscow was a Babylon.
“Come, is Babylon reformed, or have you degenerated?” she added,
glancing with a simper at Kitty.
“It’s very flattering for me, countess, that you remember my words
so well,” responded Levin, who had succeeded in recovering his com-
posure, and at once from habit dropped into his tone of joking hostility
to the Countess Nordston. “They must certainly make a great impres-
sion on you.”
“Oh, I should think so! I always note them all down. Well, Kitty,
have you been skating again?...
And she began talking to Kitty. Awkward as it was for Levin to
withdraw now, it would still have been easier for him to perpetrate this
awkwardness than to remain all the evening and see Kitty, who glanced
at him now and then and avoided his eyes. He was on the point of
getting up, when the princess, noticing that he was silent, addressed
him.
“Shall you be long in Moscow? You’re busy with the district council,
though, aren’t you, and can’t be away for long?”
“No, princess, I’m no longer a member of the council,” he said. “I
have come up for a few days.”
“There’s something the matter with him,” thought Countess
Nordston, glancing at his stern, serious face. “He isn’t in his old argu-
mentative mood. But I’ll draw him out. I do love making a fool of him
before Kitty, and I’ll do it.”
“Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” she said to him, “do explain to me, please,
what’s the meaning of it. You know all about such things. At home in
our village of Kaluga all the peasants and all the women have drunk up
all they possessed, and now they can’t pay us any rent. What’s the
meaning of that? You always praise the peasants so.”
At that instant another lady came into the room, and Levin got up.
“Excuse me, countess, but I really know nothing about it, and can’t
tell you anything,” he said, and looked round at the officer who came in
behind the lady.
“That must be Vronsky,” thought Levin, and, to be sure of it, glanced
at Kitty. She had already had time to look at Vronsky, and looked round
at Levin. And simply from the look in her eyes, that grew uncon-
sciously brighter, Levin knew that she loved that man, knew it as surely
as if she had told him so in words. But what sort of a man was he?
Now, whether for good or for ill, Levin could not choose but remain; he
must find out what the man was like whom she loved.
There are people who, on meeting a successful rival, no matter in
what, are at once disposed to turn their backs on everything good in
him, and to see only what is bad. There are people, on the other hand,
who desire above all to find in that lucky rival the qualities by which he
has outstripped them, and seek with a throbbing ache at heart only