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husband, “and I put up with him. Is that any better? At that time I
could still have been admired, I had beauty left me still,” Darya
Alexandrovna pursued her thoughts, and she would have liked to look
at herself in the looking glass. She had a traveling looking glass in her
handbag, and she wanted to take it out; but looking at the backs of the
coachman and the swaying counting house clerk, she felt that she
would be ashamed if either of them were to look round, and she did not
take out the glass.
But without looking in the glass, she thought that even now it was
not too late; and she thought of Sergey Ivanovitch, who was always
particularly attentive to her, of Stiva’s good-hearted friend, Turovtsin,
who had helped her nurse her children through the scarlatina, and was
in love with her. And there was someone else, a quite young man,
who—her husband had told her it as a joke—thought her more beau-
tiful than either of her sisters. And the most passionate and impos-
sible romances rose before Darya Alexandrovna’s imagination. “Anna
did quite right, and certainly I shall never reproach her for it. She is
happy, she makes another person happy, and she’s not broken down as
I am, but most likely just as she always was, bright, clever, open to every
impression,” thought Darya Alexandrovna,—and a sly smile curved
her lips, for, as she pondered on Anna’s love affair, Darya Alexandrovna
constructed on parallel lines an almost identical love affair for herself,
with an imaginary composite figure, the ideal man who was in love with
her. She, like Anna, confessed the whole affair to her husband. And
the amazement and perplexity of Stepan Arkadyevitch at this avowal
made her smile.
In such daydreams she reached the turning of the highroad that
led to Vozdvizhenskoe.
Chapter 17.
The coachman pulled up his four horses and looked round to the
right, to a field of rye, where some peasants were sitting on a cart. The
counting house clerk was just going to jump down, but on second
thoughts he shouted peremptorily to the peasants instead, and beck-
oned to them to come up. The wind, that seemed to blow as they drove,
dropped when the carriage stood still; gadflies settled on the steaming
horses that angrily shook them off. The metallic clank of a whetstone
against a scythe, that came to them from the cart, ceased. One of the
peasants got up and came towards the carriage.
“Well, you are slow!” the counting house clerk shouted angrily to
the peasant who was stepping slowly with his bare feet over the ruts of
the rough dry road. “Come along, do!”
A curly-headed old man with a bit of bast tied round his hair, and
his bent back dark with perspiration, came towards the carriage, quick-
ening his steps, and took hold of the mud-guard with his sunburnt
hand.
“Vozdvizhenskoe, the manor house? the count’s?” he repeated; “go
on to the end of this track. Then turn to the left. Straight along the
avenue and you’ll come right upon it. But whom do you want? The
count himself?”
“Well, are they at home, my good man?” Darya Alexandrovna said