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“But she was always in weak health.”
“Were you at the opera yesterday?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Lucca was very good.”
“Yes, very good,” he said, and as it was utterly of no consequence to
him what they thought of him, he began repeating what they had
heard a hundred times about the characteristics of the singer’s talent.
Countess Bola pretended to be listening. Then, when he had said
enough and paused, the colonel, who had been silent till then, began to
talk. The colonel too talked of the opera, and about culture. At last,
after speaking of the proposed folle journee at Turin’s, the colonel
laughed, got up noisily, and went away. Levin too rose, but he saw by
the face of the countess that it was not yet time for him to go. He must
stay two minutes longer. He sat down.
But as he was thinking all the while how stupid it was, he could not
find a subject for conversation, and sat silent.
“You are not going to the public meeting? They say it will be very
interesting,” began the countess.
“No, I promised my belle-soeur to fetch her from it,” said Levin.
A silence followed. The mother once more exchanged glances with
a daughter.
“Well, now I think the time has come,” thought Levin, and he got
up. The ladies shook hands with him, and begged him to say mille
choses to his wife for them.
The porter asked him, as he gave him his coat, “Where is your
honor staying?” and immediately wrote down his address in a big hand-
somely bound book.
“Of course I don’t care, but still I feel ashamed and awfully stupid,”
thought Levin, consoling himself with the reflection that everyone
does it. He drove to the public meeting, where he was to find his sister-
in-law, so as to drive home with her.
At the public meeting of the committee there were a great many
people, and almost all the highest society. Levin was in time for the
report which, as everyone said, was very interesting. When the read-
ing of the report was over, people moved about, and Levin met Sviazhsky,
who invited him very pressingly to come that evening to a meeting of
the Society of Agriculture, where a celebrated lecture was to be deliv-
ered, and Stepan Arkadyevitch, who had only just come from the races,
and many other acquaintances; and Levin heard and uttered various
criticisms on the meeting, on the new fantasia, and on a public trial.
But, probably from the mental fatigue he was beginning to feel, he
made a blunder in speaking of the trial, and this blunder he recalled
several times with vexation. Speaking of the sentence upon a foreigner
who had been condemned in Russia, and of how unfair it would be to
punish him by exile abroad, Levin repeated what he had heard the
day before in conversation from an acquaintance.
“I think sending him abroad is much the same as punishing a carp
by putting it into the water,” said Levin. Then he recollected that this
idea, which he had heard from an acquaintance and uttered as his own,
came from a fable of Krilov’s, and that the acquaintance had picked it
up from a newspaper article.
After driving home with his sister-in-law, and finding Kitty in good
spirits and quite well, Levin drove to the club.