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‘infernal regions,’” added the colonel, and he walked away.
“That’s Yashvin,” Vronsky said in answer to Turovtsin, and he sat
down in the vacated seat beside them. He drank the glass offered him,
and ordered a bottle of wine. Under the influence of the club atmo-
sphere or the wine he had drunk, Levin chatted away to Vronsky of the
best breeds of cattle, and was very glad not to feel the slightest hostility
to this man. He even told him, among other things, that he had heard
from his wife that she had met him at Princess Marya Borissovna’s.
“Ah, Princess Marya Borissovna, she’s exquisite!” said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, and he told an anecdote about her which set them all
laughing. Vronsky particularly laughed with such simplehearted amuse-
ment that Levin felt quite reconciled to him.
“Well, have we finished?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting up
with a smile. “Let us go.”
Chapter 8.
Getting up from the table, Levin walked with Gagin through the
lofty room to the billiard room, feeling his arms swing as he walked with
a peculiar lightness and ease. As he crossed the big room, he came
upon his father-in-law.
“Well, how do you like our Temple of Idolence?” said the prince,
taking his arm. “Come along, come along!”
“Yes, I wanted to walk about and look at everything. It’s interest-
ing.”
“Yes, it’s interesting for you. But its interest for me is quite differ-
ent. You look at those little old men now,” he said, pointing to a club
member with bent back and projecting lip, shuffling towards them in
his soft boots, “and imagine that they were shlupiks like that from their
birth up.”
“How shlupiks?”
“I see you don’t know that name. That’s our club designation. You
know the game of rolling eggs: when one’s rolled a long while it be-
comes a shlupik. So it is with us; one goes on coming and coming to the
club, and ends by becoming a shlupik. Ah, you laugh! but we look out,
for fear of dropping into it ourselves. You know Prince Tchetchensky?”
inquired the prince; and Levin saw by his face that he was just going to
relate something funny.