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“How are you feeling today?” her brother asked her.
“Oh, nothing. Nerves, as usual.”
“Yes, isn’t it extraordinarily fine?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, notic-
ing that Levin was scrutinizing the picture.
“I have never seen a better portrait.”
“And extraordinarily like, isn’t it?” said Vorkuev.
Levin looked from the portrait to the original. A peculiar brilliance
lighted up Anna’s face when she felt his eyes on her. Levin flushed,
and to cover his confusion would have asked whether she had seen
Darya Alexandrovna lately; but at that moment Anna spoke. “We
were just talking, Ivan Petrovitch and I, of Vashtchenkov’s last pictures.
Have you seen them?”
“Yes, I have seen them,” answered Levin.
“But, I beg your pardon, I interrupted you...you were saying?...”
Levin asked if she had seen Dolly lately.
“She was here yesterday. She was very indignant with the high
school people on Grisha’s account. The Latin teacher, it seems, had
been unfair to him.”
“Yes, I have seen his pictures. I didn’t care for them very much,”
Levin went back to the subject she had started.
Levin talked now not at all with that purely businesslike attitude
to the subject with which he had been talking all the morning. Every
word in his conversation with her had a special significance. And
talking to her was pleasant; still pleasanter it was to listen to her.
Anna talked not merely naturally and cleverly, but cleverly and
carelessly, attaching no value to her own ideas and giving great weight
to the ideas of the person she was talking to.
The conversation turned on the new movement in art, on the new
illustrations of the Bible by a French artist. Vorkuev attacked the artist
for a realism carried to the point of coarseness.
Levin said that the French had carried conventionality further
than anyone, and that consequently they see a great merit in the re-
turn to realism. In the fact of not lying they see poetry.
Never had anything clever said by Levin given him so much plea-
sure as this remark. Anna’s face lighted up at once, as at once she
appreciated the thought. She laughed.
“I laugh,” she said, “as one laughs when one sees a very true por-
trait. What you said so perfectly hits off French art now, painting and
literature too, indeed—Zola, Daudet. But perhaps it is always so, that
men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and
then—all the combinaisons made—they are tired of the fictitious fig-
ures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.”
“That’s perfectly true,” said Vorknev.
“So you’ve been at the club?” she said to her brother.
“Yes, yes, this is a woman!” Levin thought, forgetting himself and
staring persistently at her lovely, mobile face, which at that moment
was all at once completely transformed. Levin did not hear what she
was talking of as she leaned over to her brother, but he was struck by
the change of her expression. Her face—so handsome a moment
before in its repose—suddenly wore a look of strange curiosity, anger,
and pride. But this lasted only an instant. She dropped her eyelids, as
though recollecting something.
“Oh, well, but that’s of no interest to anyone,” she said, and she
turned to the English girl.
“Please order the tea in the drawing room,” she said in English.
The girl got up and went out.
“Well, how did she get through her examination?” asked Stepan
Arkadyevitch.