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arm she walked with him to the high doors and he felt for her a tender-
ness and pity at which he wondered himself.
She asked Levin and Vorkuev to go into the drawing room, while
she stayed behind to say a few words to her brother. “About her
divorce, about Vronsky, and what he’s doing at the club, about me?”
wondered Levin. And he was so keenly interested by the question of
what she was saying to Stepan Arkadyevitch, that he scarcely heard
what Vorkuev was telling him of the qualities of the story for children
Anna Arkadyevna had written.
At tea the same pleasant sort of talk, full of interesting matter,
continued. There was not a single instant when a subject for conversa-
tion was to seek; on the contrary, it was felt that one had hardly time to
say what one had to say, and eagerly held back to hear what the others
were saying. And all that was said, not only by her, but by Vorkuev and
Stepan Arkadyevitch—all, so it seemed to Levin, gained peculiar sig-
nificance from her appreciation and her criticism. While he followed
this interesting conversation, Levin was all the time admiring her—
her beauty, her intelligence, her culture, and at the same time her
directness and genuine depth of feeling. He listened and talked, and
all the while he was thinking of her inner life, trying to divine her
feelings. And though he had judged her so severely hitherto, now by
some strange chain of reasoning he was justifying her and was also
sorry for her, and afraid that Vronsky did not fully understand her. At
eleven o’clock, when Stepan Arkadyevitch got up to go (Vorkuev had
left earlier), it seemed to Levin that he had only just come. Regretfully
Levin too rose.
“Good-bye,” she said, holding his hand and glancing into his face
with a winning look. “I am very glad que la glace est rompue.”
She dropped his hand, and half closed her eyes.
“Tell your wife that I love her as before, and that if she cannot
pardon me my position, then my wish for her is that she may never
pardon it. To pardon it, one must go through what I have gone through,
and may God spare her that.”
“Certainly, yes, I will tell her...” Levin said, blushing.