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Chapter 16.
At ten o’clock the old prince, Sergey Ivanovitch, and Stepan
Arkadyevitch were sitting at Levin’s. Having inquired after Kitty, they
had dropped into conversation upon other subjects. Levin heard them,
and unconsciously, as they talked, going over the past, over what had
been up to that morning, he thought of himself as he had been yester-
day till that point. It was as though a hundred years had passed since
then. He felt himself exalted to unattainable heights, from which he
studiously lowered himself so as not to wound the people he was
talking to. He talked, and was all the time thinking of his wife, of her
condition now, of his son, in whose existence he tried to school himself
into believing. The whole world of woman, which had taken for him
since his marriage a new value he had never suspected before, was
now so exalted that he could not take it in in his imagination. He heard
them talk of yesterday’s dinner at the club, and thought: “What is
happening with her now? Is she asleep? How is she? What is she
thinking of? Is he crying, my son Dmitri?” And in the middle of the
conversation, in the middle of a sentence, he jumped up and went out
of the room.
“Send me word if I can see her,” said the prince.
“Very well, in a minute,” answered Levin, and without stopping, he
went to her room.
She was not asleep, she was talking gently with her mother, making
plans about the christening.
Carefully set to rights, with hair well-brushed, in a smart little cap
with some blue in it, her arms out on the quilt, she was lying on her
back. Meeting his eyes, her eyes drew him to her. Her face, bright
before, brightened still more as he drew near her. There was the same
change in it from earthly to unearthly that is seen in the face of the
dead. But then it means farewell, here it meant welcome. Again a rush
of emotion, such as he had felt at the moment of the child’s birth,
flooded his heart. She took his hand and asked him if he had slept. He
could not answer, and turned away, struggling with his weakness.
“I have had a nap, Kostya!” she said to him; “and I am so comfort-
able now.”
She looked at him, but suddenly her expression changed.
“Give him to me,” she said, hearing the baby’s cry. “Give him to
me, Lizaveta Petrovna, and he shall look at him.”
“To be sure, his papa shall look at him,” said Lizaveta Petrovna,
getting up and bringing something red, and queer, and wriggling. “Wait
a minute, we’ll make him tidy first,” and Lizaveta Petrovna laid the red
wobbling thing on the bed, began untrussing and trussing up the baby,
lifting it up and turning it over with one finger and powdering it with
something.
Levin, looking at the tiny, pitiful creature, made strenuous efforts
to discover in his heart some traces of fatherly feeling for it. He felt
nothing towards it but disgust. But when it was undressed and he
caught a glimpse of wee, wee, little hands, little feet, saffron-colored,
with little toes, too, and positively with a little big toe different from the
rest, and when he saw Lizaveta Petrovna closing the wide-open little
hands, as though they were soft springs, and putting them into linen