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came back; everything was shut up—it was Sunday. They sent to
Stepan Arkadyevitch’s and brought a shirt—it was impossibly wide
and short. They sent finally to the Shtcherbatskys’ to unpack the
things. The bridegroom was expected at the church while he was
pacing up and down his room like a wild beast in a cage, peeping out
into the corridor, and with horror and despair recalling what absurd
things he had said to Kitty and what she might be thinking now.
At last the guilty Kouzma flew panting into the room with the
shirt.
“Only just in time. They were just lifting it into the van,” said
Kouzma.
Three minutes later Levin ran full speed into the corridor, not
looking at his watch for fear of aggravating his sufferings.
“You won’t help matters like this,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch with a
smile, hurrying with more deliberation after him. “It will come round, it
will come round...I tell you.”
Chapter 4.
“They’ve come!” “Here he is!” “Which one?” “Rather young, eh?”
“Why, my dear soul, she looks more dead than alive!” were the com-
ments in the crowd, when Levin, meeting his bride in the entrance,
walked with her into the church.
Stepan Arkadyevitch told his wife the cause of the delay, and the
guests were whispering it with smiles to one another. Levin saw noth-
ing and no one; he did not take his eyes off his bride.
Everyone said she had lost her looks dreadfully of late, and was not
nearly so pretty on her wedding day as usual; but Levin did not think
so. He looked at her hair done up high, with the long white veil and
white flowers and the high, stand-up, scalloped collar, that in such a
maidenly fashion hid her long neck at the sides and only showed it in
front, her strikingly slender figure, and it seemed to him that she looked
better than ever—not because these flowers, this veil, this gown from
Paris added anything to her beauty; but because, in spite of the elabo-
rate sumptuousness of her attire, the expression of her sweet face, of
her eyes, of her lips was still her own characteristic expression of guile-
less truthfulness.
“I was beginning to think you meant to run away,” she said, and
smiled to him.
“It’s so stupid, what happened to me, I’m ashamed to speak of it!”