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Chapter 11.
“What a marvelous, sweet and unhappy woman!” he was thinking,
as he stepped out into the frosty air with Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Well, didn’t I tell you?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, seeing that
Levin had been completely won over.
“Yes,” said Levin dreamily, “an extraordinary woman! It’s not her
cleverness, but she has such wonderful depth of feeling. I’m awfully
sorry for her!”
“Now, please God everything will soon be settled. Well, well, don’t
be hard on people in future,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, opening the
carriage door. “Good-bye; we don’t go the same way.”
Still thinking of Anna, of everything, even the simplest phrase in
their conversation with her, and recalling the minutest changes in her
expression, entering more and more into her position, and feeling sym-
pathy for her, Levin reached home.
At home Kouzma told Levin that Katerina Alexandrovna was
quite well, and that her sisters had not long been gone, and he handed
him two letters. Levin read them at once in the hall, that he might not
over look them later. One was from Sokolov, his bailiff. Sokolov wrote
that the corn could not be sold, that it was fetching only five and a half
roubles, and that more than that could not be got for it. The other letter
was from his sister. She scolded him for her business being still un-
settled.
“Well, we must sell it at five and a half if we can’t get more,” Levin
decided the first question, which had always before seemed such a
weighty one, with extraordinary facility on the spot. “It’s extraordinary
how all one’s time is taken up here,” he thought, considering the second
letter. He felt himself to blame for not having got done what his sister
had asked him to do for her. “Today, again, I’ve not been to the court,
but today I’ve certainly not had time.” And resolving that he would
not fail to do it next day, he went up to his wife. As he went in, Levin
rapidly ran through mentally the day he had spent. All the events of
the day were conversations, conversations he had heard and taken part
in. All the conversations were upon subjects which, if he had been
alone at home, he would never have taken up, but here they were very
interesting. And all these conversations were right enough, only in two
places there was something not quite right. One was what he had said
about the carp, the other was something not “quite the thing” in the
tender sympathy he was feeling for Anna.
Levin found his wife low-spirited and dull. The dinner of the three
sisters had gone off very well, but then they had waited and waited for
him, all of them had felt dull, the sisters had departed, and she had
been left alone.
“Well, and what have you been doing?” she asked him, looking
straight into his eyes, which shone with rather a suspicious brightness.
But that she might not prevent his telling her everything, she con-
cealed her close scrutiny of him, and with an approving smile listened
to his account of how he had spent the evening.
“Well, I’m very glad I met Vronsky. I felt quite at ease and natural
with him. You understand, I shall try not to see him, but I’m glad that
this awkwardness is all over,” he said, and remembering that by way of