Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [176]
‘But tell me, please, I never could understand,’ Anna said after some silence and in a tone which showed clearly that she was not putting an idle question, but that what she was asking was more important for her than it ought to be. ‘Tell me, please, what is her relation to Prince Kaluzhsky, the so-called Mishka? I’ve seldom met them. What is it?’
Betsy smiled with her eyes and looked attentively at Anna.
‘It’s the new way,’ she said. ‘They’ve all chosen this way. They’ve thrown their bonnets over the mills.w But there are different ways of throwing them over.’
‘Yes, but what is her relation to Kaluzhsky?’
Betsy unexpectedly laughed, gaily and irrepressibly, something that rarely happened with her.
‘You’re encroaching on Princess Miagky’s province. It’s the question of a terrible child.’x And Betsy obviously tried to restrain herself but failed and burst into the infectious laughter of people who laugh rarely. ‘You’ll have to ask them,’ she said through tears of laughter.
‘No, you’re laughing,’ said Anna, also involuntarily infected with laughter, ‘but I never could understand it. I don’t understand the husband’s role in it.’
‘The husband? Liza Merkalov’s husband carries rugs around for her and is always ready to be of service. And what else there is in fact, nobody wants to know. You see, in good society one doesn’t speak or even think of certain details of the toilette. It’s the same here.’
‘Will you be at Rolandaki’s fête?’ Anna asked, to change the subject.
‘I don’t think so,’ Betsy replied and began carefully filling the small, translucent cups with fragrant tea. Moving a cup towards Anna, she took out a slender cigarette, put it into a silver holder, and lit it.
‘So you see, I’m in a fortunate position,’ she began, no longer laughing, as she picked up her cup. ‘I understand you and I understand Liza. Liza is one of those naïve natures, like children, who don’t understand what’s good and what’s bad. At least she didn’t understand it when she was very young. And now she knows that this non-understanding becomes her. Now she may purposely not understand,’ Betsy spoke with a subtle smile, ‘but all the same it becomes her. You see, one and the same thing can be looked at tragically and be made into a torment, or can be looked at simply and even gaily. Perhaps you’re inclined to look at things too tragically.’
‘How I wish I knew others as I know myself,’ Anna said seriously and pensively. ‘Am I worse than others or better? Worse, I think.’
‘Terrible child, terrible child!’ Betsy repeated. ‘But here they are.’
XVIII
Footsteps were heard and a man’s voice, then a woman’s voice and laughter, and the expected guests came in: Sappho Stolz and a young man radiant with a superabundance of health, the so-called Vaska. It was evident that he prospered on a diet of rare beef, truffles and Burgundy. Vaska bowed to the ladies and glanced at them, but only for a second. He came into the drawing room after Sappho, and followed her across the room as if tied to her, not taking his shining eyes off her, as if he wanted to eat her up. Sappho Stolz was a dark-eyed blonde. She walked with brisk little steps in her high-heeled shoes and gave the ladies a firm, mannish handshake.
Anna had not met this new celebrity before and was struck by her beauty, by how extremely far her costume went, and by the boldness of her manners. On her head, hair of a delicately golden colour, her own and other women‘s, was done up into such an edifice of a coiffure that her head equalled in size her shapely, well-rounded and much-exposed bust. Her forward movement was so impetuous that at every step the forms of her knees and thighs were outlined under her dress, and the question involuntarily arose as to where, at the back of this built-up, heaving mountain, her real, small