Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [20]
‘Excellent. See you later, then.’
‘Watch out, I know you, don’t forget or suddenly leave for the country!’ Stepan Arkadyich called out with a laugh.
‘Certainly not.’
And, remembering only at the door that he had forgotten to take leave of Oblonsky’s colleagues, Levin walked out of the office.
‘Must be a very energetic gentleman,’ said Grinevich, after Levin left.
‘Yes, old man,’ Stepan Arkadyich said, nodding, ‘there’s a lucky one! Eight thousand acres in the Karazin district, everything to look forward to, and so much freshness! Not like our sort.’
‘What do you have to complain about, Stepan Arkadyich?’
‘Oh, it’s bad, awful,’ Stepan Arkadyich said with a heavy sigh.
VI
When Oblonsky had asked Levin why in fact he had come, Levin had blushed and became angry with himself for blushing, because he could not answer: ‘I’ve come to propose to your sister-in-law,’ though he had come only for that.
The houses of Levin and Shcherbatsky were old noble Moscow houses and had always been in close and friendly relations with each other. This connection had strengthened still more during Levin’s student days. He had prepared for and entered the university together with the young prince Shcherbatsky, brother of Dolly and Kitty. In those days Levin had frequented the Shcherbatskys’ house and had fallen in love with the family. Strange as it might seem, Konstantin Levin was in love precisely with the house, the family, especially the female side of it. He did not remember his own mother, and his only sister was older than he, so that in the Shcherbatskys’ house he saw for the first time the milieu of an old, noble, educated and honourable family, of which he had been deprived by the death of his father and mother. All the members of this family, especially the female side, seemed to him covered by some mysterious poetic veil, and he not only saw no defects in them, but surmised, behind the cover of this poetic veil, the loftiest feelings and every possible perfection. Why these three young ladies had to speak French and English on alternate days; why at certain hours they took turns playing the piano, the sounds of which were heard in their brother’s rooms upstairs, where the students worked; why all these teachers of French literature, music, drawing and dancing came there; why at certain hours all three young ladies, with Mlle Linon, went in a carriage to Tverskoy Boulevard in their fur-lined satin coats - Dolly in a long one, Natalie in a three-quarter one, and Kitty in a quite short one, so that her shapely legs in tight-fitting red stockings were in full view; why they had to stroll along Tverskoy Boulevard accompanied by a footman with a gold cockade on his hat - all this and much more that went on in their mysterious world he did not understand; but he knew that everything that went on there was beautiful, and he was in love precisely with the mysteriousness of it all.
During his student days he nearly fell in love with the eldest one, Dolly, but she was soon married to Oblonsky. Then he began falling in love with the second one. It was as if he felt that he had to fall in love with one of the sisters, only he could not make out which one. But Natalie, too, as soon as she appeared in society, married the diplomat Lvov. Kitty was still a child when Levin left the university. The young Shcherbatsky, having gone into the navy, was drowned in the Baltic Sea, and Levin’s contacts with the Shcherbatskys, despite his friendship with Oblonsky, became less frequent. But when, after a year in the country, Levin came to Moscow at the beginning of that winter and saw the Shcherbatskys, he realized which of the three he had really been destined to fall in love with.
Nothing could seem simpler than for him, a man of good stock, rich rather than poor, thirty-two years old,