Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [369]
‘I’m glad you like Dolly. You do, don’t you?’
‘But I’ve known her for a long time. She’s very kind, I think, mais excessivement terre-à-terre.cr But still, I’m very glad of her visit.’
He took Anna’s hand and looked questioningly into her eyes.
She, understanding that look differently, smiled at him.
The next morning, despite her hosts’ entreaties, Darya Alexandrovna made ready to leave. Levin’s driver, in his none-too-new caftan and something half resembling a post-boy’s hat, with his ill-matched horses, gloomily and resolutely drove the carriage with patched splash-boards under the covered, sand-strewn portico.
Taking leave of Princess Varvara and the men was unpleasant for Darya Alexandrovna. After a day together, both she and her hosts clearly felt that they were unsuited to each other and that it was better for them not to get together. Only Anna felt sad. She knew that now, with Dolly’s departure, there would be no one to stir up in her soul those feelings that had been aroused in her at this meeting. To stir up those feelings was painful for her; but she knew all the same that that was the best part of her soul and that it was quickly being overgrown in the life she led.
Driving out into the fields, Dolly felt pleasantly relieved, and she was about to ask the servants how they had liked it at Vronsky’s when the driver, Filipp, suddenly spoke himself:
‘Maybe they’re rich, but they only gave the horses three measures of oats. They cleaned the bottom before cockcrow. What’s three measures? Just a snack. Nowadays innkeepers sell oats for forty-five kopecks. At home we give visitors as much as they can eat.’
‘A miserly master,’ the clerk agreed.
‘Well, and did you like their horses?’ asked Dolly.
‘Horses is the word. And the food’s good. Found it a bit boring otherwise, Darya Alexandrovna, I don’t know about you,’ he said, turning his handsome and kindly face to her.
‘I thought so, too. Well, will we get there by evening?’
‘Ought to.’
On returning home and finding everyone quite well and especially nice, Darya Alexandrovna told them about her trip with great animation, about how well she had been received, the luxury and good taste of the Vronskys’ life, their amusements, and would not let anyone say a word against them.
‘You have to know Anna and Vronsky-I’ve come to know him better now - to understand how sweet and touching they are,’ she said, now with perfect sincerity, forgetting the vague sense of dissatisfaction and discomfort that she had experienced there.
XXV
Vronsky and Anna spent the whole summer and part of the autumn in the country, in the same conditions, without taking any measures towards a divorce. It was decided between them that they would not go anywhere; but they both sensed, the longer they lived alone, especially in the autumn and without guests, that they would not be able to endure that life and would have to change it.
Life, it seemed, was such that it was impossible to wish for better: there was abundance, there was health, there was the child, and they both had their occupations. Anna paid attention to herself in the same way without guests, and was also very much taken up with reading - of novels and the serious books that were in vogue. She ordered all the books that were mentioned with praise in the foreign newspapers and magazines she received, and read them with that concentration that one only finds in solitude. Moreover, by means of books and special journals, she studied all the subjects that interested Vronsky, so that he often turned directly to her with questions of agronomy, architecture and, occasionally, even horse-breeding and sports. He was amazed at her knowledge, her memory, and, being doubtful at first, wanted corroboration; and she would find what he had asked about in her books and show it to him.
The setting up of the hospital also occupied her. She not only helped but also arranged and devised many things