Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [399]
‘I’m very glad,’ he suddenly heard a voice beside him, evidently addressing him, the voice of the same woman he was admiring in the portrait. Anna came to meet him from behind the trellis, and in the half light of the study Levin saw the woman of the portrait in a dark dress of various shades of blue, not in the same position, and not with the same expression, but at the same height of beauty that the artist had caught. She was less dazzling in reality, but in the living woman there was some new attractiveness that was not in the portrait.
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She had risen to meet him, not concealing her joy at seeing him. And in the calmness with which she gave him her small and energetic hand, introduced him to Vorkuev and pointed to the pretty, red-haired girl who was sitting there over her work, referring to her as her ward, Levin saw the familiar and agreeable manners of a high-society woman, always calm and natural.
‘Very, very glad,’ she repeated, and on her lips these words for some reason acquired a special meaning for Levin. ‘I’ve long known of you and loved you, both for your friendship with Stiva and for your wife ... I knew her for a very short time, but she left me with the impression of a lovely flower, precisely a flower. And now she’ll soon be a mother!’
She spoke freely and unhurriedly, shifting her eyes now and then from Levin to her brother, and Levin felt that the impression he made was good, and he at once found it light, simple and pleasant to be with her, as if he had known her since childhood.
‘Ivan Petrovich and I settled in Alexei’s study,’ she said, in answer to Stepan Arkadyich’s question whether he might smoke, ‘precisely in order to smoke.’ And with a glance at Levin, instead of asking if he smoked, she moved a tortoise-shell cigar case towards her and took out a cigarette.
‘How are you feeling today?’ her brother asked.
‘All right. Nerves, as usual.’
‘Remarkably well done, isn’t it?’ Stepan Arkadyich said, noticing that Levin kept glancing at the portrait.
‘I’ve never seen a better portrait.’
‘And isn’t it a remarkable likeness?’ said Vorkuev.
Levin glanced from the portrait to the original. A special glow lit up Anna’s face the moment she felt his eyes on her. Levin blushed and to hide his embarrassment was about to ask if it was long since she had seen Darya Alexandrovna, but just then Anna spoke:
‘Ivan Petrovich and I were just talking about Vashchenkov’s latest pictures. Have you seen them?’
‘Yes, I have,’ Levin replied.
‘But excuse me, I interrupted you, you were about to say ...’
Levin asked if it was long since she had seen Dolly.
‘She came yesterday. She’s very angry with the school on account of Grisha. It seems the Latin teacher was unfair to him.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen the paintings. I didn’t much like them,’ Levin went back to the conversation she had begun.
Now Levin spoke not at all with that workaday attitude towards things with which he had spoken that morning. Each word of conversation with her acquired a special meaning. It was pleasant to talk to her and still more pleasant to listen to her.
Anna spoke not only naturally and intelligently, but intelligently and casually, without attaching any value to her own thoughts, yet giving great value to the thoughts of the one she was talking to.
The conversation turned to the new trend in art, to the new Bible illustrations by a French artist.17 Vorkuev accused the artist of realism pushed to the point of coarseness. Levin said that the French employed conventions in art as no one else did, and therefore they saw particular merit in the return to realism. They saw poetry in the fact that they were no longer lying.
Never had anything intelligent that Levin had said given him so much pleasure as this. Anna’s face lit up when she