Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART ONE CHAPTER 32
Chapter 32
THE first person to meet Anna at home was her son. He dashed down the stairs to
her, in spite of the governess’s call, and with desperate joy shrieked: “Mother!
mother!” Running up to her, he hung on her neck.
“I told you it was mother!” he shouted to the governess. “I knew!”
And her son, like her husband, aroused in Anna a feeling akin to disappointment.
She had imagined him better than he was in reality. She had to let herself drop down
to the reality to enjoy him as he really was. But even as he was, he was charming,
with his fair curls, his blue eyes, and his plump, graceful little legs in tightly pulledup
stockings. Anna experienced almost physical pleasure in the sensation of his
nearness, and his caresses, and moral soothing, when she met his simple, confiding,
and loving glance, and heard his naïve questions. Anna took out the presents Dolly’s
children had sent him, and told her son what sort of little girl was Tanya at Moscow,
and how Tanya could read, and even taught the other children.
“Why, am I not so nice as she?” asked Seryozha.
“To me you’re nicer than anyone in the world.”
“I know that,” said Seryozha, smiling.
Anna had not had time to drink her coffee when the Countess Lidia Ivanovna
was announced. The Countess Lidia Ivanovna was a tall, stout woman, with an
unhealthily sallow face and splendid, pensive black eyes. Anna liked her, but today
she seemed to be seeing her for the first time with all her defects.
“Well, my dear, so you took the olive branch?” inquired Countess Lidia Ivanovna,
as soon as she came into the room.
“Yes, it’s all over, but it was all much less serious than we had supposed,” answered
Anna. “My belle-soeur is in general too hasty.”
But Countess Lidia Ivanovna, though she was interested in everything that did
not concern her, had a habit of never listening to what interested her; she interrupted
Anna:
“Yes, there’s plenty of sorrow and evil in the world. I am so worried today.”
“Oh, why?” asked Anna, trying to suppress a smile.
“I’m beginning to be weary of fruitlessly championing the truth, and sometimes
I’m quite unhinged by it. The Society of the Little Sisters” (this was a religiouslypatriotic,
philanthropic institution) “was going splendidly, but with these gentlemen
it’s impossible to do anything,” added Countess Lidia Ivanovna in a tone of ironical
submission to destiny. “They pounce on the idea, and distort it, and then work it out
so pettily and unworthily. Two or three people, your husband among them, understand
all the importance of the thing, but the others simply drag it down. Yesterday
Pravdin wrote to me...”
Pravdin was a well-known Panslavist abroad, and Countess Lidia Ivanovna described
the purport of his letter.
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