Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART ONE CHAPTER 33
significance of new schools of poetry and music, all of which were classified by him
with very conspicuous consistency.
“Well, God be with you,” she said at the door of the study, where a shaded candle
and a decanter of water were already put by his armchair. “And I’ll write to
Moscow.”
He pressed her hand, and again kissed it.
“All the same he’s a good man; truthful, good-hearted, and remarkable in his own
line,” Anna said to herself going back to her room, as though she were defending
him to someone who had attacked him and said that one could not love him. “But
why is it his ears stick out so strangely? Or has he had his hair cut?”
Precisely at twelve o’clock, when Anna was still sitting at her writing table, finishing
a letter to Dolly, she heard the sound of measured steps in slippers, and Alexey
Alexandrovitch, freshly washed and combed, with a book under his arm, came in to
her.
“It’s time, it’s time,” said he, with a meaning smile, and he went into their bedroom.
“And what right had he to look at him like that?” thought Anna, recalling Vronsky’s
glance at Alexey Alexandrovitch.
Undressing, she went into the bedroom; but her face had none of the eagerness
which, during her stay in Moscow, had fairly flashed from her eyes and her smile;
on the contrary, now the fire seemed quenched in her, hidden somewhere far away.
Chapter 34
WHEN Vronsky went to Moscow from Petersburg, he had left his large set of
rooms in Morskaia to his friend and favorite comrade Petritsky.
Petritsky was a young lieutenant, not particularly well-connected, and not merely
not wealthy, but always hopelessly in debt. Towards evening he was always drunk,
and he had often been locked up after all sorts of ludicrous and disgraceful scandals,
but he was a favorite both of his comrades and his superior officers. On arriving at
twelve o’clock from the station at his flat, Vronsky saw, at the outer door, a hired
carriage familiar to him. While still outside his own door, as he rang, he heard masculine
laughter, the lisp of a feminine voice, and Petritsky’s voice. “If that’s one of
the villains, don’t let him in!” Vronsky told the servant not to announce him, and
slipped quietly into the first room. Baroness Shilton, a friend of Petritsky’s, with a
rosy little face and flaxen hair, resplendent in a lilac satin gown, and filling the whole
room, like a canary, with her Parisian chatter, sat at the round table making coffee.
Petritsky, in his overcoat, and the cavalry captain Kamerovsky, in full uniform, probably
just come from duty, were sitting each side of her.
“Bravo! Vronsky!” shouted Petritsky, jumping up, scraping his chair. “Our host
himself! Baroness, some coffee for him out of the new coffee pot. Why, we didn’t expect
you! Hope you’re satisfied with the ornament of your study,” he said, indicating
the baroness. “You know each other, of course?”
“I should think so,” said Vronsky, with a bright smile, pressing the baroness’s little
hand. “What next! I’m an old friend.”
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