Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART TWO CHAPTER 4
Chapter 4
THE highest Petersburg society is essentially one: in it everyone knows everyone
else, everyone even visits everyone else. But this great set has its subdivisions.
Anna Arkadyevna Karenina had friends and close ties in three different circles of this
highest society. One circle was her husband’s government official set, consisting of
his colleagues and subordinates, brought together in the most various and capricious
manner, and belonging to different social strata. Anna found it difficult now to recall
the feeling of almost awe-stricken reverence which she had at first entertained for
these persons. Now she knew all of them as people know one another in a country
town; she knew their habits and weaknesses, and where the shoe pinched each one
of them. She knew their relations with one another and with the head authorities,
knew who was for whom, and how each one maintained his position, and where
they agreed and disagreed. But the circle of political, masculine interests had never
interested her, in spite of countess Lidia Ivanovna’s influence, and she avoided it.
Another little set with which Anna was in close relations was the one by means
of which Alexey Alexandrovitch had made his career. The center of this circle was
the Countess Lidia Ivanovna. It was a set made up of elderly, ugly, benevolent, and
godly women, and clever, learned, and ambitious men. One of the clever people
belonging to the set had called it “the conscience of Petersburg society.” Alexey
Alexandrovitch had the highest esteem for this circle, and Anna with her special gift
for getting on with everyone, had in the early days of her life in Petersburg made
friends in this circle also. Now, since her return from Moscow, she had come to feel
this set insufferable. It seemed to her that both she and all of them were insincere,
and she felt so bored and ill at ease in that world that she went to see the Countess
Lidia Ivanovna as little as possible.
The third circle with which Anna had ties was preeminently the fashionable
world–the world of balls, of dinners, of sumptuous dresses, the world that hung on
to the court with one hand, so as to avoid sinking to the level of the demi-monde. For
the demi-monde the members of that fashionable world believed that they despised,
though their tastes were not merely similar, but in fact identical. Her connection with
this circle was kept up through Princess Betsy Tverskaya, her cousin’s wife, who had
an income of a hundred and twenty thousand roubles, and who had taken a great
fancy to Anna ever since she first came out, showed her much attention, and drew
her into her set, making fun of Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s coterie.
“When I’m old and ugly I’ll be the same,” Betsy used to say; “but for a pretty
young woman like you it’s early days for that house of charity.”
Anna had at first avoided as far as she could Princess Tverskaya’s world, because
it necessitated an expenditure beyond her means, and besides in her heart she preferred
the first circle. But since her visit to Moscow she had done quite the contrary.
She avoided her serious-minded friends, and went out into the fashionable world.
There she met Vronsky, and experienced an agitating joy at those meetings. She met
Vronsky specially often at Betsy’s for Betsy was a Vronsky by birth and his cousin.
Vronsky was everywhere where he had any chance of meeting Anna, and speaking
to her, when he could, of his love. She gave him no encouragement, but every time
she met him there surged up in her heart that same feeling of quickened life that had
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