Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART TWO CHAPTER 5
“Ah, you shall hear.... We apologize in due form: we are in despair, we entreat
forgiveness for the unfortunate misunderstanding. The government clerk with the
sausages begins to melt, but he, too, desires to express his sentiments, and as soon
as ever he begins to express them, he begins to get hot and say nasty things, and
again I’m obliged to trot out all my diplomatic talents. I allowed that their conduct
was bad, but I urged him to take into consideration their heedlessness, their youth;
then, too, the young men had only just been lunching together. ‘You understand.
They regret it deeply, and beg you to overlook their misbehavior.’ The government
clerk was softened once more. ‘I consent, count, and am ready to overlook it; but
you perceive that my wife–my wife’s a respectable woman –has been exposed to the
persecution, and insults, and effrontery of young upstarts, scoundrels....’ And you
must understand, the young upstarts are present all the while, and I have to keep
the peace between them. Again I call out all my diplomacy, and again as soon as the
thing was about at an end, our friend the government clerk gets hot and red, and
his sausages stand on end with wrath, and once more I launch out into diplomatic
wiles.”
“Ah, he must tell you this story!” said Betsy, laughing, to a lady who came into
her box. “He has been making me laugh so.”
“Well, bonne chance!” she added, giving Vronsky one finger of the hand in which
she held her fan, and with a shrug of her shoulders she twitched down the bodice of
her gown that had worked up, so as to be duly naked as she moved forward towards
the footlights into the light of the gas, and the sight of all eyes.
Vronsky drove to the French theater, where he really had to see the colonel of his
regiment, who never missed a single performance there. He wanted to see him,
to report on the result of his mediation, which had occupied and amused him for
the last three days. Petritsky, whom he liked, was implicated in the affair, and the
other culprit was a capital fellow and first-rate comrade, who had lately joined the
regiment, the young Prince Kedrov. And what was most important, the interests of
the regiment were involved in it too.
Both the young men were in Vronsky’s company. The colonel of the regiment
was waited upon by the government clerk, Venden, with a complaint against his
officers, who had insulted his wife. His young wife, so Venden told the story–he had
been married half a year–was at church with her mother, and suddenly overcome by
indisposition, arising from her interesting condition, she could not remain standing,
she drove home in the first sledge, a smart-looking one, she came across. On the spot
the officers set off in pursuit of her; she was alarmed, and feeling still more unwell,
ran up the staircase home. Venden himself, on returning from his office, heard a ring
at their bell and voices, went out, and seeing the intoxicated officers with a letter, he
had turned them out. He asked for exemplary punishment.
“Yes, it’s all very well,” said the colonel to Vronsky, whom he had invited to come
and see him. “Petritsky’s becoming impossible. Not a week goes by without some
scandal. This government clerk won’t let it drop, he’ll go on with the thing.”
Vronsky saw all the thanklessness of the business, and that there could be no question
of a duel in it, that everything must be done to soften the government clerk, and
hush the matter up. The colonel had called in Vronsky just because he knew him to
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