Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART TWO CHAPTER 6
Chapter 6
PRINCESS Betsy drove home from the theater, without waiting for the end of the
last act. She had only just time to go into her dressing room, sprinkle her long,
pale face with powder, rub it, set her dress to rights, and order tea in the big drawing
room, when one after another carriages drove up to her huge house in Bolshaia
Morskaia. Her guests stepped out at the wide entrance, and the stout porter, who
used to read the newspapers in the mornings behind the glass door, to the edification
of the passers-by, noiselessly opened the immense door, letting the visitors pass by
him into the house.
Almost at the same instant the hostess, with freshly arranged coiffure and freshened
face, walked in at one door and her guests at the other door of the drawing
room, a large room with dark walls, downy rugs, and a brightly lighted table, gleaming
with the light of candles, white cloth, silver samovar, and transparent china tea
things.
The hostess sat down at the table and took off her gloves. Chairs were set with the
aid of footmen, moving almost imperceptibly about the room; the party settled itself,
divided into two groups: one round the samovar near the hostess, the other at the
opposite end of the drawing room, round the handsome wife of an ambassador, in
black velvet, with sharply defined black eyebrows. In both groups conversation wavered,
as it always does, for the first few minutes, broken up by meetings, greetings,
offers of tea, and as it were, feeling about for something to rest upon.
“She’s exceptionally good as an actress; one can see she’s studied Kaulbach,” said
a diplomatic attache in the group round the ambassador’s wife. “Did you notice
how she fell down?...”
“Oh, please, don’t let us talk about Nilsson! No one can possibly say anything new
about her,” said a fat, red-faced, flaxen-headed lady, without eyebrows and chignon,
wearing an old silk dress. This was Princess Myakaya, noted for her simplicity and
the roughness of her manners, and nicknamed enfant terrible. Princess Myakaya,
sitting in the middle between the two groups, and listening to both, took part in the
conversation first of one and then of the other. “Three people have used that very
phrase about Kaulbach to me today already, just as though they had made a compact
about it. And I can’t see why they liked that remark so.”
The conversation was cut short by this observation, and a new subject had to be
thought of again.
“Do tell me something amusing but not spiteful,” said the ambassador’s wife, a
great proficient in the art of that elegant conversation called by the English, small
talk. She addressed the attache, who was at a loss now what to begin upon.
“They say that that’s a difficult task, that nothing’s amusing that isn’t spiteful,”
he began with a smile. “But I’ll try. Get me a subject. It all lies in the subject. If
a subject’s given me, it’s easy to spin something round it. I often think that the
celebrated talkers of the last century would have found it difficult to talk cleverly
now. Everything clever is so stale...”
“That has been said long ago,” the ambassador’s wife interrupted him, laughing.
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