Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART TWO CHAPTER 14
forgetting that it was not always spring and fine weather like that day. “And your
nurse is simply charming! A pretty maid in an apron might be even more agreeable,
perhaps; but for your severe monastic style it does very well.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch told him many interesting pieces of news; especially interesting
to Levin was the news that his brother, Sergey Ivanovitch, was intending to
pay him a visit in the summer.
Not one word did Stepan Arkadyevitch say in reference to Kitty and the
Shtcherbatskys; he merely gave him greetings from his wife. Levin was grateful to
him for his delicacy and was very glad of his visitor. As always happened with him
during his solitude, a mass of ideas and feelings had been accumulating within him,
which he could not communicate to those about him. And now he poured out upon
Stepan Arkadyevitch his poetic joy in the spring, and his failures and plans for the
land, and his thoughts and criticisms on the books he had been reading, and the idea
of his own book, the basis of which really was, though he was unaware of it himself,
a criticism of all the old books on agriculture. Stepan Arkadyevitch, always charming,
understanding everything at the slightest reference, was particularly charming
on this visit, and Levin noticed in him a special tenderness, as it were, and a new
tone of respect that flattered him.
The efforts of Agafea Mihalovna and the cook, that the dinner should be particularly
good, only ended in the two famished friends attacking the preliminary course,
eating a great deal of bread and butter, salt goose and salted mushrooms, and in
Levin’s finally ordering the soup to be served without the accompaniment of little
pies, with which the cook had particularly meant to impress their visitor. But though
Stepan Arkadyevitch was accustomed to very different dinners, he thought everything
excellent: the herb brandy, and the bread, and the butter, and above all the salt
goose and the mushrooms, and the nettle soup, and the chicken in white sauce, and
the white Crimean wine– everything was superb and delicious.
“Splendid, splendid!” he said, lighting a fat cigar after the roast. “I feel as if,
coming to you, I had landed on a peaceful shore after the noise and jolting of a
steamer. And so you maintain that the laborer himself is an element to be studied
and to regulate the choice of methods in agriculture. Of course, I’m an ignorant
outsider; but I should fancy theory and its application will have its influence on the
laborer too.”
“Yes, but wait a bit. I’m not talking of political economy, I’m talking of the science
of agriculture. It ought to be like the natural sciences, and to observe given
phenomena and the laborer in his economic, ethnographical...”
At that instant Agafea Mihalovna came in with jam.
“Oh, Agafea Mihalovna,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, kissing the tips of his plump
fingers, “what salt goose, what herb brandy!...What do you think, isn’t it time to
start, Kostya?” he added.
Levin looked out of the window at the sun sinking behind the bare tree-tops of the
forest.
“Yes, it’s time,” he said. “Kouzma, get ready the trap,” and he ran downstairs.
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