Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART TWO CHAPTER 17
know, Kostya, I’ll tell you the truth,” he went on, leaning his elbow on the table, and
propping on his hand his handsome ruddy face, in which his moist, good-natured,
sleepy eyes shone like stars. “It’s your own fault. You took fright at the sight of your
rival. But, as I told you at the time, I couldn’t say which had the better chance. Why
didn’t you fight it out? I told you at the time that....” He yawned inwardly, without
opening his mouth.
“Does he know, or doesn’t he, that I did make an offer?” Levin wondered, gazing
at him. “Yes, there’s something humbugging, diplomatic in his face,” and feeling he
was blushing, he looked Stepan Arkadyevitch straight in the face without speaking.
“If there was anything on her side at the time, it was nothing but a superficial
attraction,” pursued Oblonsky. “His being such a perfect aristocrat, don’t you
know, and his future position in society, had an influence not with her, but with her
mother.”
Levin scowled. The humiliation of his rejection stung him to the heart, as though
it were a fresh wound he had only just received. But he was at home, and the walls
of home are a support.
“Stay, stay,” he began, interrupting Oblonsky. “You talk of his being an aristocrat.
But allow me to ask what it consists in, that aristocracy of Vronsky or of anybody
else, beside which I can be looked down upon? You consider Vronsky an aristocrat,
but I don’t. A man whose father crawled up from nothing at all by intrigue, and
whose mother–God knows whom she wasn’t mixed up with.... No, excuse me, but
I consider myself aristocratic, and people like me, who can point back in the past to
three or four honorable generations of their family, of the highest degree of breeding
(talent and intellect, of course that’s another matter), and have never curried
favor with anyone, never depended on anyone for anything, like my father and my
grandfather. And I know many such. You think it mean of me to count the trees in
my forest, while you make Ryabinin a present of thirty thousand; but you get rents
from your lands and I don’t know what, while I don’t and so I prize what’s come to
me from my ancestors or been won by hard work.... We are aristocrats, and not those
who can only exist by favor of the powerful of this world, and who can be bought
for twopence halfpenny.”
“Well, but whom are you attacking? I agree with you,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
sincerely and genially; though he was aware that in the class of those who could be
bought for twopence halfpenny Levin was reckoning him too. Levin’s warmth gave
him genuine pleasure. “Whom are you attacking? Though a good deal is not true
that you say about Vronsky, but I won’t talk about that. I tell you straight out, if I
were you, I should go back with me to Moscow, and...”
“No; I don’t know whether you know it or not, but I don’t care. And I tell you–I
did make an offer and was rejected, and Katerina Alexandrovna is nothing now to
me but a painful and humiliating reminiscence.”
“What ever for? What nonsense!”
“But we won’t talk about it. Please forgive me, if I’ve been nasty,” said Levin. Now
that he had opened his heart, he became as he had been in the morning. “You’re not
angry with me, Stiva? Please don’t be angry,” he said, and smiling, he took his hand.
163