Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 7
Chapter 7
STEPHAN Arkadyevitch had gone to Petersburg to perform the most natural and
essential official duty–so familiar to everyone in the government service, though
incomprehensible to outsiders– that duty, but for which one could hardly be in government
service, of reminding the ministry of his existence–and having, for the due
performance of this rite, taken all the available cash from home, was gaily and agreeably
spending his days at the races and in the summer villas. Meanwhile Dolly and
the children had moved into the country, to cut down expenses as much as possible.
She had gone to Ergushovo, the estate that had been her dowry, and the one where in
spring the forest had been sold. It was nearly forty miles from Levin’s Pokrovskoe.
The big, old house at Ergushovo had been pulled down long ago, and the old prince
had had the lodge done up and built on to. Twenty years before, when Dolly was
a child, the lodge had been roomy and comfortable, though, like all lodges, it stood
sideways to the entrance avenue, and faced the south. But by now this lodge was old
and dilapidated. When Stepan Arkadyevitch had gone down in the spring to sell the
forest, Dolly had begged him to look over the house and order what repairs might
be needed. Stepan Arkadyevitch, like all unfaithful husbands indeed, was very solicitous
for his wife’s comfort, and he had himself looked over the house, and given
instructions about everything that he considered necessary. What he considered necessary
was to cover all the furniture with cretonne, to put up curtains, to weed the
garden, to make a little bridge on the pond, and to plant flowers. But he forgot many
other essential matters, the want of which greatly distressed Darya Alexandrovna
later on.
In spite of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s efforts to be an attentive father and husband, he
never could keep in his mind that he had a wife and children. He had bachelor tastes,
and it was in accordance with them that he shaped his life. On his return to Moscow
he informed his wife with pride that everything was ready, that the house would
be a little paradise, and that he advised her most certainly to go. His wife’s staying
away in the country was very agreeable to Stepan Arkadyevitch from every point of
view: it did the children good, it decreased expenses, and it left him more at liberty.
Darya Alexandrovna regarded staying in the country for the summer as essential for
the children, especially for the little girl, who had not succeeded in regaining her
strength after the scarlatina, and also as a means of escaping the petty humiliations,
the little bills owing to the wood-merchant, the fishmonger, the shoemaker, which
made her miserable. Besides this, she was pleased to go away to the country because
she was dreaming of getting her sister Kitty to stay with her there. Kitty was to be
back from abroad in the middle of the summer, and bathing had been prescribed for
her. Kitty wrote that no prospect was so alluring as to spend the summer with Dolly
at Ergushovo, full of childish associations for both of them.
The first days of her existence in the country were very hard for Dolly. She used
to stay in the country as a child, and the impression she had retained of it was that
the country was a refuge from all the unpleasantness of the town, that life there,
though not luxurious–Dolly could easily make up her mind to that–was cheap and
comfortable; that there was plenty of everything, everything was cheap, everything
could be got, and children were happy. But now coming to the country as the head
of a family, she perceived that it was all utterly unlike what she had fancied.
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