Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 8
her children and her. The children were not only beautiful to look at in their smart
little dresses, but they were charming in the way they behaved. Aliosha, it is true, did
not stand quite correctly; he kept turning round, trying to look at his little jacket from
behind; but all the same he was wonderfully sweet. Tanya behaved like a grownup
person, and looked after the little ones. And the smallest, Lily, was bewitching in her
naïve astonishment at everything, and it was difficult not to smile when, after taking
the sacrament, she said in English, “Please, some more.”
On the way home the children felt that something solemn had happened, and
were very sedate.
Everything went happily at home too; but at lunch Grisha began whistling, and,
what was worse, was disobedient to the English governess, and was forbidden to
have any tart. Darya Alexandrovna would not have let things go so far on such a
day had she been present; but she had to support the English governess’s authority,
and she upheld her decision that Grisha should have no tart. This rather spoiled
the general good humor. Grisha cried, declaring that Nikolinka had whistled too,
and he was not punished, and that he wasn’t crying for the tart–he didn’t care–but
at being unjustly treated. This was really too tragic, and Darya Alexandrovna made
up her mind to persuade the English governess to forgive Grisha, and she went to
speak to her. But on the way, as she passed the drawing room, she beheld a scene,
filling her heart with such pleasure that the tears came into her eyes, and she forgave
the delinquent herself.
The culprit was sitting at the window in the corner of the drawing room; beside
him was standing Tanya with a plate. On the pretext of wanting to give some dinner
to her dolls, she had asked the governess’s permission to take her share of tart to
the nursery, and had taken it instead to her brother. While still weeping over the
injustice of his punishment, he was eating the tart, and kept saying through his sobs,
“Eat yourself; let’s eat it together...together.”
Tanya had at first been under the influence of her pity for Grisha, then of a sense
of her noble action, and tears were standing in her eyes too; but she did not refuse,
and ate her share.
On catching sight of their mother they were dismayed, but, looking into her face,
they saw they were not doing wrong. They burst out laughing, and, with their
mouths full of tart, they began wiping their smiling lips with their hands, and smearing
their radiant faces all over with tears and jam.
“Mercy! Your new white frock! Tanya! Grisha!” said their mother, trying to save
the frock, but with tears in her eyes, smiling a blissful, rapturous smile.
The new frocks were taken off, and orders were given for the little girls to have
their blouses put on, and the boys their old jackets, and the wagonette to be harnessed;
with Brownie, to the bailiff’s annoyance, again in the shafts, to drive out for
mushroom picking and bathing. A roar of delighted shrieks arose in the nursery,
and never ceased till they had set off for the bathing-place.
They gathered a whole basketful of mushrooms; even Lily found a birch mushroom.
It had always happened before that Miss Hoole found them and pointed them
out to her; but this time she found a big one quite of herself, and there was a general
scream of delight, “Lily has found a mushroom!”
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