Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 10
“I don’t know!” said Levin, jumping up. “If you only knew how you are hurting
me. It’s just as if a child of yours were dead, and they were to say to you: He would
have been like this and like that, and he might have lived, and how happy you would
have been in him. But he’s dead, dead, dead!...”
“How absurd you are!” said Darya Alexandrovna, looking with mournful tenderness
at Levin’s excitement. “Yes, I see it all more and more clearly,” she went on
musingly. “So you won’t come to see us, then, when Kitty’s here?”
“No, I shan’t come. Of course I won’t avoid meeting Katerina Alexandrovna, but
as far as I can, I will try to save her the annoyance of my presence.”
“You are very, very absurd,” repeated Darya Alexandrovna, looking with tenderness
into his face. “Very well then, let it be as though we had not spoken of this.
What have you come for, Tanya?” she said in French to the little girl who had come
in.
“Where’s my spade, mamma?”
“I speak French, and you must too.”
The little girl tried to say it in French, but could not remember the French for
spade; the mother prompted her, and then told her in French where to look for the
spade. And this made a disagreeable impression on Levin.
Everything in Darya Alexandrovna’s house and children struck him now as by no
means so charming as a little while before. “And what does she talk French with the
children for?” he thought; “how unnatural and false it is! And the children feel it
so: Learning French and unlearning sincerity,” he thought to himself, unaware that
Darya Alexandrovna had thought all that over twenty times already, and yet, even
at the cost of some loss of sincerity, believed it necessary to teach her children French
in that way.
“But why are you going? Do stay a little.”
Levin stayed to tea; but his good-humor had vanished, and he felt ill at ease.
After tea he went out into the hall to order his horses to be put in, and, when he
came back, he found Darya Alexandrovna greatly disturbed, with a troubled face,
and tears in her eyes. While Levin had been outside, an incident had occurred which
had utterly shattered all the happiness she had been feeling that day, and her pride in
her children. Grisha and Tanya had been fighting over a ball. Darya Alexandrovna,
hearing a scream in the nursery, ran in and saw a terrible sight. Tanya was pulling
Grisha’s hair, while he, with a face hideous with rage, was beating her with his fists
wherever he could get at her. Something snapped in Darya Alexandrovna’s heart
when she saw this. It was as if darkness had swooped down upon her life; she felt
that these children of hers, that she was so proud of, were not merely most ordinary,
but positively bad, ill-bred children, with coarse, brutal propensities–wicked
children.
She could not talk or think of anything else, and she could not speak to Levin of
her misery.
Levin saw she was unhappy and tried to comfort her, saying that it showed nothing
bad, that all children fight; but, even as he said it, he was thinking in his heart:
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