Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FOUR CHAPTER 1
a big glossy green Dutch cucumber. The prince had traveled a great deal, and considered
one of the chief advantages of modern facilities of communication was the
accessibility of the pleasures of all nations.
He had been in Spain, and there had indulged in serenades and had made friends
with a Spanish girl who played the mandolin. In Switzerland he had killed chamois.
In England he had galloped in a red coat over hedges and killed two hundred pheasants
for a bet. In Turkey he had got into a harem; in India he had hunted on an
elephant, and now in Russia he wished to taste all the specially Russian forms of
pleasure.
Vronsky, who was, as it were, chief master of the ceremonies to him, was at great
pains to arrange all the Russian amusements suggested by various persons to the
prince. They had race horses, and Russian pancakes and bear hunts and three-horse
sledges, and gypsies and drinking feasts, with the Russian accompaniment of broken
crockery. And the prince with surprising ease fell in with the Russian spirit, smashed
trays full of crockery, sat with a gypsy girl on his knee, and seemed to be asking–what
more, and does the whole Russian spirit consist in just this?
In reality, of all the Russian entertainments the prince liked best French actresses
and ballet dancers and white-seal champagne. Vronsky was used to princes, but,
either because he had himself changed of late, or that he was in too close proximity
to the prince, that week seemed fearfully wearisome to him. The whole of that week
he experienced a sensation such as a man might have set in charge of a dangerous
madman, afraid of the madman, and at the same time, from being with him, fearing
for his own reason. Vronsky was continually conscious of the necessity of never for a
second relaxing the tone of stern official respectfulness, that he might not himself be
insulted. The prince’s manner of treating the very people who, to Vronsky’s surprise,
were ready to descend to any depths to provide him with Russian amusements, was
contemptuous. His criticisms of Russian women, whom he wished to study, more
than once made Vronsky crimson with indignation. The chief reason why the prince
was so particularly disagreeable to Vronsky was that he could not help seeing himself
in him. And what he saw in this mirror did not gratify his self-esteem. He was
a very stupid and very self-satisfied and very healthy and very well-washed man,
and nothing else. He was a gentleman–that was true, and Vronsky could not deny
it. He was equable and not cringing with his superiors, was free and ingratiating in
his behavior with his equals, and was contemptuously indulgent with his inferiors.
Vronsky was himself the same, and regarded it as a great merit to be so. But for
this prince he was an inferior, and his contemptuous and indulgent attitude to him
revolted him.
“Brainless beef! can I be like that?” he thought.
Be that as it might, when, on the seventh day, he parted from the prince, who
was starting for Moscow, and received his thanks, he was happy to be rid of his
uncomfortable position and the unpleasant reflection of himself. He said good-bye
to him at the station on their return from a bear hunt, at which they had had a display
of Russian prowess kept up all night.
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