Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FOUR CHAPTER 9
muscle with his left hand. Levin smiled, bent his arm, and under Stepan Arkadyevitch’s
fingers the muscles swelled up like a sound cheese, hard as a knob of iron,
through the fine cloth of the coat.
“What biceps! A perfect Samson!”
“I imagine great strength is needed for hunting bears,” observed Alexey Alexandrovitch,
who had the mistiest notions about the chase. He cut off and spread with
cheese a wafer of bread fine as a spider-web.
Levin smiled.
“Not at all. Quite the contrary; a child can kill a bear,” he said, with a slight bow
moving aside for the ladies, who were approaching the table.
“You have killed a bear, I’ve been told!” said Kitty, trying assiduously to catch
with her fork a perverse mushroom that would slip away, and setting the lace quivering
over her white arm. “Are there bears on your place?” she added, turning her
charming little head to him and smiling.
There was apparently nothing extraordinary in what she said, but what unutterable
meaning there was for him in every sound, in every turn of her lips, her eyes,
her hand as she said it! There was entreaty for forgiveness, and trust in him, and
tenderness– soft, timid tenderness–and promise and hope and love for him, which
he could not but believe in and which choked him with happiness.
“No, we’ve been hunting in the Tver province. It was coming back from there that
I met your beaufrère in the train, or your beaufrère’s brother-in-law,” he said with a
smile. “It was an amusing meeting.”
And he began telling with droll good-humor how, after not sleeping all night, he
had, wearing an old fur-lined, full-skirted coat, got into Alexey Alexandrovitch’s
compartment.
“The conductor, forgetting the proverb, would have chucked me out on account
of my attire; but thereupon I began expressing my feelings in elevated language,
and...you, too,” he said, addressing Karenin and forgetting his name, “at first would
have ejected me on the ground of the old coat, but afterwards you took my part, for
which I am extremely grateful.”
“The rights of passengers generally to choose their seats are too ill-defined,” said
Alexey Alexandrovitch, rubbing the tips of his fingers on his handkerchief.
“I saw you were in uncertainty about me,” said Levin, smiling good-naturedly,
“but I made haste to plunge into intellectual conversation to smooth over the defects
of my attire.” Sergey Ivanovitch, while he kept up a conversation with their hostess,
had one ear for his brother, and he glanced askance at him. “What is the matter
with him today? Why such a conquering hero?” he thought. He did not know that
Levin was feeling as though he had grown wings. Levin knew she was listening to
his words and that she was glad to listen to him. And this was the only thing that
interested him. Not in that room only, but in the whole world, there existed for him
only himself, with enormously increased importance and dignity in his own eyes,
and she. He felt himself on a pinnacle that made him giddy, and far away down
below were all those nice excellent Karenins, Oblonskys, and all the world.
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