Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FOUR CHAPTER 16
“Perhaps it was for the best. You will have to forgive me so much. I ought to tell
you...”
This was one of the things he had meant to speak about. He had resolved from the
first to tell her two things–that he was not chaste as she was, and that he was not a
believer. It was agonizing, but he considered he ought to tell her both these facts.
“No, not now, later!” he said.
“Very well, later, but you must certainly tell me. I’m not afraid of anything. I want
to know everything. Now it is settled.”
He added: “Settled that you’ll take me whatever I may be–you won’t give me up?
Yes?”
“Yes, yes.”
Their conversation was interrupted by Mademoiselle Linon, who with an affected
but tender smile came to congratulate her favorite pupil. Before she had gone, the
servants came in with their congratulations. Then relations arrived, and there began
that state of blissful absurdity from which Levin did not emerge till the day after his
wedding. Levin was in a continual state of awkwardness and discomfort, but the
intensity of his happiness went on all the while increasing. He felt continually that a
great deal was being expected of him–what, he did not know; and he did everything
he was told, and it all gave him happiness. He had thought his engagement would
have nothing about it like others, that the ordinary conditions of engaged couples
would spoil his special happiness; but it ended in his doing exactly as other people
did, and his happiness being only increased thereby and becoming more and more
special, more and more unlike anything that had ever happened.
“Now we shall have sweetmeats to eat,” said Mademoiselle Linon– and Levin
drove off to buy sweetmeats.
“Well, I’m very glad,” said Sviazhsky. “I advise you to get the bouquets from
Fomin’s.”
“Oh, are they wanted?” And he drove to Fomin’s.
His brother offered to lend him money, as he would have so many expenses,
presents to give....
“Oh, are presents wanted?” And he galloped to Foulde’s.
And at the confectioner’s, and at Fomin’s, and at Foulde’s he saw that he was expected;
that they were pleased to see him, and prided themselves on his happiness,
just as every one whom he had to do with during those days. What was extraordinary
was that everyone not only liked him, but even people previously unsympathetic,
cold, and callous, were enthusiastic over him, gave way to him in everything,
treated his feeling with tenderness and delicacy, and shared his conviction that he
was the happiest man in the world because his betrothed was beyond perfection.
Kitty too felt the same thing. When Countess Nordston ventured to hint that she
had hoped for something better, Kitty was so angry and proved so conclusively that
nothing in the world could be better than Levin, that Countess Nordston had to admit
it, and in Kitty’s presence never met Levin without a smile of ecstatic admiration.
The confession he had promised was the one painful incident of this time. He
consulted the old prince, and with his sanction gave Kitty his diary, in which there
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