Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 9
“Why mine?” said Anna. “After yours I don’t want another portrait. Better have
one of Annie” (so she called her baby girl). “Here she is,” she added, looking out
of the window at the handsome Italian nurse, who was carrying the child out into
the garden, and immediately glancing unnoticed at Vronsky. The handsome nurse,
from whom Vronsky was painting a head for his picture, was the one hidden grief in
Anna’s life. He painted with her as his model, admired her beauty and mediaevalism,
and Anna dared not confess to herself that she was afraid of becoming jealous
of this nurse, and was for that reason particularly gracious and condescending both
to her and her little son. Vronsky, too, glanced out of the window and into Anna’s
eyes, and, turning at once to Golenishtchev, he said:
“Do you know this Mihailov?”
“I have met him. But he’s a queer fish, and quite without breeding. You know,
one of those uncouth new people one’s so often coming across nowadays, one of
those free-thinkers you know, who are reared d’emblée in theories of atheism, scepticism,
and materialism. In former days,” said Golenishtchev, not observing, or not
willing to observe, that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, “in former days
the free-thinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of religion, law, and
morality, and only through conflict and struggle came to free-thought; but now there
has sprung up a new type of born free-thinkers who grow up without even having
heard of principles of morality or of religion, of the existence of authorities, who
grow up directly in ideas of negation in everything, that is to say, savages. Well, he’s
of that class. He’s the son, it appears, of some Moscow butler, and has never had
any sort of bringing-up. When he got into the academy and made his reputation he
tried, as he’s no fool, to educate himself. And he turned to what seemed to him the
very source of culture–the magazines. In old times, you see, a man who wanted to
educate himself–a Frenchman, for instance–would have set to work to study all the
classics and theologians and tragedians and historiaris and philosophers, and, you
know, all the intellectual work that came in his way. But in our day he goes straight
for the literature of negation, very quickly assimilates all the extracts of the science of
negation, and he’s ready. And that’s not all–twenty years ago he would have found
in that literature traces of conflict with authorities, with the creeds of the ages; he
would have perceived from this conflict that there was something else; but now he
comes at once upon a literature in which the old creeds do not even furnish matter
for discussion, but it is stated baldly that there is nothing else–evolution, natural
selection, struggle for existence–and that’s all. In my article I’ve...”
“I tell you what,” said Anna, who had for a long while been exchanging wary
glances with Vronsky, and knew that he was not in the least interested in the education
of this artist, but was simply absorbed by the idea of assisting him, and ordering
a portrait of him; “I tell you what,” she said, resolutely interrupting Golenishtchev,
who was still talking away, “let’s go and see him!”
Golenishtchev recovered his self-possession and readily agreed. But as the artist
lived in a remote suburb, it was decided to take the carriage.
An hour later Anna, with Golenishtchev by her side and Vronsky on the front seat
of the carriage, facing them, drove up to a new ugly house in the remote suburb. On
learning from the porter’s wife, who came out to them, that Mihailov saw visitors at
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