Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SIX CHAPTER 16
Chapter 16
DARYA Alexandrovna carried out her intention and went to see Anna. She was
sorry to annoy her sister and to do anything Levin disliked. She quite understood
how right the Levins were in not wishing to have anything to do with Vronsky.
But she felt she must go and see Anna, and show her that her feelings could not be
changed, in spite of the change in her position. That she might be independent of
the Levins in this expedition, Darya Alexandrovna sent to the village to hire horses
for the drive; but Levin learning of it went to her to protest.
“What makes you suppose that I dislike your going? But, even if I did dislike it,
I should still more dislike your not taking my horses,” he said. “You never told me
that you were going for certain. Hiring horses in the village is disagreeable to me,
and, what’s of more importance, they’ll undertake the job and never get you there. I
have horses. And if you don’t want to wound me, you’ll take mine.”
Darya Alexandrovna had to consent, and on the day fixed Levin had ready for
his sister-in-law a set of four horses and relays, getting them together from the
farm- and saddle-horses–not at all a smart-looking set, but capable of taking Darya
Alexandrovna the whole distance in a single day. At that moment, when horses were
wanted for the princess, who was going, and for the midwife, it was a difficult matter
for Levin to make up the number, but the duties of hospitality would not let him
allow Darya Alexandrovna to hire horses when staying in his house. Moreover, he
was well aware that the twenty roubles that would be asked for the journey were
a serious matter for her; Darya Alexandrovna’s pecuniary affairs, which were in a
very unsatisfactory state, were taken to heart by the Levins as if they were their own.
Darya Alexandrovna, by Levin’s advice, started before daybreak. The road was
good, the carriage comfortable, the horses trotted along merrily, and on the box, besides
the coachman, sat the counting-house clerk, whom Levin was sending instead
of a groom for greater security. Darya Alexandrovna dozed and waked up only on
reaching the inn where the horses were to be changed.
After drinking tea at the same well-to-do peasant’s with whom Levin had stayed
on the way to Sviazhsky’s, and chatting with the women about their children, and
with the old man about Count Vronsky, whom the latter praised very highly, Darya
Alexandrovna, at ten o’clock, went on again. At home, looking after her children, she
had no time to think. So now, after this journey of four hours, all the thoughts she
had suppressed before rushed swarming into her brain, and she thought over all her
life as she never had before, and from the most different points of view. Her thoughts
seemed strange even to herself. At first she thought about the children, about whom
she was uneasy, although the princess and Kitty (she reckoned more upon her) had
promised to look after them. “If only Masha does not begin her naughty tricks, if
Grisha isn’t kicked by a horse, and Lily’s stomach isn’t upset again!” she thought.
But these questions of the present were succeeded by questions of the immediate
future. She began thinking how she had to get a new flat in Moscow for the coming
winter, to renew the drawing room furniture, and to make her elder girl a cloak.
Then questions of the more remote future occurred to her: how she was to place her
children in the world. “The girls are all right,” she thought; “but the boys?”
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