Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SIX CHAPTER 28
come out of a stuffy room into the fresh air. He began walking up and down, looking
with pleasure at the waiters. He particularly liked the way one gray-whiskered
waiter, who showed his scorn for the other younger ones and was jeered at by them,
was teaching them how to fold up napkins properly. Levin was just about to enter
into conversation with the old waiter, when the secretary of the court of wardship,
a little old man whose specialty it was to know all the noblemen of the province by
name and patronymic, drew him away.
“Please come, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” he said, “your brother’s looking for you.
They are voting on the legal point.”
Levin walked into the room, received a white ball, and followed his brother, Sergey
Ivanovitch, to the table where Sviazhsky was standing with a significant and ironical
face, holding his beard in his fist and sniffing at it. Sergey Ivanovitch put his
hand into the box, put the ball somewhere, and making room for Levin, stopped.
Levin advanced, but utterly forgetting what he was to do, and much embarrassed,
he turned to Sergey Ivanovitch with the question, “Where am I to put it?” He asked
this softly, at a moment when there was talking going on near, so that he had hoped
his question would not be overheard. But the persons speaking paused, and his
improper question was overheard. Sergey Ivanovitch frowned.
“That is a matter for each man’s own decision,” he said severely.
Several people smiled. Levin crimsoned, hurriedly thrust his hand under the
cloth, and put the ball to the right as it was in his right hand. Having put it in,
he recollected that he ought to have thrust his left hand too, and so he thrust it in
though too late, and, still more overcome with confusion, he beat a hasty retreat into
the background.
“A hundred and twenty-six for admission! Ninety-eight against!” sang out the
voice of the secretary, who could not pronounce the letter r. Then there was a laugh;
a button and two nuts were found in the box. The nobleman was allowed the right
to vote, and the new party had conquered.
But the old party did not consider themselves conquered. Levin heard that they
were asking Snetkov to stand, and he saw that a crowd of noblemen was surrounding
the marshal, who was saying something. Levin went nearer. In reply Snetkov
spoke of the trust the noblemen of the province had placed in him, the affection they
had shown him, which he did not deserve, as his only merit had been his attachment
to the nobility, to whom he had devoted twelve years of service. Several times he repeated
the words: “I have served to the best of my powers with truth and good faith,
I value your goodness and thank you,” and suddenly he stopped short from the tears
that choked him, and went out of the room. Whether these tears came from a sense
of the injustice being done him, from his love for the nobility, or from the strain of
the position he was placed in, feeling himself surrounded by enemies, his emotion
infected the assembly, the majority were touched, and Levin felt a tenderness for
Snetkov.
In the doorway the marshal of the province jostled against Levin.
“Beg pardon, excuse me, please,” he said as to a stranger, but recognizing Levin,
he smiled timidly. It seemed to Levin that he would have liked to say something,
but could not speak for emotion. His face and his whole figure in his uniform with
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