Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SIX CHAPTER 30
Everything was still, and the counting of the balls was heard. Then a single voice
rose and proclaimed the numbers for and against. The marshal had been voted for
by a considerable majority. All was noise and eager movement towards the doors.
Snetkov came in, and the nobles thronged round him, congratulating him.
“Well, now is it over?” Levin asked Sergey Ivanovitch.
“It’s only just beginning,” Sviazhsky said, replying for Sergey Ivanovitch with a
smile. “Some other candidate may receive more votes than the marshal.”
Levin had quite forgotten about that. Now he could only remember that there was
some sort of trickery in it, but he was too bored to think what it was exactly. He felt
depressed, and longed to get out of the crowd.
As no one was paying any attention to him, and no one apparently needed him, he
quietly slipped away into the little room where the refreshments were, and again had
a great sense of comfort when he saw the waiters. The little old waiter pressed him
to have something, and Levin agreed. After eating a cutlet with beans and talking to
the waiters of their former masters, Levin, not wishing to go back to the hall, where
it was all so distasteful to him, proceeded to walk through the galleries. The galleries
were full of fashionably dressed ladies, leaning over the balustrade and trying not
to lose a single word of what was being said below. With the ladies were sitting and
standing smart lawyers, high school teachers in spectacles, and officers. Everywhere
they were talking of the election, and of how worried the marshal was, and how
splendid the discussions had been. In one group Levin heard his brother’s praises.
One lady was telling a lawyer:
“How glad I am I heard Koznishev! It’s worth losing one’s dinner. He’s exquisite!
So clear and distinct all of it! There’s not one of you in the law courts that speaks like
that. The only one is Meidel, and he’s not so eloquent by a long way.”
Finding a free place, Levin leaned over the balustrade and began looking and
listening.
All the noblemen were sitting railed off behind barriers according to their districts.
In the middle of the room stood a man in a uniform, who shouted in a loud, high
voice:
“As a candidate for the marshalship of the nobility of the province we call upon
staff-captain Yevgeney Ivanovitch Apuhtin!” A dead silence followed, and then a
weak old voice was heard: “Declined!”
“We call upon the privy councilor Pyotr Petrovitch Bol,” the voice began again.
“Declined!” a high boyish voice replied.
Again it began, and again “Declined.” And so it went on for about an hour. Levin,
with his elbows on the balustrade, looked and listened. At first he wondered and
wanted to know what it meant; then feeling sure that he could not make it out he
began to be bored. Then recalling all the excitement and vindictiveness he had seen
on all the faces, he felt sad; he made up his mind to go, and went downstairs. As he
passed through the entry to the galleries he met a dejected high school boy walking
up and down with tired-looking eyes. On the stairs he met a couple–a lady running
quickly on her high heels and the jaunty deputy prosecutor.
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