Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SEVEN
Chapter 1
THE Levins had been three months in Moscow. The date had long passed on which,
according to the most trustworthy calculations of people learned in such matters,
Kitty should have been confined. But she was still about, and there was nothing
to show that her time was any nearer than two months ago. The doctor, the monthly
nurse, and Dolly and her mother, and most of all Levin, who could not think of the
approaching event without terror, began to be impatient and uneasy. Kitty was the
only person who felt perfectly calm and happy.
She was distinctly conscious now of the birth of a new feeling of love for the future
child, for her to some extent actually existing already, and she brooded blissfully over
this feeling. He was not by now altogether a part of herself, but sometimes lived his
own life independently of her. Often this separate being gave her pain, but at the
same time she wanted to laugh with a strange new joy.
All the people she loved were with her, and all were so good to her, so attentively
caring for her, so entirely pleasant was everything presented to her, that if she had
not known and felt that it must all soon be over, she could not have wished for a
better and pleasanter life. The only thing that spoiled the charm of this manner of
life was that her husband was not here as she loved him to be, and as he was in the
country.
She liked his serene, friendly, and hospitable manner in the country. In the town
he seemed continually uneasy and on his guard, as though he were afraid someone
would be rude to him, and still more to her. At home in the country, knowing himself
distinctly to be in his right place, he was never in haste to be off elsewhere. He was
never unoccupied. Here in town he was in a continual hurry, as though afraid of
missing something, and yet he had nothing to do. And she felt sorry for him. To
others, she knew, he did not appear an object of pity. On the contrary, when Kitty
looked at him in society, as one sometimes looks at those one loves, trying to see him
as if he were a stranger, so as to catch the impression he must make on others, she
saw with a panic even of jealous fear that he was far indeed from being a pitiable
figure, that he was very attractive with his fine breeding, his rather old-fashioned,
reserved courtesy with women, his powerful figure, and striking, as she thought,
and expressive face. But she saw him not from without, but from within; she saw
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