Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SEVEN CHAPTER 2
During the first part of their stay in Moscow, Levin had used his own horses
brought up from the country. He had tried to arrange this part of their expenses
in the best and cheapest way possible; but it appeared that their own horses came
dearer than hired horses, and they still hired too.
“Send for the veterinary, there may be a bruise.”
“And for Katerina Alexandrovna?” asked Kouzma.
Levin was not by now struck as he had been at first by the fact that to get from one
end of Moscow to the other he had to have two powerful horses put into a heavy
carriage, to take the carriage three miles through the snowy slush and to keep it
standing there four hours, paying five roubles every time.
Now it seemed quite natural.
“Hire a pair for our carriage from the jobmaster,” said he.
“Yes, sir.”
And so, simply and easily, thanks to the facilities of town life, Levin settled a
question which, in the country, would have called for so much personal trouble and
exertion, and going out onto the steps, he called a sledge, sat down, and drove to
Nikitsky. On the way he thought no more of money, but mused on the introduction
that awaited him to the Petersburg savant, a writer on sociology, and what he would
say to him about his book.
Only during the first days of his stay in Moscow Levin had been struck by the
expenditure, strange to one living in the country, unproductive but inevitable, that
was expected of him on every side. But by now he had grown used to it. That had
happened to him in this matter which is said to happen to drunkards–the first glass
sticks in the throat, the second flies down like a hawk, but after the third they’re like
tiny little birds. When Levin had changed his first hundred-rouble note to pay for
liveries for his footmen and hall-porter he could not help reflecting that these liveries
were of no use to anyone–but they were indubitably necessary, to judge by the
amazement of the princess and Kitty when he suggested that they might do without
liveries,–that these liveries would cost the wages of two laborers for the summer,
that is, would pay for about three hundred working days from Easter to Ash
Wednesday, and each a day of hard work from early morning to late evening–and
that hundred-rouble note did stick in his throat. But the next note, changed to pay
for providing a dinner for their relations, that cost twenty-eight roubles, though it
did excite in Levin the reflection that twenty-eight roubles meant nine measures of
oats, which men would with groans and sweat have reaped and bound and thrashed
and winnowed and sifted and sown,–this next one he parted with more easily. And
now the notes he changed no longer aroused such reflections, and they flew off like
little birds. Whether the labor devoted to obtaining the money corresponded to the
pleasure given by what was bought with it, was a consideration he had long ago
dismissed. His business calculation that there was a certain price below which he
could not sell certain grain was forgotten too. The rye, for the price of which he had
so long held out, had been sold for fifty kopecks a measure cheaper than it had been
fetching a month ago. Even the consideration that with such an expenditure he could
not go on living for a year without debt, that even had no force. Only one thing was
essential: to have money in the bank, without inquiring where it came from, so as to
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