Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SEVEN CHAPTER 6
The porter asked him, as he gave him his coat, “Where is your honor staying?”
and immediately wrote down his address in a big handsomely bound book.
“Of course I don’t care, but still I feel ashamed and awfully stupid,” thought Levin,
consoling himself with the reflection that everyone does it. He drove to the public
meeting, where he was to find his sister-in-law, so as to drive home with her.
At the public meeting of the committee there were a great many people, and almost
all the highest society. Levin was in time for the report which, as everyone said,
was very interesting. When the reading of the report was over, people moved about,
and Levin met Sviazhsky, who invited him very pressingly to come that evening to
a meeting of the Society of Agriculture, where a celebrated lecture was to be delivered,
and Stepan Arkadyevitch, who had only just come from the races, and many
other acquaintances; and Levin heard and uttered various criticisms on the meeting,
on the new fantasia, and on a public trial. But, probably from the mental fatigue he
was beginning to feel, he made a blunder in speaking of the trial, and this blunder
he recalled several times with vexation. Speaking of the sentence upon a foreigner
who had been condemned in Russia, and of how unfair it would be to punish him
by exile abroad, Levin repeated what he had heard the day before in conversation
from an acquaintance.
“I think sending him abroad is much the same as punishing a carp by putting it
into the water,” said Levin. Then he recollected that this idea, which he had heard
from an acquaintance and uttered as his own, came from a fable of Krilov’s, and that
the acquaintance had picked it up from a newspaper article.
After driving home with his sister-in-law, and finding Kitty in good spirits and
quite well, Levin drove to the club.
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