Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SEVEN CHAPTER 10
Anna talked not merely naturally and cleverly, but cleverly and carelessly, attaching
no value to her own ideas and giving great weight to the ideas of the person she
was talking to.
The conversation turned on the new movement in art, on the new illustrations of
the Bible by a French artist. Vorkuev attacked the artist for a realism carried to the
point of coarseness.
Levin said that the French had carried conventionality further than anyone, and
that consequently they see a great merit in the return to realism. In the fact of not
lying they see poetry.
Never had anything clever said by Levin given him so much pleasure as this remark.
Anna’s face lighted up at once, as at once she appreciated the thought. She
laughed.
“I laugh,” she said, “as one laughs when one sees a very true portrait. What you
said so perfectly hits off French art now, painting and literature too, indeed–Zola,
Daudet. But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious,
conventional types, and then–all the combinaisons made–they are tired of the fictitious
figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.”
“That’s perfectly true,” said Vorknev.
“So you’ve been at the club?” she said to her brother.
“Yes, yes, this is a woman!” Levin thought, forgetting himself and staring persistently
at her lovely, mobile face, which at that moment was all at once completely
transformed. Levin did not hear what she was talking of as she leaned over to her
brother, but he was struck by the change of her expression. Her face–so handsome
a moment before in its repose–suddenly wore a look of strange curiosity, anger, and
pride. But this lasted only an instant. She dropped her eyelids, as though recollecting
something.
“Oh, well, but that’s of no interest to anyone,” she said, and she turned to the
English girl.
“Please order the tea in the drawing room,” she said in English.
The girl got up and went out.
“Well, how did she get through her examination?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Splendidly! She’s a very gifted child and a sweet character.”
“It will end in your loving her more than your own.”
“There a man speaks. In love there’s no more nor less. I love my daughter with
one love, and her with another.”
“I was just telling Anna Arkadyevna,” said Vorkuev, “that if she were to put a
hundredth part of the energy she devotes to this English girl to the public question
of the education of Russian children, she would be doing a great and useful work.”
“Yes, but I can’t help it; I couldn’t do it. Count Alexey Kirillovitch urged me very
much” (as she uttered the words Count Alexey Kirillovitch she glanced with appealing
timidity at Levin, and he unconsciously responded with a respectful and reassuring
look); “he urged me to take up the school in the village. I visited it several times.
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