Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SEVEN CHAPTER 11
Chapter 11
“What a marvelous, sweet and unhappy woman!” he was thinking, as he stepped
out into the frosty air with Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Well, didn’t I tell you?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, seeing that Levin had been
completely won over.
“Yes,” said Levin dreamily, “an extraordinary woman! It’s not her cleverness, but
she has such wonderful depth of feeling. I’m awfully sorry for her!”
“Now, please God, everything will soon be settled. Well, well, don’t be hard on
people in future,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, opening the carriage door. “Good-bye;
we don’t go the same way.”
Still thinking of Anna, of everything, even the simplest phrase in their conversation
with her, and recalling the minutest changes in her expression, entering more
and more into her position, and feeling sympathy for her, Levin reached home.
At home Kouzma told Levin that Katerina Alexandrovna was quite well, and that
her sisters had not long been gone, and he handed him two letters. Levin read them
at once in the hall, that he might not over look them later. One was from Sokolov, his
bailiff. Sokolov wrote that the corn could not be sold, that it was fetching only five
and a half roubles, and that more than that could not be got for it. The other letter
was from his sister. She scolded him for her business being still unsettled.
“Well, we must sell it at five and a half if we can’t get more,” Levin decided the first
question, which had always before seemed such a weighty one, with extraordinary
facility on the spot. “It’s extraordinary how all one’s time is taken up here,” he
thought, considering the second letter. He felt himself to blame for not having got
done what his sister had asked him to do for her. “Today, again, I’ve not been to
the court, but today I’ve certainly not had time.” And resolving that he would not
fail to do it next day, he went up to his wife. As he went in, Levin rapidly ran
through mentally the day he had spent. All the events of the day were conversations,
conversations he had heard and taken part in. All the conversations were upon
subjects which, if he had been alone at home, he would never have taken up, but
here they were very interesting. And all these conversations were right enough, only
in two places there was something not quite right. One was what he had said about
the carp, the other was something not “quite the thing” in the tender sympathy he
was feeling for Anna.
Levin found his wife low-spirited and dull. The dinner of the three sisters had
gone off very well, but then they had waited and waited for him, all of them had felt
dull, the sisters had departed, and she had been left alone.
“Well, and what have you been doing?” she asked him, looking straight into his
eyes, which shone with rather a suspicious brightness. But that she might not prevent
his telling her everything, she concealed her close scrutiny of him, and with an
approving smile listened to his account of how he had spent the evening.
“Well, I’m very glad I met Vronsky. I felt quite at ease and natural with him. You
understand, I shall try not to see him, but I’m glad that this awkwardness is all over,”
he said, and remembering that by way of trying not to see him, he had immediately
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