Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SEVEN CHAPTER 13
Chapter 13
THERE are no conditions to which a man cannot become used, especially if he sees
that all around him are living in the same way. Levin could not have believed
three months before that he could have gone quietly to sleep in the condition in
which he was that day, that leading an aimless, irrational life, living too beyond
his means, after drinking to excess (he could not call what happened at the club
anything else), forming inappropriately friendly relations with a man with whom
his wife had once been in love, and a still more inappropriate call upon a woman
who could only be called a lost woman, after being fascinated by that woman and
causing his wife distress–he could still go quietly to sleep. But under the influence
of fatigue, a sleepless night, and the wine he had drunk, his sleep was sound and
untroubled.
At five o’clock the creak of a door opening waked him. He jumped up and looked
round. Kitty was not in bed beside him. But there was a light moving behind the
screen, and he heard her steps.
“What is it?...what is it?” he said, half-asleep. “Kitty! What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said, coming from behind the screen with a candle in her hand. “I
felt unwell,” she said, smiling a particularly sweet and meaning smile.
“What? has it begun?” he said in terror. “We ought to send...” and hurriedly he
reached after his clothes.
“No, no,” she said, smiling and holding his hand. “It’s sure to be nothing. I was
rather unwell, only a little. It’s all over now.”
And getting into bed, she blew out the candle, lay down and was still. Though
he thought her stillness suspicious, as though she were holding her breath, and still
more suspicious the expression of peculiar tenderness and excitement with which,
as she came from behind the screen, she said “nothing,” he was so sleepy that he
fell asleep at once. Only later he remembered the stillness of her breathing, and
understood all that must have been passing in her sweet, precious heart while she
lay beside him, not stirring, in anticipation of the greatest event in a woman’s life. At
seven o’clock he was waked by the touch of her hand on his shoulder, and a gentle
whisper. She seemed struggling between regret at waking him, and the desire to talk
to him.
“Kostya, don’t be frightened. It’s all right. But I fancy.... We ought to send for
Lizaveta Petrovna.”
The candle was lighted again. She was sitting up in bed, holding some knitting,
which she had been busy upon during the last few days.
“Please, don’t be frightened, it’s all right. I’m not a bit afraid,” she said, seeing his
scared face, and she pressed his hand to her bosom and then to her lips.
He hurriedly jumped up, hardly awake, and kept his eyes fixed on her, as he put
on his dressing gown; then he stopped, still looking at her. He had to go, but he could
not tear himself from her eyes. He thought he loved her face, knew her expression,
her eyes, but never had he seen it like this. How hateful and horrible he seemed
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