Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SEVEN CHAPTER 16
Chapter 16
AT ten o’clock the old prince, Sergey Ivanovitch, and Stepan Arkadyevitch were
sitting at Levin’s. Having inquired after Kitty, they had dropped into conversation
upon other subjects. Levin heard them, and unconsciously, as they talked, going
over the past, over what had been up to that morning, he thought of himself as he
had been yesterday till that point. It was as though a hundred years had passed
since then. He felt himself exalted to unattainable heights, from which he studiously
lowered himself so as not to wound the people he was talking to. He talked, and was
all the time thinking of his wife, of her condition now, of his son, in whose existence
he tried to school himself into believing. The whole world of woman, which had
taken for him since his marriage a new value he had never suspected before, was
now so exalted that he could not take it in in his imagination. He heard them talk
of yesterday’s dinner at the club, and thought: “What is happening with her now?
Is she asleep? How is she? What is she thinking of? Is he crying, my son Dmitri?”
And in the middle of the conversation, in the middle of a sentence, he jumped up
and went out of the room.
“Send me word if I can see her,” said the prince.
“Very well, in a minute,” answered Levin, and without stopping, he went to her
room.
She was not asleep, she was talking gently with her mother, making plans about
the christening.
Carefully set to rights, with hair well-brushed, in a smart little cap with some blue
in it, her arms out on the quilt, she was lying on her back. Meeting his eyes, her
eyes drew him to her. Her face, bright before, brightened still more as he drew near
her. There was the same change in it from earthly to unearthly that is seen in the
face of the dead. But then it means farewell, here it meant welcome. Again a rush
of emotion, such as he had felt at the moment of the child’s birth, flooded his heart.
She took his hand and asked him if he had slept. He could not answer, and turned
away, struggling with his weakness.
“I have had a nap, Kostya!” she said to him; “and I am so comfortable now.”
She looked at him, but suddenly her expression changed.
“Give him to me,” she said, hearing the baby’s cry. “Give him to me, Lizaveta
Petrovna, and he shall look at him.”
“To be sure, his papa shall look at him,” said Lizaveta Petrovna, getting up and
bringing something red, and queer, and wriggling. “Wait a minute, we’ll make him
tidy first,” and Lizaveta Petrovna laid the red wobbling thing on the bed, began
untrussing and trussing up the baby, lifting it up and turning it over with one finger
and powdering it with something.
Levin, looking at the tiny, pitiful creature, made strenuous efforts to discover in his
heart some traces of fatherly feeling for it. He felt nothing towards it but disgust. But
when it was undressed and he caught a glimpse of wee, wee, little hands, little feet,
saffron-colored, with little toes, too, and positively with a little big toe different from
the rest, and when he saw Lizaveta Petrovna closing the wide-open little hands, as
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