Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SEVEN CHAPTER 22
“C’est moi, n’est-ce pas?” And receiving an answer in the affirmative, Stepan
Arkadyevitch, forgetting the favor he had meant to ask of Lidia Ivanovna, and forgetting
his sister’s affairs, caring for nothing, but filled with the sole desire to get
away as soon as possible, went out on tiptoe and ran out into the street as though
from a plague-stricken house. For a long while he chatted and joked with his cabdriver,
trying to recover his spirits.
At the French theater where he arrived for the last act, and afterwards at the Tatar
restaurant after his champagne, Stepan Arkadyevitch felt a little refreshed in the
atmosphere he was used to. But still he felt quite unlike himself all that evening.
On getting home to Pyotr Oblonsky’s, where he was staying, Stepan Arkadyevitch
found a note from Betsy. She wrote to him that she was very anxious to finish their
interrupted conversation, and begged him to come next day. He had scarcely read
this note, and frowned at its contents, when he heard below the ponderous tramp of
the servants, carrying something heavy.
Stepan Arkadyevitch went out to look. It was the rejuvenated Pyotr Oblonsky. He
was so drunk that he could not walk upstairs; but he told them to set him on his
legs when he saw Stepan Arkadyevitch, and clinging to him, walked with him into
his room and there began telling him how he had spent the evening, and fell asleep
doing so.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was in very low spirits, which happened rarely with him,
and for a long while he could not go to sleep. Everything he could recall to his mind,
everything was disgusting; but most disgusting of all, as if it were something shameful,
was the memory of the evening he had spent at Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s.
Next day he received from Alexey Alexandrovitch a final answer, refusing to grant
Anna’s divorce, and he understood that this decision was based on what the Frenchman
had said in his real or pretended trance.
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