Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy (books for 20 year olds txt) đ
- Author: Leo Tolstoy
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âOh, why so?â Levin queried, panic-stricken.
âOh, nothing,â responded Oblonsky. âWeâll talk it over. But whatâs brought you up to town?â
âOh, weâll talk about that, too, later on,â said Levin, reddening again up to his ears.
âAll right. I see,â said Stepan Arkadyevitch. âI should ask you to come to us, you know, but my wifeâs not quite the thing. But I tell you what; if you want to see them, theyâre sure now to be at the Zoological Gardens from four to five. Kitty skates. You drive along there, and Iâll come and fetch you, and weâll go and dine somewhere together.â
âCapital. So goodbye till then.â
âNow mind, youâll forget, I know you, or rush off home to the country!â Stepan Arkadyevitch called out laughing.
âNo, truly!â
And Levin went out of the room, only when he was in the doorway remembering that he had forgotten to take leave of Oblonskyâs colleagues.
âThat gentleman must be a man of great energy,â said Grinevitch, when Levin had gone away.
âYes, my dear boy,â said Stepan Arkadyevitch, nodding his head, âheâs a lucky fellow! Over six thousand acres in the Karazinsky district; everything before him; and what youth and vigor! Not like some of us.â
âYou have a great deal to complain of, havenât you, Stepan Arkadyevitch?â
âAh, yes, Iâm in a poor way, a bad way,â said Stepan Arkadyevitch with a heavy sigh.
VIWhen Oblonsky asked Levin what had brought him to town, Levin blushed, and was furious with himself for blushing, because he could not answer, âI have come to make your sister-in-law an offer,â though that was precisely what he had come for.
The families of the Levins and the Shtcherbatskys were old, noble Moscow families, and had always been on intimate and friendly terms. This intimacy had grown still closer during Levinâs student days. He had both prepared for the university with the young Prince Shtcherbatsky, the brother of Kitty and Dolly, and had entered at the same time with him. In those days Levin used often to be in the Shtcherbatskysâ house, and he was in love with the Shtcherbatsky household. Strange as it may appear, it was with the household, the family, that Konstantin Levin was in love, especially with the feminine half of the household. Levin did not remember his own mother, and his only sister was older than he was, so that it was in the Shtcherbatskysâ house that he saw for the first time that inner life of an old, noble, cultivated, and honorable family of which he had been deprived by the death of his father and mother. All the members of that family, especially the feminine half, were pictured by him, as it were, wrapped about with a mysterious poetical veil, and he not only perceived no defects whatever in them, but under the poetical veil that shrouded them he assumed the existence of the loftiest sentiments and every possible perfection. Why it was the three young ladies had one day to speak French, and the next English; why it was that at certain hours they played by turns on the piano, the sounds of which were audible in their brotherâs room above, where the students used to work; why they were visited by those professors of French literature, of music, of drawing, of dancing; why at certain hours all the three young ladies, with Mademoiselle Linon, drove in the coach to the Tversky boulevard, dressed in their satin cloaks, Dolly in a long one, Natalia in a half-long one, and Kitty in one so short that her shapely legs in tightly-drawn red stockings were visible to all beholders; why it was they had to walk about the Tversky boulevard escorted by a footman with a gold cockade in his hatâ âall this and much more that was done in their mysterious world he did not understand, but he was sure that everything that was done there was very good, and he was in love precisely with the mystery of the proceedings.
In his student days he had all but been in love with the eldest, Dolly, but she was soon married to Oblonsky. Then he began being in love with the second. He felt, as it were, that he had to be in love with one of the sisters, only he could not quite make out which. But Natalia, too, had hardly made her appearance in the world when she married the diplomat Lvov. Kitty was still a child when Levin left the university. Young Shtcherbatsky went into the navy, was drowned in the Baltic, and Levinâs relations with the Shtcherbatskys, in spite of his friendship with Oblonsky, became less intimate. But when early in the winter of this year Levin came to Moscow, after a year in the country, and saw the Shtcherbatskys, he realized which of the three sisters he was indeed destined to love.
One would have thought that nothing could be simpler than for him, a man of good family, rather rich than poor, and thirty-two years old, to make the young Princess Shtcherbatskaya an offer of marriage; in all likelihood he would at once have been looked upon as a good match. But Levin was in love, and so it seemed to him that Kitty was so perfect in every respect that she was a creature far above everything earthly; and that he was a creature so low and so earthly that it could not even be conceived that other people and she herself could regard him as worthy of her.
After spending two months in Moscow in a state of enchantment, seeing Kitty almost every day in society, into which he went so as to meet her, he
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