Page 1121 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

room, bowing, for a member of the Imperial family to
pass.
Thus people talked incessantly of Alexey
Alexandrovitch, finding fault with him and laughing at

him, while he, blocking up the way of the member of the
Imperial Council he had captured, was explaining to him
point by point his new financial project, never
interrupting his discourse for an instant for fear he should
escape.
Almost at the same time that his wife left Alexey
Alexandrovitch there had come to him that bitterest
moment in the life of an official—the moment when his
upward career comes to a full stop. This full stop had
arrived and everyone perceived it, but Alexey
Alexandrovitch himself was not yet aware that his career
was over. Whether it was due to his feud with Stremov,
or his misfortune with his wife, or simply that Alexey
Alexandrovitch had reached his destined limits, it had
become evident to everyone in the course of that year that
his career was at an end. He still filled a position of
consequence, he sat on many commissions and
committees, but he was a man whose day was over, and
from whom nothing was expected. Whatever he said,
whatever he proposed, was heard as though it were

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