Page 1188 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

the moving opera glass, Vronsky suddenly caught sight of
Anna’s head, proud, strikingly beautiful, and smiling in the
frame of lace. She was in the fifth box, twenty paces from
him. She was sitting in front, and slightly turning, was

saying something to Yashvin. The setting of her head on
her handsome, broad shoulders, and the restrained
excitement and brilliance of her eyes and her whole face
reminded him of her just as he had seen her at the ball in
Moscow. But he felt utterly different towards her beauty
now. In his feeling for her now there was no element of
mystery, and so her beauty, though it attracted him even
more intensely than before, gave him now a sense of
injury. She was not looking in his direction, but Vronsky
felt that she had seen him already.
When Vronsky turned the opera glass again in that
direction, he noticed that Princess Varvara was particularly
red, and kept laughing unnaturally and looking round at
the next box. Anna, folding her fan and tapping it on the
red velvet, was gazing away and did not see, and obviously
did not wish to see, what was taking place in the next box.
Yashvin’s face wore the expression which was common
when he was losing at cards. Scowling, he sucked the left
end of his mustache further and further into his mouth,
and cast sidelong glances at the next box.

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