Page 1429 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

movement towards the doors. Snetkov came in, and the
nobles thronged round him, congratulating him.
‘Well, now is it over?’ Levin asked Sergey Ivanovitch.
‘It’s only just beginning,’ Sviazhsky said, replying for

Sergey Ivanovitch with a smile. ‘Some other candidate
may receive more votes than the marshal.’
Levin had quite forgotten about that. Now he could
only remember that there was some sort of trickery in it,
but he was too bored to think what it was exactly. He felt
depressed, and longed to get out of the crowd.
As no one was paying any attention to him, and no one
apparently needed him, he quietly slipped away into the
little room where the refreshments were, and again had a
great sense of comfort when he saw the waiters. The little
old waiter pressed him to have something, and Levin
agreed. After eating a cutlet with beans and talking to the
waiters of their former masters, Levin, not wishing to go
back to the hall, where it was all so distasteful to him,
proceeded to walk through the galleries. The galleries
were full of fashionably dressed ladies, leaning over the
balustrade and trying not to lose a single word of what was
being said below. With the ladies were sitting and standing
smart lawyers, high school teachers in spectacles, and
officers. Everywhere they were talking of the election, and

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