Page 1509 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

expression was new; it was utterly unlike that expression,
radiant with happiness and creating happiness, which had
been caught by the painter in her portrait. Levin looked
more than once at the portrait and at her figure, as taking

her brother’s arm she walked with him to the high doors
and he felt for her a tenderness and pity at which he
wondered himself.
She asked Levin and Vorkuev to go into the drawing
room, while she stayed behind to say a few words to her
brother. ‘About her divorce, about Vronsky, and what
he’s doing at the club, about me?’ wondered Levin. And
he was so keenly interested by the question of what she
was saying to Stepan Arkadyevitch, that he scarcely heard
what Vorkuev was telling him of the qualities of the story
for children Anna Arkadyevna had written.
At tea the same pleasant sort of talk, full of interesting
matter, continued. There was not a single instant when a
subject for conversation was to seek; on the contrary, it
was felt that one had hardly time to say what one had to
say, and eagerly held back to hear what the others were
saying. And all that was said, not only by her, but by
Vorkuev and Stepan Arkadyevitch—all, so it seemed to
Levin, gained peculiar significance from her appreciation
and her criticism. While he followed this interesting

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