Page 1535 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

All the ordinary conditions of life, without which one
can form no conception of anything, had ceased to exist
for Levin. He lost all sense of time. Minutes—those
minutes when she sent for him and he held her moist

hand, that would squeeze his hand with extraordinary
violence and then push it away—seemed to him hours,
and hours seemed to him minutes. He was surprised when
Lizaveta Petrovna asked him to light a candle behind a
screen, and he found that it was five o’clock in the
afternoon. If he had been told it was only ten o’clock in
the morning he would not have been more surprised.
Where he was all this time, he knew as little as the time of
anything. He saw her swollen face, sometimes bewildered
and in agony, sometimes smiling and trying to reassure
him. He saw the old princess too, flushed and
overwrought, with her gray curls in disorder, forcing
herself to gulp down her tears, biting her lips; he saw
Dolly too and the doctor, smoking fat cigarettes, and
Lizaveta Petrovna with a firm, resolute, reassuring face,
and the old prince walking up and down the hall with a
frowning face. But why they came in and went out,
where they were, he did not know. The princess was with
the doctor in the bedroom, then in the study, where a
table set for dinner suddenly appeared; then she was not

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