Page 157 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

youth: before Kitty knew where she was she found herself
not merely under Anna’s sway, but in love with her, as
young girls do fall in love with older and married women.
Anna was not like a fashionable lady, nor the mother of a

boy of eight years old. In the elasticity of her movements,
the freshness and the unflagging eagerness which persisted
in her face, and broke out in her smile and her glance, she
would rather have passed for a girl of twenty, had it not
been for a serious and at times mournful look in her eyes,
which struck and attracted Kitty. Kitty felt that Anna was
perfectly simple and was concealing nothing, but that she
had another higher world of interests inaccessible to her,
complex and poetic.
After dinner, when Dolly went away to her own room,
Anna rose quickly and went up to her brother, who was
just lighting a cigar.
‘Stiva,’ she said to him, winking gaily, crossing him and
glancing towards the door, ‘go, and God help you.’
He threw down the cigar, understanding her, and
departed through the doorway.
When Stepan Arkadyevitch had disappeared, she went
back to the sofa where she had been sitting, surrounded by
the children. Either because the children saw that their
mother was fond of this aunt, or that they felt a special

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