Page 1573 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

‘Oh, lucky fellow!’ said he. ‘My debts mount up to a
million and a half, and I’ve nothing, and still I can live, as
you see!’
And Stepan Arkadyevitch saw the correctness of this

view not in words only but in actual fact. Zhivahov owed
three hundred thousand, and hadn’t a farthing to bless
himself with, and he lived, and in style too! Count
Krivtsov was considered a hopeless case by everyone, and
yet he kept two mistresses. Petrovsky had run through five
millions, and still lived in just the same style, and was even
a manager in the financial department with a salary of
twenty thousand. But besides this, Petersburg had
physically an agreeable effect on Stepan Arkadyevitch. It
made him younger. In Moscow he sometimes found a
gray hair in his head, dropped asleep after dinner,
stretched, walked slowly upstairs, breathing heavily, was
bored by the society of young women, and did not dance
at balls. In Petersburg he always felt ten years younger.
His experience in Petersburg was exactly what had
been described to him on the previous day by Prince
Pyotr Oblonsky, a man of sixty, who had just come back
from abroad:
‘We don’t know the way to live here,’ said Pyotr
Oblonsky. ‘I spent the summer in Baden, and you

1572 of 1759