Page 190 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

his brother, and indicating the gentleman in the jerkin:
‘This is Mr. Kritsky, my friend from Kiev, a very
remarkable man. He’s persecuted by the police, of course,
because he’s not a scoundrel.’

And he looked round in the way he always did at
everyone in the room. Seeing that the woman standing in
the doorway was moving to go, he shouted to her, ‘Wait a
minute, I said.’ And with the inability to express himself,
the incoherence that Konstantin knew so well, he began,
with another look round at everyone, to tell his brother
Kritsky’s story: how he had been expelled from the
university for starting a benefit society for the poor
students and Sunday schools; and how he had afterwards
been a teacher in a peasant school, and how he had been
driven out of that too, and had afterwards been
condemned for something.
‘You’re of the Kiev university?’ said Konstantin Levin
to Kritsky, to break the awkward silence that followed.
‘Yes, I was of Kiev,’ Kritsky replied angrily, his face
darkening.
‘And this woman,’ Nikolay Levin interrupted him,
pointing to her, ‘is the partner of my life, Marya
Nikolaevna. I took her out of a bad house,’ and he jerked
his neck saying this; ‘but I love her and respect her, and

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