Page 252 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

Vronsky heard with pleasure this light-hearted prattle
of a pretty woman, agreed with her, gave her half-joking
counsel, and altogether dropped at once into the tone
habitual to him in talking to such women. In his

Petersburg world all people were divided into utterly
opposed classes. One, the lower class, vulgar, stupid, and,
above all, ridiculous people, who believe that one husband
ought to live with the one wife whom he has lawfully
married; that a girl should be innocent, a woman modest,
and a man manly, self-controlled, and strong; that one
ought to bring up one’s children, earn one’s bread, and
pay one’s debts; and various similar absurdities. This was
the class of old-fashioned and ridiculous people. But there
was another class of people, the real people. To this class
they all belonged, and in it the great thing was to be
elegant, generous, plucky, gay, to abandon oneself without
a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything else.
For the first moment only, Vronsky was startled after
the impression of a quite different world that he had
brought with him from Moscow. But immediately as
though slipping his feet into old slippers, he dropped back
into the light-hearted, pleasant world he had always lived
in.

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