Page 288 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

overlook it; but you perceive that my wife—my wife’s a
respectable woman —his been exposed to the persecution,
and insults, and effrontery of young upstarts, scoundrels....’
And you must understand, the young upstarts are present

all the while, and I have to keep the peace between them.
Again I call out all my diplomacy, and again as soon as the
thing was about at an end, our friend the government
clerk gets hot and red, and his sausages stand on end with
wrath, and once more I launch out into diplomatic wiles.’
‘Ah, he must tell you this story!’ said Betsy, laughing,
to a lady to came into her box. ‘He has been making me
laugh so.’
‘Well, bonne chance!’ she added, giving Vronsky one
finger of the hand in which she held her fan, and with a
shrug of her shoulders she twitched down the bodice of
her gown that had worked up, so as to be duly naked as
she moved forward towards the footlights into the light of
the gas, and the sight of all eyes.
Vronsky drove to the French theater, where he really
had to see the colonel of his regiment, who never missed a
single performance there. He wanted to see him, to report
on the result of his mediation, which had occupied and
amused him for the last three days. Petritsky, whom he
liked, was implicated in the affair, and the other culprit

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