Page 379 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

consists in, that aristocracy of Vronsky or of anybody else,
beside which I can be looked down upon? You consider
Vronsky an aristocrat, but I don’t. A man whose father
crawled up from nothing at all by intrigue, and whose

mother—God knows whom she wasn’t mixed up with....
No, excuse me, but I consider myself aristocratic, and
people like me, who can point back in the past to three or
four honorable generations of their family, of the highest
degree of breeding (talent and intellect, of course that’s
another matter), and have never curried favor with
anyone, never depended on anyone for anything, like my
father and my grandfather. And I know many such. You
think it mean of me to count the trees in my forest, while
you may Ryabinin a present of thirty thousand; but you
get rents from your lands and I don’t know what, while I
don’t and so I prize what’s come to me from my ancestors
or been won by hard work.... We are aristocrats, and not
those who can only exist by favor of the powerful of this
world, and who can be bought for twopence halfpenny.’
‘Well, but whom are you attacking? I agree with you,’
said Stepan Arkadyevitch, sincerely and genially; though
he was aware that in the class of those who could be
bought for twopence halfpenny Levin was reckoning him
too. Levin’s warmth gave him genuine pleasure. ‘Whom

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