Page 39 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

said Stepan Arkadyevitch, and not content with shaking
hands, he kissed his friend. ‘Have you been here long?’
‘I have just come, and very much wanted to see you,’
said Levin, looking shyly and at the same time angry and

uneasily around.
‘Well, let’s go into my room,’ said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, who knew his friend’s sensitive and irritable
shyness, and, taking his arm, he drew him along, as though
guiding him through dangers.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was on familiar terms with almost
all his acquaintances, and called almost all of them by their
Christian names: old men of sixty, boys of twenty, actors,
ministers, merchants, and adjutant-generals, so that many
of his intimate chums were to be found at the extreme
ends of the social ladder, and would have been very much
surprised to learn that they had, through the medium of
Oblonsky, something in common. He was the familiar
friend of everyone with whom he took a glass of
champagne, and he took a glass of champagne with
everyone, and when in consequence he met any of his
disreputable chums, as he used in joke to call many of his
friends, in the presence of his subordinates, he well knew
how, with his characteristic tact, to diminish the
disagreeable impression made on them. Levin was not a

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