Page 566 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

Chapter 7

Stephan Arkadyevitch had gone to Petersburg to
perform the most natural and essential official duty—so
familiar to everyone in the government service, though
incomprehensible to outsiders— that duty, but for which
one could hardly be in government service, of reminding
the ministry of his existence—and having, for the due
performance of this rite, taken all the available cash from
home, was gaily and agreeably spending his days at the
races and in the summer villas. Meanwhile Dolly and the
children had moved into the country, to cut down
expenses as much as possible. She had gone to Ergushovo,
the estate that had been her dowry, and the one where in
spring the forest had been sold. It was nearly forty miles
from Levin’s Pokrovskoe. The big, old house at
Ergushovo had been pulled down long ago, and the old
prince had had the lodge done up and built on to. Twenty
years before, when Dolly was a child, the lodge had been
roomy and comfortable, though, like all lodges, it stood
sideways to the entrance avenue, and faced the south. But
by now this lodge was old and dilapidated. When Stepan
Arkadyevitch had gone down in the spring to sell the

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