Page 695 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

Chapter 23

On Monday there was the usual sitting of the
Commission of the 2nd of June. Alexey Alexandrovitch
walked into the hall where the sitting was held, greeted
the members and the president, as usual, and sat down in
his place, putting his hand on the papers laid ready before
him. Among these papers lay the necessary evidence and a
rough outline of the speech he intended to make. But he
did not really need these documents. He remembered
every point, and did not think it necessary to go over in
his memory what he would say. He knew that when the
time came, and when he saw his enemy facing him, and
studiously endeavoring to assume an expression of
indifference, his speech would flow of itself better than he
could prepare it now. He felt that the import of his speech
was of such magnitude that every word of it would have
weight. Meantime, as he listened to the usual report, he
had the most innocent and inoffensive air. No one,
looking at his white hands, with their swollen veins and
long fingers, so softly stroking the edges of the white paper
that lay before him, and at the air of weariness with which
his head drooped on one side, would have suspected that

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