Page 720 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

appetite, excellent spirits, and that keen, intellectual mood
which with him always accompanied violent physical
exertion. And while out shooting, when he seemed to be
thinking of nothing at all, suddenly the old man and his

family kept coming back to his mind, and the impression
of them seemed to claim not merely his attention, but the
solution of some question connected with them.
In the evening at tea, two landowners who had come
about some business connected with a wardship were of
the party, and the interesting conversation Levin had been
looking forward to sprang up.
Levin was sitting beside his hostess at the tea table, and
was obliged to keep up a conversation with her and her
sister, who was sitting opposite him. Madame Sviazhskaya
was a round-faced, fair-haired, rather short woman, all
smiles and dimples. Levin tried through her to get a
solution of the weighty enigma her husband presented to
his mind; but he had not complete freedom of ideas,
because he was in an agony of embarrassment. This agony
of embarrassment was due to the fact that the sister-in-law
was sitting opposite to him, in a dress, specially put on, as
he fancied, for his benefit, cut particularly open, in the
shape of a trapeze, on her white bosom. This quadrangular
opening, in spite of the bosom’s being very white, or just

719 of 1759