Page 972 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

Chapter 3

A crowd of people, principally women, was thronging
round the church lighted up for the wedding. Those who
had not succeeded in getting into the main entrance were
crowding about the windows, pushing, wrangling, and
peeping through the gratings.
More than twenty carriages had already been drawn up
in ranks along the street by the police. A police officer,
regardless of the frost, stood at the entrance, gorgeous in
his uniform. More carriages were continually driving up,
and ladies wearing flowers and carrying their trains, and
men taking off their helmets or black hats kept walking
into the church. Iside the church both lusters were already
lighted, and all the candles before the holy pictures. The
gilt on the red ground of the holy picture-stand, and the
gilt relief on the pictures, and the silver of the lusters and
candlesticks, and the stones of the floor, and the rugs, and
the banners above in the choir, and the steps of the altar,
and the old blackened books, and the cassocks and
surplices—all were flooded with light. On the right side of
the warm church, in the crowd of frock coats and white
ties, uniforms and broadcloth, velvet, satin, hair and

971 of 1759