Anna Karenina - Part 5

Anna and Vronsky had long been exchanging glances, regretting

their friend's flow of cleverness. At last Vronsky, without

waiting for the artist, walked away to another small picture.

"Oh, how exquisite! What a lovely thing! A gem! How

exquisite!" they cried with one voice.

"What is it they're so pleased with?" thought Mihailov. He had

positively forgotten that picture he had painted three years ago.

He had forgotten all the agonies and the ecstasies he had lived

through with that picture when for several months it had been the

one thought haunting him day and night. He had forgotten, as he

always forgot, the pictures he had finished. He did not even

like to look at it, and had only brought it out because he was

expecting an Englishman who wanted to buy it.

"Oh, that's only an old study," he said.

"How fine!" said Golenishtchev, he too, with unmistakable

sincerity, falling under the spell of the picture.

Two boys were angling in the shade of a willow-tree. The elder

had just dropped in the hook, and was carefully pulling the float

from behind a bush, entirely absorbed in what he was doing. The

other, a little younger, was lying in the grass leaning on his

elbows, with his tangled, flaxen head in his hands, staring at

the water with his dreamy blue eyes. What was he thinking of?

The enthusiasm over this picture stirred some of the old feeling

for it in Mihailov, but he feared and disliked this waste of

feeling for things past, and so, even though this praise was

grateful to him, he tried to draw his visitors away to a third

picture.

But Vronsky asked whether the picture was for sale. To Mihailov

at that moment, excited by visitors, it was extremely distasteful

to speak of money matters.

"It is put up there to be sold," he answered, scowling gloomily.

When the visitors had gone, Mihailov sat down opposite the

picture of Pilate and Christ, and in his mind went over what had

been said, and what, though not said, had been implied by those

visitors. And, strange to say, what had had such weight with

him, while they were there and while he mentally put himself at

their point of view, suddenly lost all importance for him. He

began to look at his picture with all his own full artist vision,

and was soon in that mood of conviction of the perfectibility,

and so of the significance, of his picture--a conviction

essential to the most intense fervor, excluding all other

interests--in which alone he could work.