Anna Karenina - Part 5

"I'll go away. I'll go down to the kitchen," she brought out.

"Nikolay Dmitrievitch will be delighted. He heard about it, and

knows your lady, and remembers her abroad."

Levin realized that she meant his wife, and did not know what

answer to make.

"Come along, come along to him!" he said.

But as soon as he moved, the door of his room opened and Kitty

peeped out. Levin crimsoned both from shame and anger with his

wife, who had put herself and him in such a difficult position;

but Marya Nikolaevna crimsoned still more. She positively shrank

together and flushed to the point of tears, and clutching the

ends of her apron in both hands, twisted them in her red fingers

without knowing what to say and what to do.

For the first instant Levin saw an expression of eager curiosity

in the eyes with which Kitty looked at this awful woman, so

incomprehensible to her; but it lasted only a single instant.

"Well! how is he?" she turned to her husband and then to her.

"But one can't go on talking in the passage like this!" Levin

said, looking angrily at a gentleman who walked jauntily at that

instant across the corridor, as though about his affairs.

"Well then, come in," said Kitty, turning to Marya Nikolaevna,

who had recovered herself, but noticing her husband's face of

dismay, "or go on; go, and then come for me," she said, and went

back into the room.

Levin went to his brother's room. He had not in the least

expected what he saw and felt in his brother's room. He had

expected to find him in the same state of self-deception which he

had heard was so frequent with the consumptive, and which had

struck him so much during his brother's visit in the autumn. He

had expected to find the physical signs of the approach of death

more marked--greater weakness, greater emaciation, but still

almost the same condition of things. He had expected himself to

feel the same distress at the loss of the brother he loved and

the same horror in face of death as he had felt then, only in a

greater degree. And he had prepared himself for this; but he

found something utterly different.

In a little dirty room with the painted panels of its walls

filthy with spittle, and conversation audible through the thin

partition from the next room, in a stifling atmosphere saturated

with impurities, on a bedstead moved away from the wall, there

lay covered with a quilt, a body. One arm of this body was above

the quilt, and the wrist, huge as a rake-handle, was attached,

inconceivably it seemed, to the thin, long bone of the arm smooth

from the beginning to the middle. The head lay sideways on the

pillow. Levin could see the scanty locks wet with sweat on the

temples and tense, transparent-looking forehead.