Anna Karenina - Part 7

The porter asked him, as he gave him his coat, "Where is your

honor staying?" and immediately wrote down his address in a big

handsomely bound book.

"Of course I don't care, but still I feel ashamed and awfully

stupid," thought Levin, consoling himself with the reflection

that everyone does it. He drove to the public meeting, where he

was to find his sister-in-law, so as to drive home with her.

At the public meeting of the committee there were a great many

people, and almost all the highest society. Levin was in time

for the report which, as everyone said, was very interesting.

When the reading of the report was over, people moved about, and

Levin met Sviazhsky, who invited him very pressingly to come that

evening to a meeting of the Society of Agriculture, where a

celebrated lecture was to be delivered, and Stepan Arkadyevitch,

who had only just come from the races, and many other

acquaintances; and Levin heard and uttered various criticisms on

the meeting, on the new fantasia, and on a public trial. But,

probably from the mental fatigue he was beginning to feel, he

made a blunder in speaking of the trial, and this blunder he

recalled several times with vexation. Speaking of the sentence

upon a foreigner who had been condemned in Russia, and of how

unfair it would be to punish him by exile abroad, Levin repeated

what he had heard the day before in conversation from an

acquaintance.

"I think sending him abroad is much the same as punishing a carp

by putting it into the water," said Levin. Then he recollected

that this idea, which he had heard from an acquaintance and

uttered as his own, came from a fable of Krilov's, and that the

acquaintance had picked it up from a newspaper article.

After driving home with his sister-in-law, and finding Kitty in

good spirits and quite well, Levin drove to the club.