Anna Karenina - Part 7

And Levin saw a new trait in this woman, who attracted him so

extraordinarily. Besides wit, grace, and beauty, she had truth.

She had no wish to hide from him all the bitterness of her

position. As she said that she sighed, and her face suddenly

taking a hard expression, looked as it were turned to stone.

With that expression on her face she was more beautiful than

ever; but the expression was new; it was utterly unlike that

expression, radiant with happiness and creating happiness, which

had been caught by the painter in her portrait. Levin looked

more than once at the portrait and at her figure, as taking her

brother's arm she walked with him to the high doors and he felt

for her a tenderness and pity at which he wondered himself.

She asked Levin and Vorkuev to go into the drawing room, while

she stayed behind to say a few words to her brother. "About her

divorce, about Vronsky, and what he's doing at the club, about

me?" wondered Levin. And he was so keenly interested by the

question of what she was saying to Stepan Arkadyevitch, that he

scarcely heard what Vorkuev was telling him of the qualities of

the story for children Anna Arkadyevna had written.

At tea the same pleasant sort of talk, full of interesting

matter, continued. There was not a single instant when a subject

for conversation was to seek; on the contrary, it was felt that

one had hardly time to say what one had to say, and eagerly held

back to hear what the others were saying. And all that was said,

not only by her, but by Vorkuev and Stepan Arkadyevitch--all, so

it seemed to Levin, gained peculiar significance from her

appreciation and her criticism. While he followed this

interesting conversation, Levin was all the time admiring her--

her beauty, her intelligence, her culture, and at the same time

her directness and genuine depth of feeling. He listened and

talked, and all the while he was thinking of her inner life,

trying to divine her feelings. And though he had judged her so

severely hitherto, now by some strange chain of reasoning he was

justifying her and was also sorry for her, and afraid that

Vronsky did not fully understand her. At eleven o'clock, when

Stepan Arkadyevitch got up to go (Vorkuev had left earlier), it

seemed to Levin that he had only just come. Regretfully Levin

too rose.

"Good-bye," she said, holding his hand and glancing into his face

with a winning look. "I am very glad _que la glace est rompue._"