Anna Karenina - Part 7

_"Que la personne qui est arrivee la derniere, celle qui demande,

qu'elle sorte! Qu'elle sorte!"_ articulated the Frenchman,

without opening his eyes.

_"Vous m'excuserez, mais vous voyez.... Revenez vers dix heures,

encore mieux demain."_ _"Qu'elle sorte!"_ repeated the Frenchman impatiently.

_"C'est moi, n'est-ce pas?"_ And receiving an answer in the

affirmative, Stepan Arkadyevitch, forgetting the favor he had

meant to ask of Lidia Ivanovna, and forgetting his sister's

affairs, caring for nothing, but filled with the sole desire to

get away as soon as possible, went out on tiptoe and ran out into

the street as though from a plague-stricken house. For a long

while he chatted and joked with his cab-driver, trying to recover

his spirits.

At the French theater where he arrived for the last act, and

afterwards at the Tatar restaurant after his champagne, Stepan

Arkadyevitch felt a little refreshed in the atmosphere he was

used to. But still he felt quite unlike himself all that

evening.

On getting home to Pyotr Oblonsky's, where he was staying, Stepan

Arkadyevitch found a note from Betsy. She wrote to him that she

was very anxious to finish their interrupted conversation, and

begged him to come next day. He had scarcely read this note, and

frowned at its contents, when he heard below the ponderous tramp

of the servants, carrying something heavy.

Stepan Arkadyevitch went out to look. It was the rejuvenated

Pyotr Oblonsky. He was so drunk that he could not walk upstairs;

but he told them to set him on his legs when he saw Stepan

Arkadyevitch, and clinging to him, walked with him into his room

and there began telling him how he had spent the evening, and

fell asleep doing so.

Stepan Arkadyevitch was in very low spirits, which happened

rarely with him, and for a long while he could not go to sleep.

Everything he could recall to his mind, everything was

disgusting; but most disgusting of all, as if it were something

shameful, was the memory of the evening he had spent at Countess

Lidia Ivanovna's.

Next day he received from Alexey Alexandrovitch a final answer,

refusing to grant Anna's divorce, and he understood that this

decision was based on what the Frenchman had said in his real or

pretended trance.