When Oblonsky asked Levin what had brought him to town, Levin

blushed, and was furious with himself for blushing, because he

could not answer, "I have come to make your sister-in-law an

offer," though that was precisely what he had come for.

The families of the Levins and the Shtcherbatskys were old, noble

Moscow families, and had always been on intimate and friendly

terms. This intimacy had grown still closer during Levin's

student days. He had both prepared for the university with the

young Prince Shtcherbatsky, the brother of Kitty and Dolly, and

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had entered at the same time with him. In those days Levin used

often to be in the Shtcherbatskys' house, and he was in love with

the Shtcherbatsky household. Strange as it may appear, it was

with the household, the family, that Konstantin Levin was in

love, especially with the feminine half of the household. Levin

did not remember his own mother, and his only sister was older

than he was, so that it was in the Shtcherbatskys' house that he

saw for the first time that inner life of an old, noble,

cultivated, and honorable family of which he had been deprived by

the death of his father and mother. All the members of that

family, especially the feminine half, were pictured by him, as

it were, wrapped about with a mysterious poetical veil, and he

not only perceived no defects whatever in them, but under the

poetical veil that shrouded them he assumed the existence of the

loftiest sentiments and every possible perfection. Why it was

the three young ladies had one day to speak French, and the next

English; why it was that at certain hours they played by turns on

the piano, the sounds of which were audible in their brother's

room above, where the students used to work; why they were

visited by those professors of French literature, of music, of

drawing, of dancing; why at certain hours all the three young

ladies, with Mademoiselle Linon, drove in the coach to the

Tversky boulevard, dressed in their satin cloaks, Dolly in a long

one, Natalia in a half-long one, and Kitty in one so short that

her shapely legs in tightly-drawn red stockings were visible to

all beholders; why it was they had to walk about the Tversky

boulevard escorted by a footman with a gold cockade in his

hat--all this and much more that was done in their mysterious

world he did not understand, but he was sure that everything that

was done there was very good, and he was in love precisely with

the mystery of the proceedings.




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