"How wonderfully they make this soap," he said gazing at a piece

of soap he was handling, which Agafea Mihalovna had put ready for

the visitor but Oblonsky had not used. "Only look; why, it's a

work of art."

"Yes, everything's brought to such a pitch of perfection

nowadays," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, with a moist and blissful

yawn. "The theater, for instance, and the entertainments...

a--a--a!" he yawned. "The electric light everywhere...a--a--a!"

"Yes, the electric light," said Levin. "Yes. Oh, and where's

Vronsky now?" he asked suddenly, laying down the soap.

Advertisement..

"Vronsky?" said Stepan Arkadyevitch, checking his yawn; "he's in

Petersburg. He left soon after you did, and he's not once been

in Moscow since. And do you know, Kostya, I'll tell you the

truth," he went on, leaning his elbow on the table, and propping

on his hand his handsome ruddy face, in which his moist,

good-natured, sleepy eyes shone like stars. "It's your own

fault. You took fright at the sight of your rival. But, as I

told you at the time, I couldn't say which had the better

chance. Why didn't you fight it out? I told you at the time

that...." He yawned inwardly, without opening his mouth.

"Does he know, or doesn't he, that I did make an offer?" Levin

wondered, gazing at him. "Yes, there's something humbugging,

diplomatic in his face," and feeling he was blushing, he looked

Stepan Arkadyevitch straight in the face without speaking.

"If there was anything on her side at the time, it was nothing

but a superficial attraction," pursued Oblonsky. "His being such

a perfect aristocrat, don't you know, and his future position in

society, had an influence not with her, but with her mother."

Levin scowled. The humiliation of his rejection stung him to the

heart, as though it were a fresh wound he had only just received.

But he was at home, and the walls of home are a support.

"Stay, stay," he began, interrupting Oblonsky. "You talk of his

being an aristocrat. But allow me to ask what it consists in,

that aristocracy of Vronsky or of anybody else, beside which I

can be looked down upon? You consider Vronsky an aristocrat,

but I don't. A man whose father crawled up from nothing at all

by intrigue, and whose mother--God knows whom she wasn't mixed

up with.... No, excuse me, but I consider myself aristocratic,

and people like me, who can point back in the past to three or

four honorable generations of their family, of the highest degree

of breeding (talent and intellect, of course that's another

matter), and have never curried favor with anyone, never depended

on anyone for anything, like my father and my grandfather. And I

know many such. You think it mean of me to count the trees in my

forest, while you make Ryabinin a present of thirty thousand; but

you get rents from your lands and I don't know what, while I

don't and so I prize what's come to me from my ancestors or been

won by hard work.... We are aristocrats, and not those who can

only exist by favor of the powerful of this world, and who can be

bought for twopence halfpenny."




Most Popular