Next day at ten o'clock Levin, who had already gone his rounds,

knocked at the room where Vassenka had been put for the night.

"_Entrez!_" Veslovsky called to him. "Excuse me, I've only just

finished my ablutions," he said, smiling, standing before him in

his underclothes only.

"Don't mind me, please." Levin sat down in the window. "Have

you slept well?"

"Like the dead. What sort of day is it for shooting?"

"What will you take, tea or coffee?"

"Neither. I'll wait till lunch. I'm really ashamed. I suppose

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the ladies are down? A walk now would be capital. You show me

your horses."

After walking about the garden, visiting the stable, and even

doing some gymnastic exercises together on the parallel bars,

Levin returned to the house with his guest, and went with him

into the drawing room.

"We had splendid shooting, and so many delightful experiences!"

said Veslovsky, going up to Kitty, who was sitting at the

samovar. "What a pity ladies are cut off from these delights!"

"Well, I suppose he must say something to the lady of the house,"

Levin said to himself. Again he fancied something in the smile,

in the all-conquering air with which their guest addressed

Kitty....

The princess, sitting on the other side of the table with Marya

Vlasyevna and Stepan Arkadyevitch, called Levin to her side, and

began to talk to him about moving to Moscow for Kitty's

confinement, and getting ready rooms for them. Just as Levin

had disliked all the trivial preparations for his wedding, as

derogatory to the grandeur of the event, now he felt still more

offensive the preparations for the approaching birth, the date of

which they reckoned, it seemed, on their fingers. He tried to

turn a deaf ear to these discussions of the best patterns of long

clothes for the coming baby; tried to turn away and avoid seeing

the mysterious, endless strips of knitting, the triangles of

linen, and so on, to which Dolly attached special importance.

The birth of a son (he was certain it would be a son) which was

promised him, but which he still could not believe in--so

marvelous it seemed--presented itself to his mind, on one hand,

as a happiness so immense, and therefore so incredible; on the

other, as an event so mysterious, that this assumption of a

definite knowledge of what would be, and consequent preparation

for it, as for something ordinary that did happen to people,

jarred on him as confusing and humiliating.

But the princess did not understand his feelings, and put down

his reluctance to think and talk about it to carelessness and

indifference, and so she gave him no peace. She had commissioned

Stepan Arkadyevitch to look at a flat, and now she called Levin

up.




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