"What's this?" Levin thought, when a footman ran out of the house
and stopped the trap. It was the mechanician, whom Levin had
totally forgotten. The mechanician, bowing low, said something
to Veslovsky, then clambered into the trap, and they drove off
together.
Stepan Arkadyevitch and the princess were much upset by Levin's
action. And he himself felt not only in the highest degree
_ridicule_, but also utterly guilty and disgraced. But remembering
what sufferings he and his wife had been through, when he asked
himself how he should act another time, he answered that he
should do just the same again.
In spite of all this, towards the end of that day, everyone
except the princess, who could not pardon Levin's action, became
extraordinarily lively and good humored, like children after a
punishment or grown-up people after a dreary, ceremonious
reception, so that by the evening Vassenka's dismissal was spoken
of, in the absence of the princess, as though it were some remote
event. And Dolly, who had inherited her father's gift of
humorous storytelling, made Varenka helpless with laughter as she
related for the third and fourth time, always with fresh humorous
additions, how she had only just put on her new shoes for the
benefit of the visitor, and on going into the drawing room, heard
suddenly the rumble of the trap. And who should be in the trap
but Vassenka himself, with his Scotch cap, and his songs and his
gaiters, and all, sitting in the hay.
"If only you'd ordered out the carriage! But no! and then I
hear: 'Stop!' Oh, I thought they've relented. I look out, and
behold a fat German being sat down by him and driving away....
And my new shoes all for nothing!..."