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<h1>ANNA KARENINA</h1>
<h2>by Leo Tolstoy</h2>
<h4>Translated by Constance Garnett</h4>
<hr />
<h2>BOOK SEVEN</h2>
<h3>Chapter 1</h3>
<p>The Levins had been three months in Moscow. The date had long passed on which,
according to the most trustworthy calculations of people learned in such
matters, Kitty should have been confined. But she was still about, and there
was nothing to show that her time was any nearer than two months ago. The
doctor, the monthly nurse, and Dolly and her mother, and most of all Levin, who
could not think of the approaching event without terror, began to be impatient
and uneasy. Kitty was the only person who felt perfectly calm and happy.</p>
<p>She was distinctly conscious now of the birth of a new feeling of love for the
future child, for her to some extent actually existing already, and she brooded
blissfully over this feeling. He was not by now altogether a part of herself,
but sometimes lived his own life independently of her. Often this separate
being gave her pain, but at the same time she wanted to laugh with a strange
new joy.</p>
<p>All the people she loved were with her, and all were so good to her, so
attentively caring for her, so entirely pleasant was everything presented to
her, that if she had not known and felt that it must all soon be over, she
could not have wished for a better and pleasanter life. The only thing that
spoiled the charm of this manner of life was that her husband was not here as
she loved him to be, and as he was in the country.</p>
<p>She liked his serene, friendly, and hospitable manner in the country. In the
town he seemed continually uneasy and on his guard, as though he were afraid
someone would be rude to him, and still more to her. At home in the country,
knowing himself distinctly to be in his right place, he was never in haste to
be off elsewhere. He was never unoccupied. Here in town he was in a continual
hurry, as though afraid of missing something, and yet he had nothing to do. And
she felt sorry for him. To others, she knew, he did not appear an object of
pity. On the contrary, when Kitty looked at him in society, as one sometimes
looks at those one loves, trying to see him as if he were a stranger, so as to
catch the impression he must make on others, she saw with a panic even of
jealous fear that he was far indeed from being a pitiable figure, that he was
very attractive with his fine breeding, his rather old-fashioned, reserved
courtesy with women, his powerful figure, and striking, as she thought, and
expressive face. But she saw him not from without, but from within; she saw
that here he was not himself; that was the only way she could define his
condition to herself. Sometimes she inwardly reproached him for his inability
to live in the town; sometimes she recognized that it was really hard for him
to order his life here so that he could be satisfied with it.</p>
<p>What had he to do, indeed? He did not care for cards; he did not go to a club.
Spending the time with jovial gentlemen of Oblonsky’s type—she knew
now what that meant ... it meant drinking and going somewhere after drinking.
She could not think without horror of where men went on such occasions. Was he
to go into society? But she knew he could only find satisfaction in that if he
took pleasure in the society of young women, and that she could not wish for.
Should he stay at home with her, her mother and her sisters? But much as she
liked and enjoyed their conversations forever on the same
subjects—“Aline-Nadine,” as the old prince called the
sisters’ talks—she knew it must bore him. What was there left for
him to do? To go on writing at his book he had indeed attempted, and at first
he used to go to the library and make extracts and look up references for his
book. But, as he told her, the more he did nothing, the less time he had to do
anything. And besides, he complained that he had talked too much about his book
here, and that consequently all his ideas about it were muddled and had lost
their interest for him.</p>
<p>One advantage in this town life was that quarrels hardly ever happened between
them here in town. Whether it was that their conditions were different, or that
they had both become more careful and sensible in that respect, they had no
quarrels in Moscow from jealousy, which they had so dreaded when they moved
from the country.</p>
<p>One event, an event of great importance to both from that point of view, did
indeed happen—that was Kitty’s meeting with Vronsky.</p>
<p>The old Princess Marya Borissovna, Kitty’s godmother, who had always been
very fond of her, had insisted on seeing her. Kitty, though she did not go into
society at all on account of her condition, went with her father to see the
venerable old lady, and there met Vronsky.</p>
<p>The only thing Kitty could reproach herself for at this meeting was that at the
instant when she recognized in his civilian dress the features once so familiar
to her, her breath failed her, the blood rushed to her heart, and a vivid
blush—she felt it—overspread her face. But this lasted only a few
seconds. Before her father, who purposely began talking in a loud voice to
Vronsky, had finished, she was perfectly ready to look at Vronsky, to speak to
him, if necessary, exactly as she spoke to Princess Marya Borissovna, and more
than that, to do so in such a way that everything to the faintest intonation
and smile would have been approved by her husband, whose unseen presence she
seemed to feel about her at that instant.</p>
<p>She said a few words to him, even smiled serenely at his joke about the
elections, which he called “our parliament.” (She had to smile to
show she saw the joke.) But she turned away immediately to Princess Marya
Borissovna, and did not once glance at him till he got up to go; then she
looked at him, but evidently only because it would be uncivil not to look at a
man when he is saying good-bye.</p>
<p>She was grateful to her father for saying nothing to her about their meeting
Vronsky, but she saw by his special warmth to her after the visit during their
usual walk that he was pleased with her. She was pleased with herself. She had
not expected she would have had the power, while keeping somewhere in the
bottom of her heart all the memories of her old feeling for Vronsky, not only
to seem but to be perfectly indifferent and composed with him.</p>
<p>Levin flushed a great deal more than she when she told him she had met Vronsky
at Princess Marya Borissovna’s. It was very hard for her to tell him
this, but still harder to go on speaking of the details of the meeting, as he
did not question her, but simply gazed at her with a frown.</p>
<p>“I am very sorry you weren’t there,” she said. “Not
that you weren’t in the room ... I couldn’t have been so natural in
your presence ... I am blushing now much more, much, much more,” she
said, blushing till the tears came into her eyes. “But that you
couldn’t see through a crack.”</p>
<p>The truthful eyes told Levin that she was satisfied with herself, and in spite
of her blushing he was quickly reassured and began questioning her, which was
all she wanted. When he had heard everything, even to the detail that for the
first second she could not help flushing, but that afterwards she was just as
direct and as much at her ease as with any chance acquaintance, Levin was quite
happy again and said he was glad of it, and would not now behave as stupidly as
he had done at the election, but would try the first time he met Vronsky to be
as friendly as possible.</p>
<p>“It’s so wretched to feel that there’s a man almost an enemy
whom it’s painful to meet,” said Levin. “I’m very, very
glad.”</p>
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