`Wait, wait,' he began, interrupting Oblonsky. `You talk of his being an aristocrat. But allow me to ask what it consists of, 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, are 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 Riabinin a present of thirty thousand; but you get from the government your liferent, and I don't know what, while I shall not, and so I prize what's come to me from my ancestors, or has been won by hard work... We are aristocrats, and not those who can only exist by favor of the powerful ones of this earth, and who can be bought for twenty kopecks.'

`Well, but whom are you attacking? I agree with you,' said Stepan Arkadyevich, sincerely and genially; though he was aware that in the class of those who could be bought for twenty kopecks Levin was reckoning him as well. Levin's animation gave him genuine pleasure. `Whom are you attacking? A good deal of what you say is not true about Vronsky, of course, but I won't talk about that. I tell you straight out, if I were you, I should go back with me to Moscow, and...'

`No; I don't know whether you know it or not, but I don't care. And I tell you - I did propose, and was rejected, and Katerina Alexandrovna is nothing now to me but a painful and humiliating reminiscence.'

`Why? What nonsense!'

`But we won't talk about it. Please forgive me, if I've been nasty,' said Levin. Now that he had opened his heart, he became as he had been in the morning. `You're not angry with me, Stiva? Please don't be angry,' he said, and, smiling, he took his hand.

`Of course not; not a bit - nor is there any reason to be. I'm glad we've spoken openly. And, do you know, stand shooting in the morning is usually good - why not go? I might go, without sleeping, straight from shooting to the station.'

`Capital.'