`You are very, very absurd,' repeated Darya Alexandrovna, looking with tenderness into his face. `Very well then, let it be as though we had not spoken of this. What have you come for, Tania?' she said in French to the little girl who had come in.

`Where's my spade, mamma?'

`I speak French, and you must too.'

The little girl tried to say it in French, but could not remember the French for spade; the mother prompted her, and then told her in French where to look for the spade. And this made a disagreeable impression on Levin.

Everything in Darya Alexandrovna's house and children struck him now as by no means so charming as a little while before.

`And why does she talk French with the children?' he thought. `How unnatural and false it is! And the children feel it so: Learning French and unlearning sincerity,' he thought to himself, unaware that Darya Alexandrovna had thought all that over twenty times already, and yet, even at the cost of some loss of sincerity, believed it necessary to teach her children French in that way.

`But why are you going? Do stay a little.'

Levin stayed to tea; but his good humor had vanished, and he felt ill at ease.

After tea he went out into the hall to order his horses to be put in, and, when he came back, he found Darya Alexandrovna greatly disturbed, with a troubled face, and tears in her eyes. While Levin had been outside, an incident had occurred which had all at once shattered all the happiness she had been feeling that day, and her pride in her children. Grisha and Tania had been fighting over a ball. Darya Alexandrovna, hearing a scream in the nursery, ran in and saw a terrible sight. Tania was pulling Grisha's hair, while he, with a face hideous with rage, was beating her with his fists wherever he could get at her. Something snapped in Darya Alexandrovna's heart when she saw this. It was as if darkness had swooped down upon her life; she felt that these children of hers, that she was so proud of, were not merely most ordinary, but positively bad, ill-bred children, with coarse, brutal propensities - wicked children.

She could not talk or think of anything else, and she could not help speaking to Levin of her misery.

Levin saw she was unhappy and tried to comfort her, saying that it showed nothing bad, that all children fight; but, even as he said it, he was thinking in his heart: `No, I won't be artificial and talk French with my children; but my children won't be like that. All one has to do is not spoil children, not to distort their nature, and they'll be delightful. No, my children won't be like that.'

He said good-by and drove away, and she did not try to detain him.