Chapter 11

`Well, didn't I tell you?' said Stepan Arkadyevich, seeing that Levin had been completely won over.

`Yes,' said Levin pensively, `an extraordinary woman! It's not her cleverness, but she has such wonderful depth of feeling. I'm awfully sorry for her!'

`Now, please God everything will soon be settled. Well, well, don't be hard on people in future,' said Stepan Arkadyevich, opening the carriage door. `Good-by; we don't go the same way.'

Still thinking of Anna, of everything, even the simplest phrase in their conversation with her, and recalling the minutest changes in her expression, entering more and more into her position, and feeling sympathy for her, Levin reached home.

At home Kouzma told Levin that Katerina Alexandrovna was quite well, and that her sisters had just gone, and he handed him two letters. Levin read them at once in the hall, that he might not overlook them later. One was from Sokolov, his bailiff. Sokolov wrote that the wheat could not be sold, that the price was only five and a half roubles, and that he did not know where he had to get the money. The other letter was from his sister. She scolded him for her business being still unsettled.

`Well, we must sell it at five and a half if we can't get more,' Levin decided on the spot the first question which had always before seemed such a weighty one, with extraordinary facility. `It's extraordinary how all one's time is taken up here,' he thought, considering the second letter. He felt himself to blame for not having got done what his sister had asked him to do for her. `Today, again, I've not been to court, but today I've certainly not had time.' And resolving that he would not fail to do it next day, he went up to his wife. As he went in, Levin mentally ran rapidly through the day he had spent. All the events of the day were conversations: conversations he had heard and taken part in. All the conversations were upon subjects which, if he had been alone in the country, he would never have taken up, but here they were very interesting. And all these conversations were right enough, only in two places there was something not quite right. One was what he had said about the carp, the other was something not quite the thing in the tender sympathy he was feeling for Anna.

Levin found his wife low-spirited and dull. The dinner of the three sisters had gone off very well, but then they had waited and waited for him, all of them had felt dull, the sisters had departed, and she had been left alone.

`Well, and what have you been doing?' she asked him, looking straight into his eyes, which shone with rather a suspicious brightness. But that she might not prevent his telling her everything, she concealed her close scrutiny of him, and with an approving smile listened to his account of how he had spent the evening.

`Well, I'm very glad I met Vronsky. I felt quite at ease and natural with him. You understand, I shall try not to see him, but I'm glad that this awkwardness is all over,' he said, and remembering that, by way of trying not to see him, he had immediately gone to call on Anna, he blushed. `We talk about the peasants drinking; I don't know who drinks most, the peasantry or our own class; the peasants do it on holidays, but...'

But Kitty took not the slightest interest in discussing the drinking habits of the peasants. She saw that he blushed, and she wanted to know why.

`Well, and then where did you go?'

`Stiva urged me awfully to go and see Anna Arkadyevna.'