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Updated: May 27, 2025
The house on her own estate was quite in ruins, and Levin and his wife had persuaded her to spend the summer with them. Stepan Arkadyevitch greatly approved of the arrangement.
Turovtsin good, simple man felt unmistakably a fish out of water, and the smile with which his thick lips greeted Stepan Arkadyevitch said, as plainly as words: "Well, old boy, you have popped me down in a learned set! A drinking party now, or the Château des Fleurs, would be more in my line!"
Did I tell you?" "Yes, I heard so," answered Koznishev indifferently. "It's a pity you're going away," said Stepan Arkadyevitch. "Tomorrow we're giving a dinner to two who're setting off Dimer-Bartnyansky from Petersburg and our Veslovsky, Grisha. They're both going. Veslovsky's only lately married. There's a fine fellow for you! Eh, princess?" he turned to the lady.
This silence was so awkward for both of them that Stepan Arkadyevitch's lips began twitching nervously, while he still gazed without speaking at Karenin's face. "That's what I wanted to say to her," said Alexey Alexandrovitch, turning away. "Yes, yes..." said Stepan Arkadyevitch, not able to answer for the tears that were choking him. "Yes, yes, I understand you," he brought out at last.
Stepan Arkadyevitch went to the Grand Theater to a rehearsal of the ballet, and gave Masha Tchibisova, a pretty dancing-girl whom he had just taken under his protection, the coral necklace he had promised her the evening before, and behind the scenes in the dim daylight of the theater, managed to kiss her pretty little face, radiant over her present.
And now, at the mere recollection, he blushed. "Now there is something I want to talk about, and you know what it is. About Anna," Stepan Arkadyevitch said, pausing for a brief space, and shaking off the unpleasant impression. As soon as Oblonsky uttered Anna's name, the face of Alexey Alexandrovitch was completely transformed; all the life was gone out of it, and it looked weary and dead.
"We shall be pleased to see you," the princess said stiffly. This stiffness hurt Kitty, and she could not resist the desire to smooth over her mother's coldness. She turned her head, and with a smile said: "Good-bye till this evening." At that moment Stepan Arkadyevitch, his hat cocked on one side, with beaming face and eyes, strode into the garden like a conquering hero.
"Oh, I've got over that, Darya Dmitrievna," he answered, and a melancholy and serious expression suddenly came over his face. Stepan Arkadyevitch was telling his sister-in-law his joke about divorce. "The wreath wants setting straight," she answered, not hearing him. "What a pity she's lost her looks so," Countess Nordston said to Madame Lvova. "Still he's not worth her little finger, is he?"
Stepan Arkadyevitch evidently had the same desire, and on his face Levin saw the look of anxiety always present in a true sportsman when beginning shooting, together with a certain good-humored slyness peculiar to him. "How shall we go? It's a splendid marsh, I see, and there are hawks," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, pointing to two great birds hovering over the reeds.
The principal qualities in Stepan Arkadyevitch which had gained him this universal respect in the service consisted, in the first place, of his extreme indulgence for others, founded on a consciousness of his own shortcomings; secondly, of his perfect liberalism not the liberalism he read of in the papers, but the liberalism that was in his blood, in virtue of which he treated all men perfectly equally and exactly the same, whatever their fortune or calling might be; and thirdly the most important point his complete indifference to the business in which he was engaged, in consequence of which he was never carried away, and never made mistakes.
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