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In the drawing room there were already sitting Prince Alexander Dmitrievitch Shtcherbatsky, young Shtcherbatsky, Turovtsin, Kitty, and Karenin. Stepan Arkadyevitch saw immediately that things were not going well in the drawing-room without him.
I'm going to the 'infernal regions," added the colonel, and he walked away. "That's Yashvin," Vronsky said in answer to Turovtsin, and he sat down in the vacated seat beside them. He drank the glass offered him, and ordered a bottle of wine.
Levin glanced once more at Turovtsin, and wondered how it was he had not realized all this man's goodness before. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, and I'll never think ill of people again!" he said gaily, genuinely expressing what he felt at the moment.
He got up hurriedly, and went to look for Oblonsky and Turovtsin, with whom it had been so pleasant. Turovtsin was one of the circle drinking in the billiard room, and Stepan Arkadyevitch was talking with Vronsky near the door at the farther corner of the room.
Slapping Turovtsin on the shoulder, he whispered something comic in his ear, and set him down by his wife and the old prince. Then he told Kitty she was looking very pretty that evening, and presented Shtcherbatsky to Karenin. In a moment he had so kneaded together the social dough that the drawing room became very lively, and there was a merry buzz of voices.
"Just as though I should seek the right to be a wet-nurse and feel injured because women are paid for the work, while no one will take me," said the old prince. Turovtsin exploded in a loud roar of laughter and Sergey Ivanovitch regretted that he had not made this comparison. Even Alexey Alexandrovitch smiled. "Yes, but a man can't nurse a baby," said Pestsov, "while a woman..."
The applicability or non-applicability of the Christian precept to his own case was too difficult a question to be discussed lightly, and this question had long ago been answered by Alexey Alexandrovitch in the negative. Of all that had been said, what stuck most in his memory was the phrase of stupid, good-natured Turovtsin "Acted like a man, he did! Called him out and shot him!"
The young man, holding himself very erect, with eyes forever twinkling with enjoyment, was an officer from Petersburg, Gagin. Turovtsin introduced them. "Oblonsky's always late." "Ah, here he is!" "Have you only just come?" said Oblonsky, coming quickly towards them. "Good day. Had some vodka? Well, come along then."
But at this point Turovtsin broke suddenly and unexpectedly into the conversation, addressing Alexey Alexandrovitch. "You heard, perhaps, about Pryatchnikov?" said Turovtsin, warmed up by the champagne he had drunk, and long waiting for an opportunity to break the silence that had weighed on him.
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!"
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