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Updated: May 25, 2025
"Yes, isn't it extraordinarily fine?" said Stepan Arkadyevitch, noticing that Levin was scrutinizing the picture. "I have never seen a better portrait." "And extraordinarily like, isn't it?" said Vorkuev. Levin looked from the portrait to the original. A peculiar brilliance lighted up Anna's face when she felt his eyes on her.
Looking at himself in the glass, Levin noticed that he was red in the face, but he felt certain he was not drunk, and he followed Stepan Arkadyevitch up the carpeted stairs. At the top Stepan Arkadyevitch inquired of the footman, who bowed to him as to an intimate friend, who was with Anna Arkadyevna, and received the answer that it was M. Vorkuev. "Where are they?" "In the study."
"I know about you," she said to Levin; "that you're not a public-spirited citizen, and I have defended you to the best of my ability." "How have you defended me?" "Oh, according to the attacks made on you. But won't you have some tea?" She rose and took up a book bound in morocco. "Give it to me, Anna Arkadyevna," said Vorkuev, indicating the book. "It's well worth taking up."
There was not a single instant when a subject for conversation was to seek; on the contrary, it was felt that one had hardly time to say what one had to say, and eagerly held back to hear what the others were saying. And all that was said, not only by her, but by Vorkuev and Stepan Arkadyevitch all, so it seemed to Levin, gained peculiar significance from her appreciation and her criticism.
I see you're smiling ironically, but you're wrong. She's writing a children's book, and doesn't talk about it to anyone, but she read it to me and I gave the manuscript to Vorkuev...you know the publisher...and he's an author himself too, I fancy. He understands those things, and he says it's a remarkable piece of work. But are you fancying she's an authoress? not a bit of it.
"About her divorce, about Vronsky, and what he's doing at the club, about me?" wondered Levin. And he was so keenly interested by the question of what she was saying to Stepan Arkadyevitch, that he scarcely heard what Vorkuev was telling him of the qualities of the story for children Anna Arkadyevna had written. At tea the same pleasant sort of talk, full of interesting matter, continued.
"I was just telling Anna Arkadyevna," said Vorkuev, "that if she were to put a hundredth part of the energy she devotes to this English girl to the public question of the education of Russian children, she would be doing a great and useful work." "Yes, but I can't help it; I couldn't do it. I visited it several times. The children were very nice, but I could not feel drawn to the work.
The conversation turned on the new movement in art, on the new illustrations of the Bible by a French artist. Vorkuev attacked the artist for a realism carried to the point of coarseness. Levin said that the French had carried conventionality further than anyone, and that consequently they see a great merit in the return to realism. In the fact of not lying they see poetry.
She had risen to meet him, not concealing her pleasure at seeing him; and in the quiet ease with which she held out her little vigorous hand, introduced him to Vorkuev and indicated a red-haired, pretty little girl who was sitting at work, calling her her pupil, Levin recognized and liked the manners of a woman of the great world, always self-possessed and natural.
Levin looked more than once at the portrait and at her figure, as taking her brother's arm she walked with him to the high doors and he felt for her a tenderness and pity at which he wondered himself. She asked Levin and Vorkuev to go into the drawing room, while she stayed behind to say a few words to her brother.
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