committee. I shall not be alone at dinner again,” Alexey Alexandrovitch
went on, no longer in a sarcastic tone. “You wouldn’t believe how I’ve
missed….” And with a long pressure of her hand and a meaning smile, he
put her in her carriage.
Chapter 32
The first person to meet Anna at home was her son. He dashed down the
stairs to her, in spite of the governess’s call, and with desperate joy
shrieked: “Mother! mother!” Running up to her, he hung on her neck.
“I told you it was mother!” he shouted to the governess. “I knew!”
And her son, like her husband, aroused in Anna a feeling akin to
disappointment. She had imagined him better than he was in reality. She
had to let herself drop down to the reality to enjoy him as he really was. But
even as he was, he was charming, with his fair curls, his blue eyes, and his
plump, graceful little legs in tightly pulled-up stockings. Anna experienced
almost physical pleasure in the sensation of his nearness, and his caresses,
and moral soothing, when she met his simple, confiding, and loving glance,
and heard his naïve questions. Anna took out the presents Dolly’s children
had sent him, and told her son what sort of little girl was Tanya at Moscow,
and how Tanya could read, and even taught the other children.
“Why, am I not so nice as she?” asked Seryozha.
“To me you’re nicer than anyone in the world.”
“I know that,” said Seryozha, smiling.
Anna had not had time to drink her coffee when the Countess Lidia
Ivanovna was announced. The Countess Lidia Ivanovna was a tall, stout
woman, with an unhealthily sallow face and splendid, pensive black eyes.
Anna liked her, but today she seemed to be seeing her for the first time with
all her defects.
“Well, my dear, so you took the olive branch?” inquired Countess Lidia
Ivanovna, as soon as she came into the room.
“Yes, it’s all over, but it was all much less serious than we had
supposed,” answered Anna. “My belle-sœur is in general too hasty.”
But Countess Lidia Ivanovna, though she was interested in everything
that did not concern her, had a habit of never listening to what interested
her; she interrupted Anna:
“Yes, there’s plenty of sorrow and evil in the world. I am so worried
today.”
“Oh, why?” asked Anna, trying to suppress a smile.
“I’m beginning to be weary of fruitlessly championing the truth, and
sometimes I’m quite unhinged by it. The Society of the Little Sisters” (this
was a religiously-patriotic, philanthropic institution) “was going splendidly,
but with these gentlemen it’s impossible to do anything,” added Countess
Lidia Ivanovna in a tone of ironical submission to destiny. “They pounce on
the idea, and distort it, and then work it out so pettily and unworthily. Two
or three people, your husband among them, understand all the importance
of the thing, but the others simply drag it down. Yesterday Pravdin wrote to
me….”
Pravdin was a well-known Panslavist abroad, and Countess Lidia
Ivanovna described the purport of his letter.
Then the countess told her of more disagreements and intrigues against
the work of the unification of the churches, and departed in haste, as she
had that day to be at the meeting of some society and also at the Slavonic
committee.
“It was all the same before, of course; but why was it I didn’t notice it
before?” Anna asked herself. “Or has she been very much irritated today?
It’s really ludicrous; her object is doing good; she a Christian, yet she’s
always angry; and she always has enemies, and always enemies in the name
of Christianity and doing good.”
After Countess Lidia Ivanovna another friend came, the wife of a chief
secretary, who told her all the news of the town. At three o’clock she too
went away, promising to come to dinner. Alexey Alexandrovitch was at the
ministry. Anna, left alone, spent the time till dinner in assisting at her son’s
dinner (he dined apart from his parents) and in putting her things in order,
and in reading and answering the notes and letters which had accumulated
on her table.
The feeling of causeless shame, which she had felt on the journey, and
her excitement, too, had completely vanished. In the habitual conditions of
