Anna Karenina - Part 1 - Page 117/119

"You'll spoil it!"

"No, I won't spoil it! Well, and your wife?" said the baroness

suddenly, interrupting Vronsky's conversation with his comrade.

"We've been marrying you here. Have you brought your wife?"

"No, baroness. I was born a Bohemian, and a Bohemian I shall

die."

"So much the better, so much the better. Shake hands on it."

And the baroness, detaining Vronsky, began telling him, with many

jokes, about her last new plans of life, asking his advice.

"He persists in refusing to give me a divorce! Well, what am I

to do?" (_He_ was her husband.) "Now I want to begin a suit

against him. What do you advise? Kamerovsky, look after the

coffee; it's boiling over. You see, I'm engrossed with business!

I want a lawsuit, because I must have my property. Do you

understand the folly of it, that on the pretext of my being

unfaithful to him," she said contemptuously, "he wants to get the

benefit of my fortune."

Vronsky heard with pleasure this light-hearted prattle of a

pretty woman, agreed with her, gave her half-joking counsel, and

altogether dropped at once into the tone habitual to him in

talking to such women. In his Petersburg world all people were

divided into utterly opposed classes. One, the lower class,

vulgar, stupid, and, above all, ridiculous people, who believe

that one husband ought to live with the one wife whom he has

lawfully married; that a girl should be innocent, a woman modest,

and a man manly, self-controlled, and strong; that one ought to

bring up one's children, earn one's bread, and pay one's debts;

and various similar absurdities. This was the class of

old-fashioned and ridiculous people. But there was another class

of people, the real people. To this class they all belonged, and

in it the great thing was to be elegant, generous, plucky, gay,

to abandon oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh

at everything else.

For the first moment only, Vronsky was startled after the

impression of a quite different world that he had brought with

him from Moscow. But immediately as though slipping his feet

into old slippers, he dropped back into the light-hearted,

pleasant world he had always lived in.

The coffee was never really made, but spluttered over every one,

and boiled away, doing just what was required of it--that is,

providing much cause for much noise and laughter, and spoiling a

costly rug and the baroness's gown.

"Well now, good-bye, or you'll never get washed, and I shall have

on my conscience the worst sin a gentleman can commit. So you

would advise a knife to his throat?"