Anna Karenina - Part 6 - Page 57/121

"What's this?" Levin thought, when a footman ran out of the house

and stopped the trap. It was the mechanician, whom Levin had

totally forgotten. The mechanician, bowing low, said something

to Veslovsky, then clambered into the trap, and they drove off

together.

Stepan Arkadyevitch and the princess were much upset by Levin's

action. And he himself felt not only in the highest degree

_ridicule_, but also utterly guilty and disgraced. But remembering

what sufferings he and his wife had been through, when he asked

himself how he should act another time, he answered that he

should do just the same again.

In spite of all this, towards the end of that day, everyone

except the princess, who could not pardon Levin's action, became

extraordinarily lively and good humored, like children after a

punishment or grown-up people after a dreary, ceremonious

reception, so that by the evening Vassenka's dismissal was spoken

of, in the absence of the princess, as though it were some remote

event. And Dolly, who had inherited her father's gift of

humorous storytelling, made Varenka helpless with laughter as she

related for the third and fourth time, always with fresh humorous

additions, how she had only just put on her new shoes for the

benefit of the visitor, and on going into the drawing room, heard

suddenly the rumble of the trap. And who should be in the trap

but Vassenka himself, with his Scotch cap, and his songs and his

gaiters, and all, sitting in the hay.

"If only you'd ordered out the carriage! But no! and then I

hear: 'Stop!' Oh, I thought they've relented. I look out, and

behold a fat German being sat down by him and driving away....

And my new shoes all for nothing!..."