The porter asked him, as he gave him his coat, "Where is your
honor staying?" and immediately wrote down his address in a big
handsomely bound book.
"Of course I don't care, but still I feel ashamed and awfully
stupid," thought Levin, consoling himself with the reflection
that everyone does it. He drove to the public meeting, where he
was to find his sister-in-law, so as to drive home with her.
At the public meeting of the committee there were a great many
people, and almost all the highest society. Levin was in time
for the report which, as everyone said, was very interesting.
When the reading of the report was over, people moved about, and
Levin met Sviazhsky, who invited him very pressingly to come that
evening to a meeting of the Society of Agriculture, where a
celebrated lecture was to be delivered, and Stepan Arkadyevitch,
who had only just come from the races, and many other
acquaintances; and Levin heard and uttered various criticisms on
the meeting, on the new fantasia, and on a public trial. But,
probably from the mental fatigue he was beginning to feel, he
made a blunder in speaking of the trial, and this blunder he
recalled several times with vexation. Speaking of the sentence
upon a foreigner who had been condemned in Russia, and of how
unfair it would be to punish him by exile abroad, Levin repeated
what he had heard the day before in conversation from an
acquaintance.
"I think sending him abroad is much the same as punishing a carp
by putting it into the water," said Levin. Then he recollected
that this idea, which he had heard from an acquaintance and
uttered as his own, came from a fable of Krilov's, and that the
acquaintance had picked it up from a newspaper article.
After driving home with his sister-in-law, and finding Kitty in
good spirits and quite well, Levin drove to the club.