And Levin saw a new trait in this woman, who attracted him so
extraordinarily. Besides wit, grace, and beauty, she had truth.
She had no wish to hide from him all the bitterness of her
position. As she said that she sighed, and her face suddenly
taking a hard expression, looked as it were turned to stone.
With that expression on her face she was more beautiful than
ever; but the expression was new; it was utterly unlike that
expression, radiant with happiness and creating happiness, which
had been caught by the painter in her portrait. 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. "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. 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. While he followed this
interesting conversation, Levin was all the time admiring her--
her beauty, her intelligence, her culture, and at the same time
her directness and genuine depth of feeling. He listened and
talked, and all the while he was thinking of her inner life,
trying to divine her feelings. And though he had judged her so
severely hitherto, now by some strange chain of reasoning he was
justifying her and was also sorry for her, and afraid that
Vronsky did not fully understand her. At eleven o'clock, when
Stepan Arkadyevitch got up to go (Vorkuev had left earlier), it
seemed to Levin that he had only just come. Regretfully Levin
too rose.
"Good-bye," she said, holding his hand and glancing into his face
with a winning look. "I am very glad _que la glace est rompue._"