Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part Two/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
The highest Petersburg society is remarkably united. Every one knows every one else, and every one exchanges visits. But in this great circle there are subdivisions. Anna Arkadyevna Karenina had friends and close relations with three different circles. One was the official circle, to which her husband belonged, composed of his colleagues and subordinates, bound together, or even further subdivided, by the most varied, and often the most capricious, social relations. It was now difficult for Anna to call back the sentiment of almost religious respect which at first she felt for all these personages. Now she knew them all, as one knows people in a provincial city. She knew what habits and weaknesses were characteristic of each, and what feet the shoe pinched. She knew what were their relations among themselves, and to the official center. She knew how this one agreed with that and on what grounds, and how another disagreed with still another, and wherefore. But this administrative clique, to which her husband belonged, could never interest her, in spite of the Countess Lidya Ivanovna's suggestions, and she avoided it.
The second circle in which Anna moved was that which had helped Alekseï Aleksandrovitch in his career. The center of this circle was the Countess Lidya Ivanovna; it was composed of aged, ugly, charitable, and devout women, and intelligent, learned, and ambitious men. One of the clever men who belonged to this circle had called it the "conscience of Petersburg society." Karenin was very much devoted to this circle; and Anna, who had the faculty of getting along with all people, had, during the early days of her life in Petersburg, made friends in its number. After her return from Moscow, this set of people seemed to her insupportable; it seemed as if she herself, as well as all the rest of them, were hypocritical, and she felt depressed and ill at ease in this society. She saw the Countess Lidya as infrequently as she possibly could.
Finally, the third circle in which Anna had connections was Society, properly speaking, the fashionable society of balls, dinner-parties, brilliant toilets—the society which with one hand lays fast hold of the court lest it descend to the level of the demi-monde, which the members of this circle affect to despise, and yet whose tastes are not only similar, but the same. The bond that united her to this society was the Princess Betsy Tverskaya, the wife of one of her cousins, who enjoyed an income of a hundred and twenty thousand rubles, and who had taken a great fancy to Anna as soon as she came to Petersburg, flattered her, introduced her among her friends, and made ridicule of the Countess Lidya's friends.
"When I am old and ugly, I will do the same," said Betsy; "but a young and pretty woman like yourself has as yet no place in such an asylum."
Anna at first had avoided as far as possible the society to which the Princess Betsy Tverskaya belonged, as it called for expenses beyond her means, and in her heart she preferred the first-mentioned coterie; but after her visit to Moscow all this was changed. She neglected her worthy old friends, and cared to go only into grand society. There she met Vronsky, and experienced tumultuous pleasure in these meetings. They met with especial frequency at the house of Betsy, who was a Vronskaya before her marriage, and was an own cousin of the count. Vronsky went everywhere that he was likely to meet Anna, and, if possible, spoke to her of his love. She gave him no encouragement; but every time she met him, there flamed up in her soul the same sense of animation which had seized her the moment that they met, for the first time, on the train at Moscow; she herself was conscious that at the sight of him this joy shone in her eyes, in her smile, but she had not the power to hide it.
Anna at first sincerely believed that she was angry because he persisted in following her; but one evening, not long after her return from Moscow, when she was present at a house where she expected to meet him, and he failed to come, she perceived clearly, by the pang that went through her heart, that she was deceiving herself, that this insistence of his not only was not disagreeable to her but that it formed the ruling passion of her life,
A famous diva was singing for the second time, and all the high society of Petersburg was at the theater. Vronsky, from his seat in the first row saw his cousin there, and without waiting for the entr'acte, left to visit her box.
"Why did n't you come to dinner?" she asked; and then with a smile she added, so as to be heard only by him, "I admire this clairvoyance of lovers; she was not there. But come to my house after the opera."
Vronsky looked at her questioningly. She nodded. He thanked her with a smile and sat down by her side.
"But how I miss your pleasantries; what have become of them?" continued the Princess Betsy, who followed with keen pleasure the progress of this passion. "You are in the toils, my dear!"
"That is all that I ask for," he replied, with his calm, good-natured smile, "to be in the toils. If I complain, it is not because I am too little in the toils if the truth must be told. I am beginning to lose hope."
"What hope could you have?" asked Betsy, taking the part of her friend. "Let us have a clear understanding." But the fire in her eyes told with sufficient clearness that she understood as well as he did what his hope meant.
"None," replied Vronsky, laughing, and showing his regular white teeth. "Excuse me," he added, taking the opera-glasses from his cousin's hand, in order to direct it across her bare shoulder at one of the opposite boxes. "I fear I am becoming ridiculous."
He knew very well that in Betsy's eyes, and in those of her world, he ran no risk of being ridiculous; he knew very well that in the eyes of such people the rôle of an unsuccessful lover of a young girl or an unmarried woman might be ridiculous; but not so the rôle of a man who pursues a married woman and at any price makes it his aim to lead her into committing adultery. This rôle is something beautiful and majestic and can never be ridiculous, and therefore Vronsky, as he handed back the opera-glasses, looked at his cousin with a smile of pride and joy lurking under his mustache.
"And why did n't you come to dinner?" she asked again, unable to refrain from admiration of him.
"I must tell you; I was busy ....and what about? I will give you one guess out of a hundred—out of a thousand .... you would never hit it. I have been reconciling a husband with his wife's persecutor. Yes, fact!"
"What! and you reconciled them?"
"Pretty nearly."
"You must tell me all about it," said Betsy, rising. "Come during the next entr'acte."
"Impossible; I am going to the French Theater."
"From Nilsson?" said Betsy, with horror, though she could not have distinguished Nilsson from the poorest chorus-singer.
"But what can I do? I have made an appointment in order to finish my act of peacemaking."
"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be saved," said Betsy, remembering that she had heard somewhere some such quotation. "Well, then, sit down and tell me all about it."
And she resumed her seat.