Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/298

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282
ANNA KARENINA

the unknown maiden's look; and indeed Kitty saw that she was always busy. Either she was taking the children of a Russian family home from the baths, or carrying a plaid for an invalid and wrapping her up in it, or she was trying to divert some irritable sick man, or selecting and buying confections for some other sick persons.

One morning, soon after the arrival of the Shcherbatskys, two new persons appeared who immediately became the object of rather unfriendly criticism. The one was a very tall, stooping man, with enormous hands, black eyes, at once innocent and terrifying, and wearing an old, ill-fitting, short coat. The other was a pock-marked woman, with a kindly face, and dressed very badly and inartistically.

Kitty instantly recognized that they were Russians; and in her imagination set to work constructing a beautiful and touching romance about them. But the princess, learning by the kurliste, or list of arrivals, that this was Nikolaï Levin and Marya Nikolayevna, explained to her what a bad man this Levin was, and all her illusions about these two persons vanished.

The fact that he was Konstantin Levin's brother, even more than her mother's words, suddenly made these two people particularly repulsive to Kitty. This Levin, with his habit of twitching his head, aroused in her an unsurmountable feeling of repulsion. It seemed to her that in his great, wild eyes, as they persistently followed her, was expressed a sentiment of hatred and irony, and she tried to avoid meeting him.


CHAPTER XXXI

It was a stormy day; the rain fell all the morning, and the invalids with umbrellas thronged the gallery.

Kitty and her mother, accompanied by the Muscovite colonel playing the elegant in his European overcoat, bought ready-made in Frankfort, were walking on one side of the gallery, in order to avoid Nikolaï Levin, who