feet. "If you only realized the pain that you cause me! It is just the same as if you had lost a child, and they came to you and said, 'He would have been like this, like this, and he might have lived, and you would have had so much joy in him But he is dead, dead, dead.'" ....
"How absurd you are!" said Darya Aleksandrovna, with a melancholy smile at the sight of Levin's emotion. "Well! I understand it all better and better," she continued pensively. "Then you won't come to see us when Kitty is here?"
"No, I will not. Of course I will not avoid Katerina Aleksandrovna; but, when it is possible, I shall endeavor to spare her the affliction of my presence."
"You are very, very absurd," said Darya Aleksan-drovna, looking at him affectionately. "Well, then, let it be as if we had not said a word about it.—What do you want, Tania?" said she in French to her little girl, who came running in.
"Where is my little shovel, mamma?"
"I speak French to you, and you must answer in French."
The child tried to speak, but could not recall the French word for lopatka, shovel. Her mother whispered it to her, and then told her, still in French, where she should go to find it. This made Levin feel unpleasant.
Everything now seemed changed in Darya Aleksandrovna's household; even the children were not nearly so attractive as before.
"And why does she speak French with the children?" he thought. "How false and unnatural! Even the children feel it. Teach them French, and spoil their sincerity," he said to himself, not knowing that Darya Aleksandrovna had twenty times asked the same question, and yet, in spite of the harm that it did their simplicity, had come to the conclusion that this was the right way to teach them.
"But why are you in a hurry? Sit a little while longer."
