Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/916

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234
ANNA KARENINA

the meeting and the new piece and the lawsuit. But apparently in consequence of his weariness and the strain which he began to feel, he made a blunder in speaking of a certain lawsuit, and this blunder he afterward remembered with annoyance. Speaking of the recent punishment of a foreigner who had been tried in Russia, and that it would have been irregular to punish him by exile. Levin repeated what he had heard the evening before in a conversation with a friend of his.

"I think that to send him abroad is just the same as to punish a fish by throwing it into the water," said Levin.

Too late he remembered that this comparison which he put forth to express his thought, though he had heard his friend use it, was really taken from a fable by Kruilof , and that his friend had taken it from the feuilleton of a newspaper.

Returning home with his sister-in-law, and finding Kitty well and happy. Levin went to the club.


CHAPTER VII

Levin reached the club very punctually. A number of the guests and members arrived there at the same time as he did. Levin had not been at the club very recently, indeed, not since the time when, having finished his studies at the university, he passed a winter at Moscow, and went into society. He remembered the club in a general sort of way, but had entirely forgotten the impressions which, in former days, it had made upon him. But as soon as he entered the great semicircular dvor, or court, sent away his izvoshchik, and mounted the steps and saw the liveried Swiss noiselessly open the door for him, and bow as he ushered him in; as soon as he saw in the cloak-room the galoshes and shubas of the members, who felt that it was less work to take them off down-stairs, and leave them with the Swiss, than to wear them up-stairs; as soon as he heard the well-known mysterious sound of the bell, and as soon as he mounted the easy flight of carpeted stairs and saw the statue on