"Where is he?"
"Maybe he’s gone into the passage, but here he comes anyway. That
is he," said the doorkeeper…
Stepan Arkadyevitch was standing at the top of the stairs. His
good-naturedly glowing face above the embroidered collar of his uniform glowed
more than ever when he recognized the man coming up.
"Why, it’s actually you, Levin, at last!" he said with a
friendly mocking smile, scanning Levin as he approached. "How is it you
have thought to look me up in this den?" said Stepan Arkadyevitch, and not
content with shaking hands, he kissed his friend. "Have you been here
long?"
"I have just come, and very much wanted to see you," said
Levin, looking shyly and at the same time angrily and uneasily around.
"Well, let’s go into my room," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, who
knew his friend’s sensitive and irritable shyness, and, taking his arm, he drew
him along, as though guiding him through dangers…
Levin was almost of the same age as Oblonsky; their intimacy did not
rest merely on champagne. Levin had been the friend and companion of his early
youth. They were fond of one another in spite of the difference of their
characters and tastes …
"We have long been expecting you," said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
going into his room and letting Levin’s hand go as though to show that here all
danger was over. "I am very, very glad to see you," he went on.
"Well, how are you? Eh? When did you come?"
Levin was silent, looking at the unknown faces of Oblonsky’s two
companions, and especially at the hand of the elegant Grinevitch…
"Ah, to be sure, let me introduce you," he said. "My
colleagues: Philip Ivanitch Nikitin, Mihail Stanislavitch Grinevitch"—and
turning to Levin—"a district councilor, a modern district councilman, a
gymnast who lifts thirteen stone with one hand, a cattle-breeder and sportsman,
and my friend, Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin, the brother of Sergey Ivanovitch
Koznishev."…
"What are the Shtcherbatskys doing? Everything as it used to
be?" he said.
Stepan Arkadyevitch, who had long known that Levin was in love with his
sister-in-law, Kitty, gave a hardly perceptible smile, and his eyes sparkled
merrily.
"You said a few words, but I can’t answer in a few words ..."
The families of the Levins and the Shtcherbatskys were old, noble Moscow
families, and had always been on intimate and friendly terms. This intimacy had
grown still closer during Levin’s student days. He had both prepared for the
university with the young Prince Shtcherbatsky, the brother of Kitty and Dolly,
and had entered at the same time with him. In those days Levin used often to be
in the Shtcherbatskys’ house, and he was in love with the Shtcherbatsky
household. Strange as it may appear, it was with the household, the family,
that Konstantin Levin was in love, especially with the feminine half of the
household. Levin did not remember his own mother, and his only sister was older
than he was, so that it was in the Shtcherbatskys’ house that he saw for the
first time that inner life of an old, noble, cultivated, and honorable family
of which he had been deprived by the death of his father and mother. All the
members of that family, especially the feminine half, were pictured by him, as
it were, wrapped about with a mysterious poetical veil, and he not only
perceived no defects whatever in them, but under the poetical veil that covered
them he assumed the existence of the most elevated sentiments and every
possible perfection. Why it was the three young ladies had one day to speak
French, and the next English; why it was that at certain hours they played by
turns on the piano, the sounds of which were audible in their brother’s room
above, where the students used to work; why they were visited by those
professors of French literature, of music, of drawing, of dancing; why at
certain hours all the three young ladies, with Mademoiselle Linon, drove in the
coach to the Tversky boulevard, dressed in their satin cloaks, Dolly in a long
one, Natalia in a half-long one, and Kitty in one so short that her shapely
legs in tightly-drawn red stockings were visible to all beholders; why it was
they had to walk about the Tversky boulevard escorted by a footman with a gold cockade in his hat—all
this and much more that was done in their mysterious world he did not
understand, but he was sure that everything that was done there was very good,
and he was in love precisely with the mystery of the proceedings. (Inglés más fácil)
Vocabulario reemplazado
Beaming deigned shrouded
loftiest
Vocabulario
Cockade: un
ornamento, tal como una roseta, usualmente llevado en el sombrero como símbolo.
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Argentina
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