Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/356

 The letter was from Oblonsky. Levin read it aloud. It was dated from Petersburg:—

"This is admirable! Certainly I will go to see her," said Levin. "Let us go together. She is a glorious woman; don't you think so?"

"And they live near you?"

"About thirty versts, possibly forty. But there's a good road. We can cover it quickly."

"I shall be delighted," said Sergyeï Ivanovitch, smiling. The sight of his brother immediately filled him with happiness. "Well there! what an appetite you have!" he added, looking at his tanned, sunburned, glowing face and neck, as he bent over his plate.

"Excellent! You can't imagine how useful this régime is against whims! I am going to enrich medicine with a new term, arbeitskur—labor-cure."

"Well, you don't seem to need it much, it seems to me.

"Yes; it is a sovereign specific against nervous troubles."

"It must be looked into. I was coming to see you mow, but the heat was so insupportable that I did not go farther than the wood. I rested awhile, and then I went to the village. I met your nurse there, and sounded her as to what the muzhiks thought about you. As I understand it, they don't approve of you. She said, 'Not gentlemen's work.' I think that, as a general thing, the peasantry form very definite ideas about what is becoming for the gentry to do, and they don't like to have them go outside of certain fixed limits."

"Maybe; but you see I have never enjoyed anything more in all my life, and I do not do anybody any harm, do I?" asked Levin. "And suppose it does n't please them, what is to be done? Whose business is it?"