Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/523

 possible. It is there where my brother and I are in fault; while you married gentlemen and especially you, Stepan Arkadyevitch, are acting the part of good patriots. How many have you?" he asked of the host, handing him a very diminutive glass.

Everybody laughed, and Oblonsky most of all. "Yes, that is certainly the best means!" said he, taking a bite of cheese and pouring some special kind of vodka into the glass that Koznuishef offered him. But the jest really served to bring the discussion to a close.

"This cheese is not bad; what do you say?" remarked the host.

"Do you still practise gymnastics?" said Oblonsky, addressing Levin, and with his left hand feeling his friend's muscles.

Levin smiled and doubled up his arm, and Stepan Arkadyevitch felt how under his fingers the biceps swelled up like a round cheese beneath the smooth cloth of his coat.

"What biceps! a Samson," said he.

"I suppose it is necessary to be endowed with remarkable strength, to hunt bears, is n't it?' said Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, smearing some cheese on a piece of bread as thin as a cobweb. His ideas about hunting were of the vaguest.

Levin smiled.

"No; on the contrary, a child could kill a bear;"—and he drew back, with a slight bow, to make room for the ladies, who with the hostess were coming to the zakuska table.

"I hear that you have just killed a bear," said Kitty, vainly trying to put her fork into a recalcitrant mushroom which kept flying about on the plate, and as she threw back the lace in her sleeve there was a ghmpse of a white arm. "Are there really bears where you live?" she added, half turning her pretty face toward him and smiling. What she said had no especial importance, but what significance inexpressible in words there was for him in the sound of her voice, in every motion of her lips, of her eyes, hands, when she said it!