Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/628

 Mæcenas he ought to find some way of aiding the artist, whether his painting was good or not.

"It is doubtful. He is a famous portrait painter. Have you not seen his portrait of Madame Vasilchikof? But it seems he does n't care to paint portraits any longer, and perhaps that is the reason he is in need. I say that...."

"Could n't we ask him to paint Anna Arkadyevna's portrait?"

"Why mine?" she demanded. "After your portrait of me, I want no other. It would be better to let him paint Ani [so she called her daughter], or her," she added, looking out of the window at the pretty Italian nurse, who was just taking the baby into the garden. And at the same time she gave Vronsky a furtive glance. This pretty Italian woman, whose face Vronsky had taken as a model for a picture, was the only secret woe in Anna's life. Vronsky painted her picture, admired her beauty and her medieval quaintness, and Anna did not dare to confess to herself that she feared she was going to be jealous, and was accordingly all the more kind to her and her little boy.

Vronsky also looked out of the window, and at Anna's eyes, and, instantly turning to Golenishchef, said:—

"And so you know this Mikhailof?"

"I have met him. But he is an original—a chudak—without any education, you know, one of these new-fashioned savages such as you meet with nowadays—you know them—these free-thinkers, who rush headlong into atheism, materialism, universal negation. Once," Golenishchef went on to say, either not noticing or not wishing to notice that both Vronsky and Anna were ready to speak, "once the free-thinker was a man educated in the conceptions of religion, law, and morality, who did not ignore the laws by which society is regulated, and who reached freedom of thought only after long struggles. But now we have a new type of them,—free-thinkers who grow up without even knowing that there are such things as laws in morality and religion, who will not admit that sure authorities exist,