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 Aleksandrovitch, accentuating the adjective prekrasny, as was his habit.

He knew that these gentlemen were making sport of him; but he expected nothing but hostile feelings, and he was accustomed to it.

Catching sight of the countess's yellow shoulders rising from her corsage, as she appeared at the door, and her beautiful pensive eyes, inviting him to join her, Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, with a smile which showed his even white teeth, went to her.

Lidia Ivanovna's toilet had cost her much labor, like all her recent efforts in this direction; for the object of her toilet was now entirely the reverse of that which she had followed thirty years before. Formerly she had thought only of adorning herself, and the more the better; now, on the contrary, she had to be adorned so unsuitably for her figure and her years that she simply endeavored to render the contrast between her person and her toilet not too frightful, and in Alekseï Aleksandrovitch's eyes she succeeded; he thought her fascinating. For him she, with her friendliness and even love for him, was the only island amid the sea of animosity and ridicule that surrounded him. As he was the gantlet of scornful glances, he was naturally drawn to her loving eyes like a plant toward the light.

"I congratulate you," she said, looking at his decoration.

Repressing a smile of satisfaction, Karenin shrugged his shoulders and half closed his eyes, as if to say that this was nothing to him.

The Countess Lidia Ivanovna knew well that these distinctions, even though he would not confess it, caused him the keenest pleasure.

"How is our angel?" she asked, referring to Serozha.

"I cannot say that I very am well satisfied with him," replied Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, lifting his eyebrows and opening his eyes. "And Sitnikof" (a pedagogue who had been intrusted with Serozha's childish education) "does not please him. As I told you, I find in him a certain apathy toward the chief questions which