Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/858

 "Yes! I've known her for a long time. She's a very good woman, mais excessivement terre a terre. But still I am well pleased at her visit."

He gave Anna another questioning look, and took her hand; but she understood his look in another way, and smiled.

The next morning, in spite of repeated urging from her hosts, Darya Aleksandrovna prepared to go away. Levin's coachman, in his old kaftan and a sort of postilion's cap, put the unmatched horses into the old carrriage with its shabby harness, and, looking stern and resolute, drove up the sanded driveway to the covered portico.

Darya Aleksandrovna took a cold farewell of the Princess Varvara and the gentlemen. The day that they had passed together made them all see clearly that they had no interests in common, and that they were better apart. Anna only was sad. She knew that no one would waken again in her the feelings which Dolly had aroused in her soul. To have these feelings aroused was painful to her, but still she knew that they represented all the better side of her nature, and that soon all vestige of such feelings would be stifled by the life that she was leading.

As soon as she got fairly away from the house, Darya Aleksandrovna experienced a pleasant feeling of relief, and she was about to ask her men how they liked the Vronskys, when suddenly the coachman, Filipp himself, spoke out:—

"They 're rich, rich enough, but they give only three measures of oats. The horses cleaned it all up before cockcrow. What are three measures? Only a bite. Nowadays oats cost only forty-five kopeks. With us, we give our visitors' horses as much as they will eat."

"A stingy barin," said the bookkeeper.

"Well, but you liked their horses, didn't you?" asked Dolly.

"The horses, yes, they were all right. And the food was good. But still somehow I felt kind of homesick,