Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/901

 five rubles for it. Now it seemed to him the natural thing to do.

"Get a pair of horses from the izvoshchik, and put them into our carriage."

"I will obey."

And having thus decided simply and quickly, thanks to his training in city ways, a labor which in the country would have cost him much trouble and attention. Levin went out on the porch, and, beckoning to an izvoshchik, took his seat in the cab, and rode off to the Nikitskaya Street.

On the way the question of money did not occupy him, but he thought over how he was about to make the acquaintance of the sociological savant from Petersburg, and what he should say to him in regard to his treatise.

It was only during the first part of his stay in Moscow that Levin, who had been used to the productive ways of the country, was amazed at the strange and unavoidable expenses which met him on every side. But now he was wonted to them. He had somewhat the same experience as he had been told drunken men went through: each successive glass made him more reckless.

When Levin took the first hundred-ruble note for the purchase of liveries for the lackey and Swiss, he could not avoid the consideration that these liveries were wholly useless to any one; and yet they seemed to be unavoidable and indispensable, judging from the amazement of Kitty and her mother, when he made the remark that they might go without them—and he put it to himself that these liveries represented the wages of two laborers for a year, that is to say, about three hundred working days from early in the morning till late at night; so that the first hundred-ruble note corresponded to the first glass.

But the second bill of twenty-eight rubles, expended for the purchase of provisions for a family dinner, cost