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 and, looking at Levin, instead of asking "Do you smoke?" she held over a tortoise-shell cigar-case to him, and took a cigarette herself.

"How are you to-day?" asked her brother.

"Pretty well; a little nervous, as usual."

"Isn't it extraordinarily good?" said Stepan Arkadyevitch, noticing Levin's admiration of the portrait.

"I never saw a better portrait."

"An extraordinary likeness, is n't it?" added Vorkuyef.

Levin looked from the portrait to the original. Anna's face lighted up with a peculiar glow as she felt conscious of his eyes resting on her. He blushed, and, to conceal his confusion, was just going to ask her when she had seen Darya Aleksandrovna. But at that instant Anna said:—

"Ivan Petrovitch and I were talking just now of Vashchenkof's pictures. Do you know them?"

"Yes; I have seen them," answered Levin.

"But I beg your pardon .... you were just going to ask me something?"

Levin asked whether she had seen Dolly lately.

"She was here yesterday. She was indignant at what happened to Grisha at the gymnasium. It seems his Latin teacher was unfair to him."

"Yes; I saw the pictures. They pleased me very much," said Levin, returning to the topic which they had begun to talk about.

What Levin now said was entirely free from the technical formality with which he had talked in the morning. Every word of the conversation with her seemed to be significant. And pleasant as it was to talk with her, it was still pleasanter to listen to her. Anna talked not only naturally and intelligently, but, though intelligently, still without pretense, not arrogating any great importance to her own thoughts but attributing great importance to what her friends said.

The conversation turned on the new tendencies of art and on some new illustrations to the Bible which a French artist had recently made.

Vorkuyef severely criticized the realism which the