Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/977

 CHAPTER XXII

felt perfectly bewildered by these strange and to him unwonted discourses to which he had been listening. After the stagnation of Moscow, the complication of life in Petersburg as a general thing had an enlivening effect on him; but he liked it and was at home in it when he was among those whom he knew well. In this unfamiliar environment, he was bewildered and stupefied, and could not make anything out of it.

As he listened to the reading, and saw the brilliant eyes of Laudau—naive or knavish, he could not tell which—fixed on him, he felt a peculiar heaviness in his head. The most heterogeneous thoughts went whirling through his brain.

"Marie Sanina is happy in having lost her son. .... It would be good if I could only smoke! .... To be saved, one needs only to believe. .... The monks do not understand about this, but the Countess Lidia Ivanovna does. What makes my head feel so heavy? Is it the brandy, or the strangeness of all this? I have done nothing out of the way as yet; but I shan't venture to ask anything to-day. It is said they make you say your prayers. Suppose they should make me say mine! That would be too nonsensical. What stuff that is she is reading! But she reads well. Landau Bezzubof .... why is he Bezzubof?"

Suddenly Stepan Arkadyevitch felt that his lower jaw was irresistibly beginning to accomplish a yawn. He smoothed his whiskers to conceal the yawn, and shook himself; but the next moment he felt sure that he was asleep, and even beginning to snore. The voice of the Countess Lidia Ivanovna waked him, saying:—

"He's asleep."

Stepan Arkadyevitch waked with a start, feeling a consciousness of guilt. But instantly he was relieved to find that the words, "He's asleep," had reference, not to himself, but to Landau. The Frenchman was as sound asleep as Stepan Arkadyevitch had been. But