Episode 210

Levin realized that she meant his wife, and did not know what answer to make.

`Come along, come along to him!' he said.

But, as soon as he moved, the door of his room opened and Kitty peeped out. Levin crimsoned both from shame and anger at his wife, who had put herself and him in such a difficult position; but Marya Nikolaevna crimsoned still more. She positively shrank together and flushed to the point of tears, and, clutching the ends of her shawl in both hands, twisted them in her red fingers without knowing what to say and what to do.

For the first instant Levin saw an expression of eager curiosity in the eyes with which Kitty looked at this incomprehensible to her, awful woman; but it lasted only a single instant.

`Well! How is he?' she turned to her husband and then to her.

`But one can't go on talking in the passage like this!' Levin said, looking angrily at a gentleman who walked jauntily at that instant across the corridor, as though about his affairs.

Well then, come in,' said Kitty, turning to Marya Nikolaevna, who had recovered herself - but, noticing her husband's face of dismay -or go on; go, and then come for me,' she said, and went back into the room. Levin went to his brother's room.

He had not in the least expected what he saw and felt in his brother's room. He had expected to find him in the same state of self-deception which he had heard was so frequent with the consumptive, and which had struck him so much during his brother's visit in the autumn. He had expected to find the physical signs of the approach of death more marked - greater weakness, greater emaciation, but still almost the same condition of things.

He had expected himself to feel the same distress at the loss of the brother he loved and the same horror in face of death as he had felt then, only in a greater degree. And he had prepared himself for this; but he found something utterly different.