"Altogether," pursued Sergey Ivanovitch, "you're satisfied with your day?"
"Quite satisfied.
We cut the whole meadow.
And such a splendid old man I made friends with there!
You can't fancy how delightful he was!"
"Well, so you're content with your day.
And so am I.
First, I solved two chess problems, and one a very pretty one--a pawn opening.
I'll show it you.
And then--I thought over our conversation yesterday."
"Eh! our conversation yesterday?" said Levin, blissfully dropping his eyelids and drawing deep breaths after finishing his dinner, and absolutely incapable of recalling what their conversation yesterday was about.
"I think you are partly right.
Our difference of opinion amounts to this, that you make the mainspring self-interest, while I suppose that interest in the common weal is bound to exist in every man of a certain degree of advancement.
Possibly you are right too, that action founded on material interest would be more desirable.
You are altogether, as the French say, too _primesautiere_ a nature; you must have intense, energetic action, or nothing."
Levin listened to his brother and did not understand a single word, and did not want to understand.
He was only afraid his brother might ask him some question which would make it evident he had not heard.
"So that's what I think it is, my dear boy," said Sergey Ivanovitch, touching him on the shoulder.
"Yes, of course.
But, do you know?
I won't stand up for my view," answered Levin, with a guilty, childlike smile.
"Whatever was it I was disputing about?" he wondered. "Of course, I'm right, and he's right, and it's all first-rate.
Only I must go round to the counting house and see to things."
He got up, stretching and smiling.
Sergey Ivanovitch smiled too.
"If you want to go out, let's go together," he said, disinclined to be parted from his brother, who seemed positively breathing out freshness and energy. "Come, we'll go to the counting house, if you have to go there."
"Oh, heavens!" shouted Levin, so loudly that Sergey Ivanovitch was quite frightened.
"What, what is the matter?"
"How's Agafea Mihalovna's hand?" said Levin, slapping himself on the head. "I'd positively forgotten her even."
"It's much better."
"Well, anyway I'll run down to her.
Before you've time to get your hat on, I'll be back."
And he ran downstairs, clattering with his heels like a spring-rattle.
Chapter 7
Stephan Arkadyevitch had gone to Petersburg to perform the most natural and essential official duty--so familiar to everyone in the government service, though incomprehensible to outsiders-- that duty, but for which one could hardly be in government service, of reminding the ministry of his existence--and having, for the due performance of this rite, taken all the available cash from home, was gaily and agreeably spending his days at the races and in the summer villas. Meanwhile Dolly and the children had moved into the country, to cut down expenses as much as possible.
She had gone to Ergushovo, the estate that had been her dowry, and the one where in spring the forest had been sold. It was nearly forty miles from Levin's Pokrovskoe.
The big, old house at Ergushovo had been pulled down long ago, and the old prince had had the lodge done up and built on to.
Twenty years before, when Dolly was a child, the lodge had been roomy and comfortable, though, like all lodges, it stood sideways to the entrance avenue, and faced the south.
But by now this lodge was old and dilapidated.
When Stepan Arkadyevitch had gone down in the spring to sell the forest, Dolly had begged him to look over the house and order what repairs might be needed.
Stepan Arkadyevitch, like all unfaithful husbands indeed, was very solicitous for his wife's comfort, and he had himself looked over the house, and given instructions about everything that he considered necessary.
What he considered necessary was to cover all the furniture with cretonne, to put up curtains, to weed the garden, to make a little bridge on the pond, and to plant flowers. But he forgot many other essential matters, the want of which greatly distressed Darya Alexandrovna later on.
In spite of Stepan Arkadyevitch's efforts to be an attentive father and husband, he never could keep in his mind that he had a wife and children.
He had bachelor tastes, and it was in accordance with them that he shaped his life.
On his return to Moscow he informed his wife with pride that everything was ready, that the house would be a little paradise, and that he advised her most certainly to go.
His wife's staying away in the country was very agreeable to Stepan Arkadyevitch from every point of view: it did the children good, it decreased expenses, and it left him more at liberty.
Darya Alexandrovna regarded staying in the country for the summer as essential for the children, especially for the little girl, who had not succeeded in regaining her strength after the scarlatina, and also as a means of escaping the petty humiliations, the little bills owing to the wood-merchant, the fishmonger, the shoemaker, which made her miserable.
Besides this, she was pleased to go away to the country because she was dreaming of getting her sister Kitty to stay with her there. Kitty was to be back from abroad in the middle of the summer, and bathing had been prescribed for her.
Kitty wrote that no prospect was so alluring as to spend the summer with Dolly at Ergushovo, full of childish associations for both of them.
The first days of her existence in the country were very hard for Dolly.