of the new coffee-pot. "Pierre, bring some more coffee," said she to Petritsky, whom she called Pierre, after his family name, making no concealment of her intimacy with him. "I will add it."
"You will spoil it."
"No! I won't spoil it. Well! and your wife?" said the baroness, suddenly interrupting Vronsky's remarks to his companions. "We have been marrying you off. Did you bring your wife?"
"No, baroness. I was born a Bohemian, and I shall die a Bohemian."
"So much the better, so much the better; give us your hand!"
And the baroness, without letting him go, began to talk with him, developing her various plans of life, and asking his advice with many jests.
"He will never be willing to let me have a divorce. Well! what am I to do? [He was her husband.] I now mean to institute a lawsuit. What should you think of it? .... Kamerovsky, just watch the coffee! It's boiling over. .... You see how well I understand business! I mean to begin a lawsuit to get control of my fortune. Do you understand this nonsense? Under the pretext that I have been unfaithful," said she, in a scornful tone, "he means to get possession of my estate."
Vronsky listened with amusement to this gay prattle of the pretty woman, approved of what she said, gave her half-jesting advice, and assumed the tone he usually affected with women of her character. In his Petersburg world, humanity was divided into two absolutely distinct categories,—the one of a low order, trivial, stupid, and above all ridiculous people, who declared that one husband ought to live with one wedded wife, that girls should be virtuous, women chaste, men brave, temperate, and upright, occupied in bringing up their children decently, in earning their bread, and paying their debts, and other such absurdities. People of this kind were old-fashioned and ridiculous.
But there was another and vastly superior class, to which he and his friends belonged, and in this the chief
