He expected all this, he saw it in their faces, and he read it in the indifference with which his visitors conversed together as they walked up and down the studio, leisurely examining the manikins and busts, while waiting for him to take the covering off his painting.
But, in spite of this, all the time that he was turning over his studies, raising his window-blinds, and uncovering his paintings, he experienced a powerful emotion, and all the more so because, though he considered that all distinguished and wealthy Russians must necessarily be "cattle" and fools, yet Vronsky, and particularly Anna, pleased him.
"Here," he said, stepping back from the easel and pointing to the painting, "is the 'Christ before Pilate.' Matthew, chapter xxvii."
He felt his lips tremble with emotion, and he took his place behind his guests. During the few seconds, during which the visitors looked silently at the painting, Mikhaïlof also looked at it and looked at it with the indifference of a stranger. In those few seconds he anticipated a superior and infallible criticism from these three persons, whom but a moment before he had despised. He forgot all that he had thought about his painting during the three years while he had been painting it; he forgot all those merits which had been so indubitable to him; he looked at it now with the cold and critical look of a stranger, and found nothing good in it. He saw in the foreground the irate face of Pilate and the Christ's serene countenance, and in the middle distance the figures of Pilate's servants, and among them John, looking on at the proceedings. Each face, with its attempted expression, with its faults, with its rectifications, each face which, with its own peculiar character, had, as it were, been a growth from himself, and had cost him so much travail and delight,—and all these faces, which he had changed so many times so as to unify them,—all the shades of color, all the nuances, obtained with such extraordinary pains,—all this, taken together and looked at in such a way, now seemed to him commonplace, a thousand fold commonplace! The face which he had
