PART SIXTH
CHAPTER I
Darya Aleksandrovna, with her children, was spending the summer at Pokrovskoye, at the house of her sister, Kitty Levin. The house on her own estate, at Yergushovo, was all in ruins, and Levin and his wife had urged her to come to them for the summer. Stepan Arkadyevitch heartily approved of this arrangement. He assured them that he very much regretted that his duties would prevent him from spending the summer with his family in the country, for that would be the greatest possible delight for him, and if he stayed in Moscow he could occasionally run down for a day or two at a time.
Besides the Oblonskys and all their children, the Levins had with them the old princess, who considered her presence near her daughter at this particular time indispensable; they had also Varenka, Kitty's Soden friend, who was fulfilling her promise of making Kitty a visit when she should have been married. All these were Kitty's relatives and friends. Levin, though he liked them all, still felt some regret for his own people and his own ways, which were swallowed up as in a flood by the "Shcherbatsky element," as he called it. Of his own relatives that summer Sergyeï Ivanovitch was the only representative, and he was not a Levin but a Koznuishef. So that the Levin spirit was at a great discount. There were so many persons in the long-deserted house that almost all the rooms were occupied, and almost every day the old princess, as she sat down at table, would count the guests and send off to the special table the grandson or granddaughter who made the number thirteen. And Kitty, diligently occupied with her
59
