Countess Nordstone. She was a dried-up, sallow, nervous, sickly woman, with brilliant black eyes. She was fond of Kitty, and her affection, like that of every married woman for a young girl, was expressed by a keen desire to have her married in accordance with her own ideal of conjugal happiness. She wanted to marry her to Vronsky. Levin, whom she had often met at the Shcherbatskys' the first of the winter, was always distasteful to her, and her favorite occupation, after she had met him in society, was to make sport of him.
"I am enchanted," she said, "when he looks down on me from his loftiness; either he fails to honor me with his learned conversation because I am too silly for him, or else he treats me condescendingly. I like this; condescending to me! I am very glad that he cannot endure me."
She was right, because the fact was that Levin could not endure her, and he despised her for being proud of what she regarded as a merit,—her nervous temperament, her indifference and delicate scorn for all that seemed to her gross and material.
The relationship between Levin and the Countess Nordstone was such as is often met with in society where two persons, friends in outward appearance, despise each other to such a degree that they cannot hold a serious conversation, or even clash with each other.
The Countess Nordstone instantly addressed herself to Levin:—
"Ah, Konstantin Dmitrievitch! are you back again in our abominable Babylon?" said she, giving him her little yellow hand, and recalling his own words at the beginning of the winter when he said Moscow was a Babylon. "Is Babylon converted, or have you been corrupted?" she added, with a mocking smile in Kitty's direction.
"I am greatly flattered, countess, that you remember my words so well," replied Levin, who, having had time to collect his thoughts, instantly entered into the facetiously hostile tone peculiar to his relations with the
