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da Anna Karenina
| " ... Pierre, playing on his surname, making no
secret of her relations with him. "I want to put some more in." "You'll spoil it!" "No, I won't spoil it! Well, and how is your wife?" said the Baroness suddenly, interrupting Vronsky's conversation with his comrade. "We've been marrying you off here. Have you brought your wife along?" "No, Baroness. I was born a gypsy, and a gypsy I'll die." "So much the better- so much the better. Shake hands on it." And the Baroness, detaining Vronsky, began telling him, interspersing her story with many jokes, about her latest plans of life, and seeking his counsel. "He persists in refusing to give me a divorce! Well, what am I to do?" (He was her husband.) "Now I want to begin a suit against him. What ..... ........... ; in India he had traveled on an elephant; and now, in Russia, he wished to taste all the peculiarly Russian forms of pleasure. Vronsky, who was, as it were, chief master of the ceremonies to him, was at great pains to distribute all the Russian amusements suggested by various persons to the Prince. They had race horses, and Russian pancakes and bear hunts, and troikas, and gypsy choruses, and drinking orgies, with the Russian accompaniment of broken crockery. And the Prince, with surprising ease, fell in with the Russian spirit; he smashed trays full of crockery, sat with a gypsy girl on his knee, and seemed to be asking: What more? Or does the whole Russian spirit consist in just this? In reality, of all the Russian entertainments the Prince liked best French actresses, a ballet dancer, and white-seal champagne. Vronsky was used to Princes, but, either because he had himself changed of late, or that he was in too close proximity to the Prince, .... |