Not only that, but he did not know what to say, how to look, how to walk. To speak of unrelated things seemed to him offensive, impossible; to speak of death, of dark things - also impossible. To be silent - also impossible. ‘If I look, I’m afraid he’ll think I’m studying him; if I don’t look, he’ll think I’m thinking of something else. If I walk on tiptoe, he’ll be displeased; if I stomp around, it’s embarrassing.’ But Kitty obviously did not think about herself and had no time to; she thought about him, because she knew something, and it all turned out well. She told him about herself and about her wedding, and smiled, and pitied, and caressed him, and spoke of cases of recovery, and it all turned out well; which meant that she knew. The proof that what she and Agafya Mikhailovna did was not instinctive, animal, unreasoning, was that, besides physical care, the alleviation of suffering, both Agafya Mikhailovna and Kitty demanded something more important for the dying man, something that had nothing in common with physical conditions. Agafya Mikhailovna, speaking of an old man who had died, said: ‘Well, thank God, he took communion, got anointed, God grant everybody such a death.’ In the same way Katia, besides all her cares about linen, bedsores, drink, persuaded the sick man on the very first day of the need to take communion and be anointed.
When he left the sick man and went to his own rooms for the night, Levin sat, his head bowed, not knowing what to do. Not to mention having supper, settling for the night, thinking about what they were going to do, he could not even speak to his wife: he was abashed. But Kitty, on the contrary, was more active than usual. She was even more animated than usual. She ordered supper, unpacked their things herself, helped to make the beds, and did not forget to sprinkle them with Persian powder. She had in her that excitement and quickness of judgement that appear in men before a battle, a struggle, in dangerous and decisive moments of life, those moments when once and for all a man shows his worth and that his whole past has not been in vain but has been a preparation for those moments.
Everything she did went well, and it was not yet midnight when all the things were unpacked, cleanly and neatly, somehow specially, so that the room began to resemble her home, her rooms: beds made, brushes, combs, mirrors laid out, doilies spread.
Levin found it inexcusable even now to eat, sleep, talk, and felt that his every movement was improper. Yet she was sorting her brushes, doing it in such a way that there was no offence in it.
They could not eat anything anyway, and for a long time they could not fall asleep; it was even a long time before they went to bed.
‘I’m very glad I persuaded him to be anointed tomorrow,’ she said, sitting in a dressing jacket before her folding mirror and combing her soft, fragrant hair with a fine comb. ‘I’ve never seen it done, but mama told me all the prayers are about healing.’
‘Do you really think he can get well?’Levin said, looking at the narrow parting at the back of her round little head, which kept closing the moment she drew her comb forward.
‘I asked the doctor: he says he can’t live more than three days. But can they really know? All the same, I’m very glad I persuaded him,’ she said, looking sideways at her husband from behind her hair. ‘Anything can happen,’ she added, with the special, somewhat sly expression she usually had on her face when she talked about religion.
Since their conversation about religion while they were still engaged, neither he nor she had ever started speaking of it, but she always observed her rituals of going to church and saying her prayers with the same calm awareness that it was necessary. Despite his assurances to the contrary, she was firmly convinced that he was as good a Christian as she was, or even better, and that everything he said about it was one of those ridiculous male quirks, like what he said about broderie anglaise: that good people mend holes, while she cut them on purpose, and so on.
‘Yes, that woman, Marya Nikolaevna, couldn’t have arranged it all,’ said Levin. ‘And... I must admit that I’m very, very glad you came. You’re such purity that ...’ He took her hand and did not kiss it (to kiss that hand in this presence of death seemed improper to him) but only pressed it with a guilty air, looking into her brightened eyes.
‘It would be so painful for you alone,’ she said, and raising her arms high so that they hid her cheeks, blushing from pleasure, she twisted her braids on the back of her head and pinned them up. ‘No,’ she went on, ‘she didn’t know... Fortunately, I learned a lot in Soden.’
‘Can there have been such sick people there?’
‘Worse.’
‘For me the terrible thing is that I can’t help seeing him as he was when he was young... You can’t imagine what a lovely youth he was, but I didn’t understand him then.’
