He was nine years old, he was a child; but he knew his own soul, it was dear to him, he protected it as the eyelid protects the eye, and did not let anyone into his soul without the key of love. His educators complained that he did not want to learn, yet his soul was overflowing with a thirst for knowledge. And he learned from Kapitonych, from his nurse, from Nadenka, from Vassily Lukich, but not from his teachers. The water that his father and the teacher had expected to turn their mill-wheels had long since seeped away and was working elsewhere.
His father punished Seryozha by not letting him visit Nadenka, Lydia Ivanovna’s niece; but this punishment turned out to be lucky for Seryozha. Vassily Lukich was in good spirits and showed him how to make windmills. They spent the whole evening working and dreaming of how to make a windmill so that you could turn round with it: hold on to the wings, or be tied to them, and turn. Seryozha did not think of his mother all evening, but when he went to bed, he suddenly remembered her and prayed in his own words that, for his birthday tomorrow, his mother would stop hiding and come to him.
‘Vassily Lukich, do you know what extra I prayed for besides?’
‘To study better?’
‘No.’
‘Toys?’
‘No. You’ll never guess. It’s splendid, but secret! If it comes true, I’ll tell you. You can’t guess?’
‘No, I can’t. You’ll have to tell me,’ Vassily Lukich said, smiling, which rarely happened with him. ‘Well, lie down, I’m putting the candle out.’
‘And I can see what I prayed for better without the candle. Now I’ve nearly told you the secret!’ said Seryozha, laughing gaily.
When the candle was taken away, he heard and felt his mother. She stood over him and caressed him with her loving eyes. But windmills came, a penknife came, everything got confused, and he fell asleep.
XXVIII
On arriving in Petersburg, Vronsky and Anna stayed in one of the best hotels. Vronsky separately on the lower floor, Anna upstairs with the baby, the wet nurse and the maid, in a big four-room suite.
The day they arrived Vronsky went to see his brother. There he found his mother, who had come from Moscow on her own business. His mother and sister-in-law met him as usual; they asked him about his trip abroad, spoke of mutual acquaintances, and did not say a word about his liaison with Anna. But his brother, when he came to Vronsky the next day, asked about her himself, and Alexei Vronsky told him straight out that he considered his liaison with Mme Karenina a marriage; that he hoped to arrange for a divorce and then marry her; and till then he considered her just as much his wife as any other wife and asked him to convey that to his mother and his wife.
‘If society doesn’t approve of it, that’s all the same to me,’ said Vronsky, ‘but if my family wants to have family relations with me, they will have to have the same relations with my wife.’
The elder brother, who had always respected the opinions of the younger, could not quite tell whether he was right or wrong until society decided the question; he himself, for his own part, had nothing against it and went together with Alexei to see Anna.
In his brother’s presence, as in everyone else‘s, Vronsky addressed Anna formally and treated her as a close acquaintance, but it was implied that the brother knew of their relations, and mention was made of Anna going to Vronsky’s estate.
Despite all his social experience, Vronsky, owing to the new position in which he found himself, was strangely deluded. It seems he ought to have understood that society was closed to him and Anna; but some vague arguments were born in his head, that it had been so only in olden times, while now, progress being so quick (without noticing it he had become an advocate of every sort of progress), society’s outlook had changed and the question of their being received in society was still to be decided. ‘Naturally,’ he thought, ‘court society will not receive her, but closer acquaintances can and must understand it in the right way.’
A man can spend several hours sitting cross-legged in the same position if he knows that nothing prevents him from changing it; but if he knows that he has to sit with his legs crossed like that, he will get cramps, his legs will twitch and strain towards where he would like to stretch them. That was what Vronsky felt with regard to society. Though in the depths of his soul he knew that society was closed to them, he tested whether it might change now and they might be received. But he very soon noticed that, though society was open to him personally, it was closed to Anna. As in the game of cat and mouse, arms that were raised for him were immediately lowered before Anna.
One of the first ladies of Petersburg society whom Vronsky saw was his cousin Betsy.
