y," she said in
answer to Stepan Arkadyevitch's question whether he might smoke,
"just so as to be able to smoke"--and glancing at Levin, instead
of asking whether he would smoke, she pulled closer a
tortoise-shell cigar-case and took a cigarette.

"How are you feeling today?" her brother asked her.

"Oh, nothing. Nerves, as usual."

"Yes, isn't it extraordinarily fine?" said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
noticing that Levin was scrutinizing the picture.

"I have never seen a better portrait."

"And extraordinarily like, isn't it?" said Vorkuev.

Levin looked from the portrait to the original. A peculiar
brilliance lighted up Anna's face when she felt his eyes on her.
Levin flushed, and to cover his confusion would have asked
whether she had seen Darya Alexandrovna lately; but at that
moment Anna spoke. "We were just talking, Ivan Petrovitch and I,
of Vashtchenkov's last pictures. Have you seen them?"

"Yes, I have seen them," answered Levin.

"But, I beg your pardon, I interrupted you...you were saying?..."

Levin asked if she had seen Dolly lately.

"She was here yesterday. She was very indignant with the high
school people on Grisha's account. The Latin teacher, it seems,
had been unfair to him."

"Yes, I have seen his pictures. I didn't care for them very
much," Levin went back to the subject she had started.

Levin talked now not at all with that purely businesslike
attitude to the subject with which he had been talking all the
morning. Every word in his conversation with her had a special
significance. And talking to her was pleasant; still pleasanter
it was to listen to her.

Anna talked not merely naturally and cleverly, but cleverly and
carelessly, attaching no value to her own ideas and giving great
weight to the ideas of the person she was talking to.

The conversation turned on the new movement in art, on the new
illustrations of the Bible by a French artist. Vorkuev attacked
the artist for a realism carried to the point of coarseness.

Levin said that the French had carried conventionality further
than anyone, and that consequently they see a great merit in the
return to realism. In the fact of not lying they see poetry.

Never had anything clever said by Levin given him so much
pleasure as this remark. Anna's face lighted up at once, as at
once she appreciated the thought. She laughed.

"I laugh," she said, "as one laughs when one sees a very true
portrait. What you said so perf