Anna Karenina(page 2)

20 of 1759
‘How is mamma?’ he asked, passing his hand over his
daughter’s smooth, soft little neck. ‘Good morning,’ he
said, smiling to the boy, who had come up to greet him.
He was conscious that he loved the boy less, and always
tried to be fair; but the boy felt it, and did not respond
with a smile to his father’s chilly smile.
‘Mamma? She is up,’ answered the girl.
Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed. ‘That means that she’s not
slept again all night,’ he thought.
‘Well, is she cheerful?’
The little girl knew that there was a quarrel between
her father and mother, and that her mother could not be
cheerful, and that her father must be aware of this, and
that he was pretending when he asked about it so lightly.
And she blushed for her father. He at once perceived it,
and blushed too.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘She did not say we must do
our lessons, but she said we were to go for a walk with
Miss Hoole to grandmamma’s.’

‘Well, go, Tanya, my darling. Oh, wait a minute,
though,’ he said, still holding her and stroking her soft
little hand.
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He took off the matelpiece, where he had put it
yesterday, a little box of sweets, and gave her two, picking
out her favorites, a chocolate and a fondant.
‘For Grisha?’ said the little girl, pointing to the
chocolate.
‘Yes, yes.’ And still stroking her little shoulder, he
kissed her on the roots of here hair and neck, and let her
go.
‘The carriage is ready,’ said Matvey; ‘but there’s some
one to see you with a petition.’
‘Been here long?’ asked Stepan Arkadyevitch.
‘Half an hour.’
‘How many times have I told you to tell me at once?’
‘One must let you drink your coffee in peace, at least,’
said Matvey, in the affectionately gruff tone with which it
was impossible to be angry.
‘Well, show the person up at once,’ said Oblonsky,
frowning with vexation.
The petitioner, the widow of a staff captain Kalinin,
came with a request impossible and unreasonable; but
Stepan Arkadyevitch, as he generally did, made her sit
down, heard her to the end attentively without
interrupting her, and gave her detailed advice as to how
and to whom to apply, and even wrote her, in his large,
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22 of 1759
sprawling, good and legible hand, a confident and fluent
little note to a personage who might be of use to her.
Having got rid of the staff captain’s widow, Stepan
Arkadyevitch took his hat and stopped to recollect
whether he had forgotten anything. It appeared that he
had forgotten nothing except what he wanted to forget—
his wife.
‘Ah, yes!’ He bowed his head, and his handsome face
assumed a harassed expression. ‘To go, or not to go!’ he
said to himself; and an inner voice told him he must not
go, that nothing could come of it but falsity; that to
amend, to set right their relations was impossible, because
it was impossible to make her attractive again and able to
inspire love, or to make him an old man, not susceptible
to love. Except deceit and lying nothing could come of it
now; and deceit and lying were opposed to his nature.
‘It must be some time, though: it can’t go on like this,’
he said, trying to give himself courage. He squared his
chest, took out a cigarette, took two whiffs at it, flung it
into a mother-of-pearl ashtray, and with rapid steps
walked through the drawing room, and opened the other
door into his wife’s bedroom.
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23 of 1759
Chapter 4
Darya Alexandrovna, in a dressing jacket, and with her
now scanty, once luxuriant and beautiful hair fastened up
with hairpins on the nape of her neck, with a sunken, thin
face and large, startled eyes, which looked prominent from
the thinness of her face, was standing among a litter of all
sorts of things scattered all over the room, before an open
bureau, from which she was taking something. Hearing
her husband’s steps, she stopped, looking towards the
door, and trying assiduously to give her features a severe
and contemptuous expression. She felt she was afraid of
him, and afraid of the coming interview. She was just
attempting to do what she had attempted to do ten times
already in these last three days—to sort out the children’s
things and her own, so as to take them to her mother’s—
and again she could not bring herself to do this; but now
again, as each time before, she kept saying to herself, ‘that
things cannot go on like this, that she must take some step’
to punish him, put him to shame, avenge on him some
little part at least of the suffering he had caused her. She
still continued to tell herself that she should leave him, but
she was conscious that this was impossible; it was
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24 of 1759
impossible because she could not get out of the habit of
regarding him as her husband and loving him. Besides this,
she realized that if even here in her own house she could
hardly manage to look after her five children properly,
they would be still worse off where she was going with
them all. As it was, even in the course of these three days,
the youngest was unwell from being given unwholesome
soup, and the others had almost gone without their dinner
the day before. She was conscious that it was impossible to
go away; but, cheating herself, she went on all the same
sorting out her things and pretending she was going.
Seeing her husband, she dropped her hands into the
drawer of the bureau as though looking for something,
and only looked round at him when he had come quite
up to her. But her face, to which she tried to give a severe
and resolute expression, betrayed bewilderment and
suffering.
‘Dolly!’ he said in a subdued and timid voice. He bent
his head towards his shoulder and tried to look pitiful and
humble, but for all that he was radiant with freshness and
health. In a rapid glance she scanned his figure that
beamed with health and freshness. ‘Yes, he is happy and
content!’ she thought; ‘while I.... And that disgusting good
nature, which every one likes him for and praises—I hate
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25 of 1759
that good nature of his,’ she thought. Her mouth stiffened,
the muscles of the cheek contracted on the right side of
her pale, nervous face.
‘What do you want?’ she said in a rapid, deep,
unnatural voice.
‘Dolly!’ he repeated, with a quiver in his voice. ‘Anna
is coming today.’
‘Well, what is that to me? I can’t see her!’ she cried.
‘But you must, really, Dolly..’
‘Go away, go away, go away!’ she shrieked, not
looking at him, as though this shriek were called up by
physical pain.
Stepan Arkadyevitch could be calm when he thought
of his wife, he could hope that she would come round, as
Matvey expressed it, and could quietly go on reading his
paper and drinking his coffee; but when he saw her
tortured, suffering face, heard the tone of her voice,
submissive to fate and full of despair, there was a catch in
his breath and a lump in his throat, and his eyes began to
shine with tears.
‘My God! what have I done? Dolly! For God’s sake!....
You know....’ He could not go on; there was a sob in his
throat.
She shut the bureau with a slam, and glanced at him.
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26 of 1759
‘Dolly, what can I say?.... One thing:
forgive...Remember, cannot nine years of my life atone
for an instant...’
She dropped her eyes and listened, expecting what he
would say, as it were beseeching him in some way or
other to make her believe differently.
‘—instant of passion?’ he said, and would have gone
on, but at that word, as at a pang of physical pain, her lips
stiffened again, and again the muscles of her right cheek
worked.
‘Go away, go out of the room!’ she shrieked still more
shrilly, ‘and don’t talk to me of your passion and your
loathsomeness.’
She tried to go out, but tottered, and clung to the back
of a chair to support herself. His face relaxed, his lips
swelled, his eyes were swimming with tears.
‘Dolly!’ he said, sobbing now; ‘for mercy’s sake, think
of the children; they are not to blame! I am to blame, and
punish me, make me expiate my fault. Anything I can do,
I am ready to do anything! I am to blame, no words can
express how much I am to blame! But, Dolly, forgive me!’
She sat down. He listened to her hard, heavy breathing,
and he was unutterably sorry for her. She tried several
times to begin to speak, but could not. He waited.
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27 of 1759
‘You remember the children, Stiva, to play with them;
but I remember them, and know that this means their
ruin,’ she said—obviously one of the phrases she had more
than once repeated to herself in the course of the last few
days.
She had called him ‘Stiva,’ and he glanced at her with
gratitude, and moved to take her hand, but she drew back
from him with aversion.
‘I think of the children, and for that reason I would do
anything in the world to save them, but I don’t myself
know how to save them. by taking them away from their
father, or by leaving them with a vicious father—yes, a
vicious father.... Tell me, after what...has happened, can
we live together? Is that possible? Tell me, eh, is it
possible?’ she repeated, raising her voice, ‘after my
husband, the father of my children, enters into a love affair
with his own children’s governess?’
‘But what could I do? what could I do?’ he kept saying
in a pitiful voice, not knowing what he was saying, as his
head sank lower and lower.
‘You are loathsome to me, repulsive!’ she shrieked,
getting more and more heated. ‘Your tears mean nothing!
You have never loved me; you have neither heart nor
honorable feeling! You are hateful to me, disgusting, a
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Anna Karenina
28 of 1759
stranger—yes, a complete stranger!’ With pain and wrath
she uttered the word so terrible to herself—stranger.
He looked at her, and the fury expressed in her face
alarmed and amazed him. He did not understand how his
pity for her exasperated her. She saw in him sympathy for
her, but not love. ‘No, she hates me. She will not forgive
me,’ he thought.
‘It is awful! awful!’ he said.
At that moment in the next room a child began to cry;
probably it had fallen down. Darya Alexandrovna listened,
and her face suddenly softened.
She seemed to be pulling herself together for a few
seconds, as though she did not know where she was, and
what she was doing, and getting up rapidly, she moved
towards the door.
‘Well, she loves my child,’ he thought, noticing the
change of her face at the child’s cry, ‘my child: how can
she hate me?’
‘Dolly, one word more,’ he said, following her.
‘If you come near me, I will call in the servants, the
children! They may all know you are a scoundrel! I am
going away at once, and you may live here with your
mistress!’
And she went out, slamming the door.
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29 of 1759
Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed, wiped his face, and with a
subdued tread walked out of the room. ‘Matvey says she
will come round; but how? I don’t see the least chance of
it. Ah, oh, how horrible it is! And how vulgarly she
shouted,’ he said to himself, remembering her shriek and
the words—‘scoundrel’ and ‘mistress.’ ‘And very likely the
maids were listening! Horribly vulgar! horrible!’ Stepan
Arkadyevitch stood a few seconds alone, wiped his face,
squared his chest, and walked out of the room.
It was Friday, and in the dining room the German
watchmaker was winding up the clock. Stepan
Arkadyevitch remembered his joke about this punctual,
bald watchmaker, ‘that the German was wound up for a
whole lifetime himself, to wind up watches,’ and he
smiled. Stepan Arkadyevitch was fond of a joke: ‘And
maybe she will come round! That’s a good expression,
‘come round,’’ he thought. ‘I must repeat that.’
‘Matvey!’ he shouted. ‘Arrange everything with Darya
in the sitting room for Anna Arkadyevna,’ he said to
Matvey when he came in.
‘Yes, sir.’
Stepan Arkadyevitch put on his fur coat and went out
onto the steps.
‘You won’t dine at home?’ said Matvey, seeing him off.
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30 of 1759
‘That’s as it happens. But here’s for the housekeeping,’
he said, taking ten roubles from his pocketbook. ‘That’ll
be enough.’
‘Enough or not enough, we must make it do,’ said
Matvey, slamming the carriage door and stepping back
onto the steps.
Darya Alexandrovna meanwhile having pacified the
child, and knowing from the sound of the carriage that he
had gone off, went back again to her bedroom. It was her
solitary refuge from the household cares which crowded
upon her directly she went out from it. Even now, in the
short time she had been in the nursery, the English
governess and Matrona Philimonovna had succeeded in
putting several questions to her, which did not admit of
delay, and which only she could answer: ‘What were the
children to put on for their walk? Should they have any
milk? Should not a new cook be sent for?’
‘Ah, let me alone, let me alone!’ she said, and going
back to her bedroom she sat down in the same place as she
had sat when talking to her husband, clasping tightly her
thin hands with the rings that slipped down on her bony
fingers, and fell to going over in her memory all the
conversation. ‘He has gone! But has he broken it off with
her?’ she thought. ‘Can it be he sees her? Why didn’t I ask
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31 of 1759
him! No, no, reconciliation is impossible. Even if we
remain in the same house, we are strangers—strangers
forever! She repeated again with special significance the
word so dreadful to her. ‘And how I loved him! my God,
how I loved him!.... How I loved him! And now don’t I
love him? Don’t I love him more than before? The most
horrible thing is,’ she began, but did not finish her
thought, because Matrona Philimonovna put her head in
at the door.
‘Let us send for my brother,’ she said; ‘he can get a
dinner anyway, or we shall have the children getting
nothing to eat till six again, like yesterday.’
‘Very well, I will come directly and see about it. But
did you send for some new milk?’
And Darya Alexandrovna plunged into the duties of the
day, and drowned her grief in them for a time.
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32 of 1759
Chapter 5
Stepan Arkadyevitch had learned easily at school,
thanks to his excellent abilities, but he had been idle and
mischievous, and therefore was one of the lowest in his
class. But in spite of his habitually dissipated mode of life,
his inferior grade in the service, and his comparative
youth, he occupied the honorable and lucrative position of
president of one of the government boards at Moscow.
This post he had received through his sister Anna’s
husband, Alexey Alexandrovitch Karenin, who held one
of the most important positions in the ministry to whose
department the Moscow office belonged. But if Karenin
had not got his brother- in-law this berth, then through a
hundred other personages— brothers, sisters, cousins,
uncles, and aunts—Stiva Oblonsky would have received
this post, or some other similar one, together with the
salary of six thousand absolutely needful for them, as his
affairs, in spite of his wife’s considerable property, were in
an embarrassed condition.
Half Moscow and Petersburg were friends and relations
of Stepan Arkadyevitch. He was born in the midst of those
who had been and are the powerful ones of this world.
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One-third of the men in the government, the older men,
had been friends of his father’s, and had known him in
petticoats; another third were his intimate chums, and the
remainder were friendly acquaintances. Consequently the
distributors of earthly blessings in the shape of places,
rents, shares, and such, were all his friends, and could not
overlook one of their own set; and Oblonsky had no need
to make any special exertion to get a lucrative post. He
had only not to refuse things, not to show jealousy, not to
be quarrelsome or take offense, all of which from his
characteristic good nature he never did. It would have
struck him as absurd if he had been told that he would not
get a position with the salary he required, especially as he
expected nothing out of the way; he only wanted what
the men of his own age and standing did get, and he was
no worse qualified for performing duties of the kind than
any other man.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was not merely liked by all who
knew him for his good humor, but for his bright
disposition, and his unquestionable honesty. In him, in his
handsome, radiant figure, his sparkling eyes, black hair and
eyebrows, and the white and red of his face, there was
something which produced a physical effect of kindliness
and good humor on the people who met him. ‘Aha! Stiva!
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Oblonsky! Here he is!’ was almost always said with a smile
of delight on meeting him. Even though it happened at
times that after a conversation with him it seemed that
nothing particularly delightful had happened, the next day,
and the next, every one was just as delighted at meeting
him again.
After filling for three years the post of president of one
of the government boards at Moscow, Stepan
Arkadyevitch had won the respect, as well as the liking, of
his fellow officials, subordinates, and superiors, and all who
had had business with him. The principal qualities in
Stepan Arkadyevitch which had gained him this universal
respect in the service consisted, in the first place, of his
extreme indulgence for others, founded on a consciousness
of his own shortcomings; secondly, of his perfect
liberalism—not the liberalism he read of in the papers, but
the liberalism that was in his blood, in virtue of which he
treated all men perfectly equally and exactly the same,
whatever their fortune or calling might be; and thirdly—
the most important point—his complete indifference to
the business in which he was engaged, in consequence of
which he was never carried away, and never made
mistakes.
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On reaching the offices of the board, Stepan
Arkadyevitch, escorted by a deferential porter with a
portfolio, went into his little private room, put on his
uniform, and went into the boardroom. The clerks and
copyists all rose, greeting him with good-humored
deference. Stepan Arkadyevitch moved quickly, as ever, to
his place, shook hands with his colleagues, and sat down.
He made a joke or two, and talked just as much as was
consistent with due decorum, and began work. No one
knew better than Stepan Arkadyevitch how to hit on the
exact line between freedom, simplicity, and official
stiffness necessary for the agreeable conduct of business. A
secretary, with the good-humored deference common to
every one in Stepan Arkadyevitch’s office, came up with
papers, and began to speak in the familiar and easy tone
which had been introduced by Stepan Arkadyevitch.
‘We have succeeded in getting the information from
the government department of Penza. Here, would you
care?...’
‘You’ve got them at last?’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
laying his finger on the paper. ‘Now, gentlemen...’
And the sitting of the board began.
‘If they knew,’ he thought, bending his head with a
significant air as he listened to the report, ‘what a guilty
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little boy their president was half an hour ago.’ And his
eyes were laughing during the reading of the report. Till
two o’clock the sitting would go on without a break, and
at two o’clock there would be an interval and luncheon.
It was not yet two, when the large glass doors of the
boardroom suddenly opened and someone came in.
All the officials sitting on the further side under the
portrait of the Tsar and the eagle, delighted at any
distraction, looked round at the door; but the doorkeeper
standing at the door at once drove out the intruder, and
closed the glass door after him.
When the case had been read through, Stepan
Arkadyevitch got up and stretched, and by way of tribute
to the liberalism of the times took out a cigarette in the
boardroom and went into his private room. Two of the
members of the board, the old veteran in the service,
Nikitin, and the Kammerjunker Grinevitch, went in with
him.
‘We shall have time to finish after lunch,’ said Stepan
Arkadyevitch.
‘To be sure we shall!’ said Nikitin.
‘A pretty sharp fellow this Fomin must be,’ said
Grinevitch of one of the persons taking part in the case
they were examining.
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Stepan Arkadyevitch frowned at Grinevitch’s words,
giving him thereby to understand that it was improper to
pass judgment prematurely, and made him no reply.
‘Who was that came in?’ he asked the doorkeeper.
‘Someone, your excellency, crept in without
permission directly my back was turned. He was asking for
you. I told him: when the members come out, then..’
‘Where is he?’
‘Maybe he’s gone into the passage, but here he comes
anyway. That is he,’ said the doorkeeper, pointing to a
strongly built, broadshouldered man with a curly beard,
who, without taking off his sheepskin cap, was running
lightly and rapidly up the worn steps of the stone
staircase.b One of the members going down—a lean
official with a portfolio—stood out of his way and looked
disapprovingly at the legs of the stranger, then glanced
inquiringly at Oblonsky.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was standing at the top of the
stairs. His good-naturedly beaming face above the
embroidered collar of his uniform beamed more than ever
when he recognized the man coming up.
‘Why, it’s actually you, Levin, at last!’ he said with a
friendly mocking smile, scanning Levin as he approached.
‘How is it you have deigned to look me up in this den?’
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said Stepan Arkadyevitch, and not content with shaking
hands, he kissed his friend. ‘Have you been here long?’
‘I have just come, and very much wanted to see you,’
said Levin, looking shyly and at the same time angry and
uneasily around.
‘Well, let’s go into my room,’ said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, who knew his friend’s sensitive and irritable
shyness, and, taking his arm, he drew him along, as though
guiding him through dangers.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was on familiar terms with almost
all his acquaintances, and called almost all of them by their
Christian names: old men of sixty, boys of twenty, actors,
ministers, merchants, and adjutant-generals, so that many
of his intimate chums were to be found at the extreme
ends of the social ladder, and would have been very much
surprised to learn that they had, through the medium of
Oblonsky, something in common. He was the familiar
friend of everyone with whom he took a glass of
champagne, and he took a glass of champagne with
everyone, and when in consequence he met any of his
disreputable chums, as he used in joke to call many of his
friends, in the presence of his subordinates, he well knew
how, with his characteristic tact, to diminish the
disagreeable impression made on them. Levin was not a
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disreputable chum, but Oblonsky, with his ready tact, felt
that Levin fancied he might not care to show his intimacy
with him before his subordinates, and so he made haste to
take him off into his room.
Levin was almost of the same age as Oblonsky; their
intimacy did not rest merely on champagne. Levin had
been the friend and companion of his early youth. They
were fond of one another in spite of the difference of their
characters and tastes, as friends are fond of one another
who have been together in early youth. But in spite of
this, each of them—as is often the way with men who
have selected careers of different kinds—though in
discussion he would even justify the other’s career, in his
heart despised it. It seemed to each of them that the life he
led himself was the only real life, and the life led by his
friend was a mere phantasm. Oblonsky could not restrain a
slight mocking smile at the sight of Levin. How often he
had seen him come up to Moscow from the country
where he was doing something, but what precisely Stepan
Arkadyevitch could never quite make out, and indeed he
took no interest in the matter. Levin arrived in Moscow
always excited and in a hurry, rather ill at ease and irritated
by his own want of ease, and for the most part with a
perfectly new, unexpected view of things. Stepan
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Anna Karenina
40 of 1759
Arkadyevitch laughed at this, and liked it. In the same way
Levin in his heart despised the town mode of life of his
friend, and his official duties, which he laughed at, and
regarded as trifling. But the difference was that Oblonsky,
as he was doing the same as every one did, laughed
complacently and good-humoredly, while Levin laughed
without complacency and sometimes angrily.
‘We have long been expecting you,’ said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, going into his room and letting Levin’s
hand go as though to show that here all danger was over.
‘I am very, very glad to see you,’ he went on. ‘Well, how
are you? Eh? When did you come?’
Levin was silent, looking at the unknown faces of
Oblonsky’s two companions, and especially at the hand of
the elegant Grinevitch, which had such long white fingers,
such long yellow filbert-shaped nails, and such huge
shining studs on the shirt-cuff, that apparently they
absorbed all his attention, and allowed him no freedom of
thought. Oblonsky noticed this at once, and smiled.
‘Ah, to be sure, let me introduce you,’ he said. ‘My
colleagues: Philip Ivanitch Nikitin, Mihail Stanislavitch
Grinevitch’—and turning to Levin—‘a district councilor, a
modern district councilman, a gymnast who lifts thirteen
stone with one hand, a cattle-breeder and sportsman, and
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my friend, Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin, the brother of
Sergey Ivonovitch Koznishev.’
‘Delighted,’ said the veteran.
‘I have the honor of knowing your brother, Sergey
Ivanovitch,’ said Grinevitch, holding out his slender hand
with its long nails.
Levin frowned, shook hands coldly, and at once turned
to Oblonsky. Though he had a great respect for his halfbrother,
an author well known to all Russia, he could not
endure it when people treated him not as Konstantin
Levin, but as the brother of the celebrated Koznishev.
‘No, I am no longer a district councilor. I have
quarreled with them all, and don’t go to the meetings any
more,’ he said, turning to Oblonsky.
‘You’ve been quick about it!’ said Oblonsky with a
smile. ‘But how? why?’
‘It’s a long story. I will tell you some time,’ said Levin,
but he began telling him at once. ‘Well, to put it shortly, I
was convinced that nothing was really done by the district
councils, or ever could be,’ he began, as though some one
had just insulted him. ‘On one side it’s a plaything; they
play at being a parliament, and I’m neither young enough
nor old enough to find amusement in playthings; and on
the other side’ (he stammered) ‘it’s a means for the coterie
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of the district to make money. Formerly they had
wardships, courts of justice, now they have the district
council—not in the form of bribes, but in the form of
unearned salary,’ he said, as hotly as though someone of
those present had opposed his opinion.
‘Aha! You’re in a new phase again, I see—a
conservative,’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch. ‘However, we
can go into that later.’
‘Yes, later. But I wanted to see you,’ said Levin,
looking with hatred at Grinevitch’s hand.
Stepan Arkadyevitch gave a scarcely perceptible smile.
‘How was it you used to say you would never wear
European dress again?’ he said, scanning his new suit,
obviously cut by a French tailor. ‘Ah! I see: a new phase.’
Levin suddenly blushed, not as grown men blush,
slightly, without being themselves aware of it, but as boys
blush, feeling that they are ridiculous through their
shyness, and consequently ashamed of it and blushing still
more, almost to the point of tears. And it was so strange to
see this sensible, manly face in such a childish plight, that
Oblonsky left off looking at him.
‘Oh, where shall we meet? You know I want very
much to talk to you,’ said Levin.
Oblonsky seemed to ponder.
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‘I’ll tell you what: let’s go to Gurin’s to lunch, and
there we can talk. I am free till three.’
‘No,’ answered Levin, after an instant’s thought, ‘I have
got to go on somewhere else.’
‘All right, then, let’s dine together.’
‘Dine together? But I have nothing very particular,
only a few words to say, and a question I want to ask you,
and we can have a talk afterwards.’
‘Well, say the few words, then, at once, and we’ll
gossip after dinner.’
‘Well, it’s this,’ said Levin; ‘but it’s of no importance,
though.’
His face all at once took an expression of anger from
the effort he was making to surmount his shyness.
‘What are the Shtcherbatskys doing? Everything as it
used to be?’ he said.
Stepan Arkadyevitch, who had long known that Levin
was in love with his sister-in-law, Kitty, gave a hardly
perceptible smile, and his eyes sparkled merrily.
‘You said a few words, but I can’t answer in a few
words, because.... Excuse me a minute..’
A secretary came in, with respectful familiarity and the
modest consciousness, characteristic of every secretary, of
superiority to his chief in the knowledge of their business;
Anna Karenina
44 of 1759