“Well, you didn’t expect me, eh?” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting out of the sledge, splashed with mud on the bridge of his nose, on his cheek, and on his eyebrows, but radiant with health and good spirits.  “I’ve come to see you in the first place,” he said, embracing and kissing him, “to have some stand-shooting second, and to sell the forest at Ergushovo third.”

“Delightful!  What a spring we’re having!  How ever did you get along in a sledge?”

“In a cart it would have been worse still, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” answered the driver, who knew him.

“Well, I’m very, very glad to see you,” said Levin, with a genuine smile of childlike delight.

Levin led his friend to the room set apart for visitors, where Stepan Arkadyevitch’s things were carried also—­a bag, a gun in a case, a satchel for cigars.  Leaving him there to wash and change his clothes, Levin went off to the counting house to speak about the ploughing and clover.  Agafea Mihalovna, always very anxious for the credit of the house, met him in the hall with inquiries about dinner.

“Do just as you like, only let it be as soon as possible,” he said, and went to the bailiff.

When he came back, Stepan Arkadyevitch, washed and combed, came out of his room with a beaming smile, and they went upstairs together.

“Well, I am glad I managed to get away to you!  Now I shall understand what the mysterious business is that you are always absorbed in here.  No, really, I envy you.  What a house, how nice it all is!  So bright, so cheerful!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, forgetting that it was not always spring and fine weather like that day.  “And your nurse is simply charming!  A pretty maid in an apron might be even more agreeable, perhaps; but for your severe monastic style it does very well.”

Stepan Arkadyevitch told him many interesting pieces of news; especially interesting to Levin was the news that his brother, Sergey Ivanovitch, was intending to pay him a visit in the summer.

Not one word did Stepan Arkadyevitch say in reference to Kitty and the Shtcherbatskys; he merely gave him greetings from his wife.  Levin was grateful to him for his delicacy and was very glad of his visitor.  As always happened with him during his solitude, a mass of ideas and feelings had been accumulating within him, which he could not communicate to those about him.  And now he poured out upon Stepan Arkadyevitch his poetic joy in the spring, and his failures and plans for the land, and his thoughts and criticisms on the books he had been reading, and the idea of his own book, the basis of which really was, though he was unaware of it himself, a criticism of all the old books on agriculture.  Stepan Arkadyevitch, always charming, understanding everything at the slightest reference, was particularly charming on this visit, and Levin noticed in him a special tenderness, as it were, and a new tone of respect that flattered him.