“Where’s my spade, mamma?”

“I speak French, and you must too.”

The little girl tried to say it in French, but could not remember the French for spade; the mother prompted her, and then told her in French where to look for the spade.  And this made a disagreeable impression on Levin.

Everything in Darya Alexandrovna’s house and children struck him now as by no means so charming as a little while before.  “And what does she talk French with the children for?” he thought; “how unnatural and false it is!  And the children feel it so:  Learning French and unlearning sincerity,” he thought to himself, unaware that Darya Alexandrovna had thought all that over twenty times already, and yet, even at the cost of some loss of sincerity, believed it necessary to teach her children French in that way.

“But why are you going?  Do stay a little.”

Levin stayed to tea; but his good-humor had vanished, and he felt ill at ease.

After tea he went out into the hall to order his horses to be put in, and, when he came back, he found Darya Alexandrovna greatly disturbed, with a troubled face, and tears in her eyes.  While Levin had been outside, an incident had occurred which had utterly shattered all the happiness she had been feeling that day, and her pride in her children.  Grisha and Tanya had been fighting over a ball.  Darya Alexandrovna, hearing a scream in the nursery, ran in and saw a terrible sight.  Tanya was pulling Grisha’s hair, while he, with a face hideous with rage, was beating her with his fists wherever he could get at her.  Something snapped in Darya Alexandrovna’s heart when she saw this.  It was as if darkness had swooped down upon her life; she felt that these children of hers, that she was so proud of, were not merely most ordinary, but positively bad, ill-bred children, with coarse, brutal propensities—­wicked children.

She could not talk or think of anything else, and she could not speak to Levin of her misery.

Levin saw she was unhappy and tried to comfort her, saying that it showed nothing bad, that all children fight; but, even as he said it, he was thinking in his heart:  “No, I won’t be artificial and talk French with my children; but my children won’t be like that.  All one has to do is not spoil children, not to distort their nature, and they’ll be delightful.  No, my children won’t be like that.”

He said good-bye and drove away, and she did not try to keep him.

Chapter 11

In the middle of July the elder of the village on Levin’s sister’s estate, about fifteen miles from Pokrovskoe, came to Levin to report on how things were going there and on the hay.  The chief source of income on his sister’s estate was from the riverside meadows.  In former years the hay had been bought by the peasants for twenty roubles the three acres.  When Levin took over