“I should say not.  He’s a remarkable portrait-painter.  Have you ever seen his portrait of Madame Vassiltchikova?  But I believe he doesn’t care about painting any more portraits, and so very likely he is in want.  I maintain that...”

“Couldn’t we ask him to paint a portrait of Anna Arkadyevna?” said Vronsky.

“Why mine?” said Anna.  “After yours I don’t want another portrait.  Better have one of Annie” (so she called her baby girl).  “Here she is,” she added, looking out of the window at the handsome Italian nurse, who was carrying the child out into the garden, and immediately glancing unnoticed at Vronsky.  The handsome nurse, from whom Vronsky was painting a head for his picture, was the one hidden grief in Anna’s life.  He painted with her as his model, admired her beauty and mediaevalism, and Anna dared not confess to herself that she was afraid of becoming jealous of this nurse, and was for that reason particularly gracious and condescending both to her and her little son.  Vronsky, too, glanced out of the window and into Anna’s eyes, and, turning at once to Golenishtchev, he said: 

“Do you know this Mihailov?”

“I have met him.  But he’s a queer fish, and quite without breeding.  You know, one of those uncouth new people one’s so often coming across nowadays, one of those free-thinkers you know, who are reared d’emblee in theories of atheism, scepticism, and materialism.  In former days,” said Golenishtchev, not observing, or not willing to observe, that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, “in former days the free-thinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle came to free-thought; but now there has sprung up a new type of born free-thinkers who grow up without even having heard of principles of morality or of religion, of the existence of authorities, who grow up directly in ideas of negation in everything, that is to say, savages.  Well, he’s of that class.  He’s the son, it appears, of some Moscow butler, and has never had any sort of bringing-up.  When he got into the academy and made his reputation he tried, as he’s no fool, to educate himself.  And he turned to what seemed to him the very source of culture—­the magazines.  In old times, you see, a man who wanted to educate himself—­a Frenchman, for instance—­would have set to work to study all the classics and theologians and tragedians and historiaris and philosophers, and, you know, all the intellectual work that came in his way.  But in our day he goes straight for the literature of negation, very quickly assimilates all the extracts of the science of negation, and he’s ready.  And that’s not all—­twenty years ago he would have found in that literature traces of conflict with authorities, with the creeds of the ages; he would have perceived from this conflict that there was something else; but now he comes at once upon a literature in which the old creeds do not even furnish matter for discussion, but it is stated baldly that there is nothing else—­evolution, natural selection, struggle for existence—­and that’s all.  In my article I’ve...”