about her husband, “and I put up with him.  Is that any better?  At that time I could still have been admired, I had beauty left me still,” Darya Alexandrovna pursued her thoughts, and she would have liked to look at herself in the looking glass.  She had a traveling looking glass in her handbag, and she wanted to take it out; but looking at the backs of the coachman and the swaying counting house clerk, she felt that she would be ashamed if either of them were to look round, and she did not take out the glass.

But without looking in the glass, she thought that even now it was not too late; and she thought of Sergey Ivanovitch, who was always particularly attentive to her, of Stiva’s good-hearted friend, Turovtsin, who had helped her nurse her children through the scarlatina, and was in love with her.  And there was someone else, a quite young man, who—­her husband had told her it as a joke—­thought her more beautiful than either of her sisters.  And the most passionate and impossible romances rose before Darya Alexandrovna’s imagination.  “Anna did quite right, and certainly I shall never reproach her for it.  She is happy, she makes another person happy, and she’s not broken down as I am, but most likely just as she always was, bright, clever, open to every impression,” thought Darya Alexandrovna,—­and a sly smile curved her lips, for, as she pondered on Anna’s love affair, Darya Alexandrovna constructed on parallel lines an almost identical love affair for herself, with an imaginary composite figure, the ideal man who was in love with her.  She, like Anna, confessed the whole affair to her husband.  And the amazement and perplexity of Stepan Arkadyevitch at this avowal made her smile.

In such daydreams she reached the turning of the highroad that led to Vozdvizhenskoe.

Chapter 17

The coachman pulled up his four horses and looked round to the right, to a field of rye, where some peasants were sitting on a cart.  The counting house clerk was just going to jump down, but on second thoughts he shouted peremptorily to the peasants instead, and beckoned to them to come up.  The wind, that seemed to blow as they drove, dropped when the carriage stood still; gadflies settled on the steaming horses that angrily shook them off.  The metallic clank of a whetstone against a scythe, that came to them from the cart, ceased.  One of the peasants got up and came towards the carriage.

“Well, you are slow!” the counting house clerk shouted angrily to the peasant who was stepping slowly with his bare feet over the ruts of the rough dry road.  “Come along, do!”

A curly-headed old man with a bit of bast tied round his hair, and his bent back dark with perspiration, came towards the carriage, quickening his steps, and took hold of the mud-guard with his sunburnt hand.

“Vozdvizhenskoe, the manor house? the count’s?” he repeated; “go on to the end of this track.  Then turn to the left.  Straight along the avenue and you’ll come right upon it.  But whom do you want?  The count himself?”