At the public meeting of the committee there were a great many people, and almost all the highest society.  Levin was in time for the report which, as everyone said, was very interesting.  When the reading of the report was over, people moved about, and Levin met Sviazhsky, who invited him very pressingly to come that evening to a meeting of the Society of Agriculture, where a celebrated lecture was to be delivered, and Stepan Arkadyevitch, who had only just come from the races, and many other acquaintances; and Levin heard and uttered various criticisms on the meeting, on the new fantasia, and on a public trial.  But, probably from the mental fatigue he was beginning to feel, he made a blunder in speaking of the trial, and this blunder he recalled several times with vexation.  Speaking of the sentence upon a foreigner who had been condemned in Russia, and of how unfair it would be to punish him by exile abroad, Levin repeated what he had heard the day before in conversation from an acquaintance.

“I think sending him abroad is much the same as punishing a carp by putting it into the water,” said Levin.  Then he recollected that this idea, which he had heard from an acquaintance and uttered as his own, came from a fable of Krilov’s, and that the acquaintance had picked it up from a newspaper article.

After driving home with his sister-in-law, and finding Kitty in good spirits and quite well, Levin drove to the club.

Chapter 7

Levin reached the club just at the right time.  Members and visitors were driving up as he arrived.  Levin had not been at the club for a very long while—­not since he lived in Moscow, when he was leaving the university and going into society.  He remembered the club, the external details of its arrangement, but he had completely forgotten the impression it had made on him in old days.  But as soon as, driving into the wide semicircular court and getting out of the sledge, he mounted the steps, and the hall porter, adorned with a crossway scarf, noiselessly opened the door to him with a bow; as soon as he saw in the porter’s room the cloaks and galoshes of members who thought it less trouble to take them off downstairs; as soon as he heard the mysterious ringing bell that preceded him as he ascended the easy, carpeted staircase, and saw the statue on the landing, and the third porter at the top doors, a familiar figure grown older, in the club livery, opening the door without haste or delay, and scanning the visitors as they passed in—­Levin felt the old impression of the club come back in a rush, an impression of repose, comfort, and propriety.

“Your hat, please,” the porter said to Levin, who forgot the club rule to leave his hat in the porter’s room.  “Long time since you’ve been.  The prince put your name down yesterday.  Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch is not here yet.”

The porter did not only know Levin, but also all his ties and relationships, and so immediately mentioned his intimate friends.