“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 medievalism, 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 freethinkers you know, who are reared d’emblée