“Wonderfully good-hearted fellow!” thought Levin.
“Well, but you yourself, Yegor, when you got married, did you love your wife?”
“Ay! and why not?” responded Yegor.
And Levin saw that Yegor too was in an excited state and intending to express all his most heartfelt emotions.
“My life, too, has been a wonderful one. From a child up. …” he was beginning with flashing eyes, apparently catching Levin’s enthusiasm, just as people catch yawning.
But at that moment a ring was heard. Yegor departed, and Levin was left alone. He had eaten scarcely anything at dinner, had refused tea and supper at Sviazhsky’s, but he was incapable of thinking of supper. He had not slept the previous night, but was incapable of thinking of sleep either. His room was cold, but he was oppressed by heat. He opened both the movable panes in his window and sat down to the table opposite the open panes. Over the snow-covered roofs could be seen a decorated cross with chains, and above it the rising triangle of Charles’s Wain with the yellowish light of Capella. He gazed at the cross, then at the stars, drank in the fresh freezing air that flowed evenly into the room, and followed as though in a dream the images and memories that rose in his imagination. At four o’clock he heard steps in the passage and peeped out at the door. It was the gambler Myaskin, whom he knew, coming from the club. He walked gloomily, frowning and coughing. “Poor, unlucky fellow!” thought Levin, and tears came into his eyes from love and pity for this man. He would have talked with him, and tried to comfort him, but remembering that he had nothing but his shirt on, he