true that you’re a savage? How do you explain the sudden way in which you vanished from Moscow? The Shtcherbatskys were continually asking me about you, as though I ought to know. The only thing I know is that you always do what no one else does.”
“Yes,” said Levin, slowly and with emotion, “you’re right. I am a savage. Only, my savageness is not in having gone away, but in coming now. Now I have come. …”
“Oh, what a lucky fellow you are!” broke in Stepan Arkadyevitch, looking into Levin’s eyes.
“Why?”
“ ‘I know a gallant steed by tokens sure, And by his eyes I know a youth in love,’ ”
declaimed Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Everything is before you.”
“Why, is it over for you already?”
“No; not over exactly, but the future is yours, and the present is mine, and the present—well, it’s not all that it might be.”
“How so?”
“Oh, things go wrong. But I don’t want to talk of myself, and besides I can’t explain it all,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Well, why have you come to Moscow, then? … Hi! take away!” he called to the Tatar.
“You guess?” responded Levin, his eyes like deep wells of light fixed on Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“I guess, but I can’t be the first to talk about it. You can see by that whether I guess right or wrong,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, gazing at Levin with a subtle smile.