“Well?” demanded Mr. Shatov.
“It’s fascinating.”
“What have I told you? That is Tols toy ,” he said proudly; “but this is a most vile translation. All these nu and da . Why not simply well and yes ; and boszhe moi is quite simply, my God. But this preliminary part is not so interesting as later. There is in this book the self-history of Tolstoy. He is Layvin, and Kitty is the Countess Tolstoy. That is all most wonderful. When we see her in the early morning; and the picture of this wedding. There is only Tolstoy for those marvellous touches. I shall show you.”
“Why does he call it Anna Karaynina?” asked Miriam anxiously.
“Certainly. It is a most masterly study of a certain type of woman.”
The fascination of the book still flickered brightly; but far away, retreated into the lonely incommunicable distance of her mind. It seemed always to be useless and dangerous to talk about books. They were always about something else. … If she had not asked she would have read the book without finding out it was a masterly study of Anna. Why must a book be a masterly study of some single thing? Everybody wisely raving about it. … But if one never found out what a book was a masterly study of, it meant being ignorant of things everyone knew and agreed about; a kind of hopeless personal ignorance and unintelligence; reading whole books through and through, and only finding out what they were about by accident, when people happened to talk about them, and even then, reading them again, and finding principally quite other things, which stayed, after one had forgotten what people had explained.