Part 2 - Chapter 14 - Page 2

to you! Now I shall
understand what the mysterious business is that you are always
absorbed in here. No, really, I envy you. What a house, how
nice it all is! So bright, so cheerful!" said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, forgetting that it was not always spring and fine
weather like that day. "And your nurse is simply charming! A
pretty maid in an apron might be even more agreeable, perhaps;
but for your severe monastic style it does very well."

Stepan Arkadyevitch told him many interesting pieces of news;
especially interesting to Levin was the news that his brother,
Sergey Ivanovitch, was intending to pay him a visit in the
summer.

Not one word did Stepan Arkadyevitch say in reference to Kitty
and the Shtcherbatskys; he merely gave him greetings from his
wife. Levin was grateful to him for his delicacy and was very
glad of his visitor. As always happened with him during his
solitude, a mass of ideas and feelings had been accumulating
within him, which he could not communicate to those about him.
And now he poured out upon Stepan Arkadyevitch his poetic joy in
the spring, and his failures and plans for the land, and his
thoughts and criticisms on the books he had been reading, and the
idea of his own book, the basis of which really was, though he
was unaware of it himself, a criticism of all the old books on
agriculture. Stepan Arkadyevitch, always charming, understanding
everything at the slightest reference, was particularly charming
on this visit, and Levin noticed in him a special tenderness, as
it were, and a new tone of respect that flattered him.

The efforts of Agafea Mihalovna and the cook, that the dinner
should be particularly good, only ended in two famished friends
attacking the preliminary course, eating a great deal of bread
and butter, salt goose and salted mushrooms, and in Levin's
finally ordering the soup to be served without the accompaniment
of little pies, with which the cook had particularly meant to
impress their visitor. But though Stepan Arkadyevitch was
accustomed to very different dinners, he thought everything
excellent: the herb brandy, and the bread, and the butter, and
above all the salt goose and the mushrooms, and the nettle soup,
and the chicken in white sauce, and the white Crimean wine--
everything was superb and delicious.

"Splendid, splendid!" he said, lighting a fat cigar after the
roast. "I feel as if, coming to you, I had landed on a peaceful
shore after the noise and jolting of a steamer. And so you
maintain that the laborer himself is an element to be studied and
to regulate the choice of methods in agriculture. Of course, I'm
an ignorant outsider; but I should fancy theory and its
application will have its influence on the