“Alive! alive!  And a boy too!  Set your mind at rest!” Levin heard Lizaveta Petrovna saying, as she slapped the baby’s back with a shaking hand.

“Mamma, is it true?” said Kitty’s voice.

The princess’s sobs were all the answers she could make.  And in the midst of the silence there came in unmistakable reply to the mother’s question, a voice quite unlike the subdued voices speaking in the room.  It was the bold, clamorous, self-assertive squall of the new human being, who had so incomprehensibly appeared.

If Levin had been told before that Kitty was dead, and that he had died with her, and that their children were angels, and that God was standing before him, he would have been surprised at nothing.  But now, coming back to the world of reality, he had to make great mental efforts to take in that she was alive and well, and that the creature squalling so desperately was his son.  Kitty was alive, her agony was over.  And he was unutterably happy.  That he understood; he was completely happy in it.  But the baby?  Whence, why, who was he?...  He could not get used to the idea.  It seemed to him something extraneous, superfluous, to which he could not accustom himself.

Chapter 16

At ten o’clock the old prince, Sergey Ivanovitch, and Stepan Arkadyevitch were sitting at Levin’s.  Having inquired after Kitty, they had dropped into conversation upon other subjects.  Levin heard them, and unconsciously, as they talked, going over the past, over what had been up to that morning, he thought of himself as he had been yesterday till that point.  It was as though a hundred years had passed since then.  He felt himself exalted to unattainable heights, from which he studiously lowered himself so as not to wound the people he was talking to.  He talked, and was all the time thinking of his wife, of her condition now, of his son, in whose existence he tried to school himself into believing.  The whole world of woman, which had taken for him since his marriage a new value he had never suspected before, was now so exalted that he could not take it in in his imagination.  He heard them talk of yesterday’s dinner at the club, and thought:  “What is happening with her now?  Is she asleep?  How is she?  What is she thinking of?  Is he crying, my son Dmitri?” And in the middle of the conversation, in the middle of a sentence, he jumped up and went out of the room.

“Send me word if I can see her,” said the prince.

“Very well, in a minute,” answered Levin, and without stopping, he went to her room.

She was not asleep, she was talking gently with her mother, making plans about the christening.

Carefully set to rights, with hair well-brushed, in a smart little cap with some blue in it, her arms out on the quilt, she was lying on her back.  Meeting his eyes, her eyes drew him to her.  Her face, bright before, brightened still more as he drew near her.  There was the same change in it from earthly to unearthly that is seen in the face of the dead.  But then it means farewell, here it meant welcome.  Again a rush of emotion, such as he had felt at the moment of the child’s birth, flooded his heart.  She took his hand and asked him if he had slept.  He could not answer, and turned away, struggling with his weakness.