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Vronsky had not even tried to sleep all that night. He sat in his

armchair, looking straight before him or scanning the people who

got in and out. If he had indeed on previous occasions struck and

impressed people who did not know him by his air of unhesitating

composure, he seemed now more haughty and self-possessed than

ever. He looked at people as if they were things. A nervous young

man, a clerk in a law court, sitting opposite him, hated him for

that look. The young man asked him for a light, and entered into

conversation with him, and even pushed against him, to make him

feel that he was not a thing, but a person. But Vronsky gazed at

him exactly as he did at the lamp, and the young man made a wry

face, feeling that he was losing his self-possession under the

oppression of this refusal to recognize him as a person.