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"I have just come, and very much wanted to see you," said Levin,

looking shyly and at the same time angrily and uneasily around.

"Well, let's go into my room," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, who knew

his friend's sensitive and irritable shyness, and, taking his

arm, he drew him along, as though guiding him through dangers.

Stepan Arkadyevitch was on familiar terms with almost all his

acquaintances, and called almost all of them by their Christian

names: old men of sixty, boys of twenty, actors, ministers,

merchants, and adjutant-generals, so that many of his intimate

chums were to be found at the extreme ends of the social ladder,

and would have been very much surprised to learn that they had,

through the medium of Oblonsky, something in common. He was the

familiar friend of everyone with whom he took a glass of

champagne, and he took a glass of champagne with everyone, and

when in consequence he met any of his disreputable chums, as he

used in joke to call many of his friends, in the presence of his

subordinates, he well knew how, with his characteristic tact, to

diminish the disagreeable impression made on them.