Stepan Arkadyevitch was standing at the top of the stairs. His
good-naturedly beaming face above the embroidered collar of his
uniform beamed more than ever when he recognized the man coming
up.

"Why, it's actually you, Levin, at last!" he said with a friendly
mocking smile, scanning Levin as he approached. "How is it you
have deigned to look me up in this den?" said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, and not content with shaking hands, he kissed his
friend. "Have you been here long?"

"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