During the whole of the performance Levin felt like a deaf man
watching people dancing, and was in a state of complete
bewilderment when the fantasia was over, and felt a great
weariness from the fruitless strain on his attention. Loud
applause resounded on all sides. Everyone got up, moved about,
and began talking. Anxious to throw some light on his own
perplexity from the impressions of others, Levin began to walk
about, looking for connoisseurs, and was glad to see a well-known
musical amateur in conversation with Pestsov, whom he knew.

"Marvelous!" Pestsov was saying in his mellow bass. "How are
you, Konstantin Dmitrievitch? Particularly sculpturesque and
plastic, so to say, and richly colored is that passage where you
feel Cordelia's approach, where woman, _das ewig Weibliche,_
enters into conflict with fate. Isn't it?"

"You mean...what has Cordelia to do with it?" Levin asked
timidly, forgetting that the fantasia was supposed to represent
King Lear.

"Cordelia comes in...see here!" said Pestsov, tapping his finger
on the satiny surface of the program he held in his hand and
passing it to Levin.

Only then Levin recollected the title of the fantasia, and made
haste to read in the Russian translation the lines from
Shakespeare that were printed on the back of the program.

"You can't follow it without that," said Pestsov, addressing
Levin, as the person he had been speaking to had gone away, and
he had no one to talk to.