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"Stay, stay," he began, interrupting Oblonsky. "You talk of his

being an aristocrat. But allow me to ask what it consists in,

that aristocracy of Vronsky or of anybody else, beside which I

can be looked down upon? You consider Vronsky an aristocrat, but

I don't. A man whose father crawled up from nothing at all by

intrigue, and whose mother-God knows whom she wasn't mixed up

with.... No, excuse me, but I consider myself aristocratic, and

people like me, who can point back in the past to three or four

honorable generations of their family, of the highest degree of

breeding (talent and intellect, of course that's another matter),

and have never curried favor with anyone, never depended on

anyone for anything, like my father and my grandfather. And I

know many such.