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.

Vronsky saw nothing and no one.