The house was big and old-fashioned, and Levin, though he lived

alone, had the whole house heated and used. He knew that this

was stupid, he knew that it was positively not right, and

contrary to his present new plans, but this house was a whole

world to Levin. It was the world in which his father and mother

had lived and died. They had lived just the life that to Levin

seemed the ideal of perfection, and that he had dreamed of

beginning with his wife, his family.

Levin scarcely remembered his mother. His conception of her was

for him a sacred memory, and his future wife was bound to be in

his imagination a repetition of that exquisite, holy ideal of a

woman that his mother had been.

He was so far from conceiving of love for woman apart from

marriage that he positively pictured to himself first the family,

and only secondarily the woman who would give him a family. His

ideas of marriage were, consequently, quite unlike those of the

great majority of his acquaintances, for whom getting married was

one of the numerous facts of social life. For Levin it was the

chief affair of life, on which its whole happiness turned. And

now he had to give up that.

When he had gone into the little drawing room, where he always

had tea, and had settled himself in his armchair with a book,

and Agafea Mihalovna had brought him tea, and with her usual,

"Well, I'll stay a while, sir," had taken a chair in the window,

he felt that, however strange it might be, he had not parted from

his daydreams, and that he could not live without them. Whether

with her, or with another, still it would be. He was reading a

book, and thinking of what he was reading, and stopping to listen

to Agafea Mihalovna, who gossiped away without flagging, and yet

with all that, all sorts of pictures of family life and work in

the future rose disconnectedly before his imagination. He felt

that in the depth of his soul something had been put in its

place, settled down, and laid to rest.

He heard Agafea Mihalovna talking of how Prohor had forgotten his

duty to God, and with the money Levin had given him to buy a

horse, had been drinking without stopping, and had beaten his

wife till he'd half killed her. He listened, and read his book,

and recalled the whole train of ideas suggested by his reading.

It was Tyndall's _Treatise on Heat_. He recalled his own

criticisms of Tyndall of his complacent satisfaction in the

cleverness of his experiments, and for his lack of philosophic

insight. And suddenly there floated into his mind the joyful

thought: "In two years' time I shall have two Dutch cows; Pava

herself will perhaps still be alive, a dozen young daughters of

Berkoot and the three others--how lovely!"




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