Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 3
And Sergey Ivanovitch put before him the alternative: either you are so undeveloped
that you can’t see all that you can do, or you won’t sacrifice your ease, your
vanity, or whatever it is, to do it.
Konstantin Levin felt that there was no course open to him but to submit, or to
confess to a lack of zeal for the public good. And this mortified him and hurt his
feelings.
“It’s both,” he said resolutely: “I don’t see that it was possible...”
“What! was it impossible, if the money were properly laid out, to provide medical
aid?”
“Impossible, as it seems to me.... For the three thousand square miles of our district,
what with our thaws, and the storms, and the work in the fields, I don’t see
how it is possible to provide medical aid all over. And besides, I don’t believe in
medicine.”
“Oh, well, that’s unfair...I can quote to you thousands of instances.... But the
schools, anyway.”
“Why have schools?”
“What do you mean? Can there be two opinions of the advantage of education? If
it’s a good thing for you, it’s a good thing for everyone.”
Konstantin Levin felt himself morally pinned against a wall, and so he got hot,
and unconsciously blurted out the chief cause of his indifference to public business.
“Perhaps it may all be very good; but why should I worry myself about establishing
dispensaries which I shall never make use of, and schools to which I shall never
send my children, to which even the peasants don’t want to send their children, and
to which I’ve no very firm faith that they ought to send them?” said he.
Sergey Ivanovitch was for a minute surprised at this unexpected view of the subject;
but he promptly made a new plan of attack. He was silent for a little, drew out
a hook, threw it in again, and turned to his brother smiling.
“Come, now.... In the first place, the dispensary is needed. We ourselves sent for
the district doctor for Agafea Mihalovna.”
“Oh, well, but I fancy her wrist will never be straight again.”
“That remains to be proved.... Next, the peasant who can read and write is as a
workman of more use and value to you.”
“No, you can ask anyone you like,” Konstantin Levin answered with decision,
“the man that can read and write is much inferior as a workman. And mending the
highroads is an impossibility; and as soon as they put up bridges they’re stolen.”
“Still, that’s not the point,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, frowning. He disliked contradiction,
and still more, arguments that were continually skipping from one thing to
another, introducing new and disconnected points, so that there was no knowing to
which to reply. “Do you admit that education is a benefit for the people?”
“Yes, I admit it,” said Levin without thinking, and he was conscious immediately
that he had said what he did not think. He felt that if he admitted that, it would
be proved that he had been talking meaningless rubbish. How it would be proved
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