Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 6
“That’s capital! I will certainly ride over to her,” said Levin. “Or we’ll go together.
She’s such a splendid woman, isn’t she?”
“They’re not far from here, then?”
“Twenty-five miles. Or perhaps it is thirty. But a capital road. Capital, we’ll drive
over.”
“I shall be delighted,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, still smiling. The sight of his
younger brother’s appearance had immediately put him in a good humor.
“Well, you have an appetite!” he said, looking at his dark-red, sunburnt face and
neck bent over the plate.
“Splendid! You can’t imagine what an effectual remedy it is for every sort of foolishness.
I want to enrich medicine with a new word: Arbeitskur.”
“Well, but you don’t need it, I should fancy.”
“No, but for all sorts of nervous invalids.”
“Yes, it ought to be tried. I had meant to come to the mowing to look at you, but
it was so unbearably hot that I got no further than the forest. I sat there a little, and
went on by the forest to the village, met your old nurse, and sounded her as to the
peasants’ view of you. As far as I can make out, they don’t approve of this. She said:
‘It’s not a gentleman’s work.’ Altogether, I fancy that in the people’s ideas there are
very clear and definite notions of certain, as they call it, ‘gentlemanly’ lines of action.
And they don’t sanction the gentry’s moving outside bounds clearly laid down in
their ideas.”
“Maybe so; but anyway it’s a pleasure such as I have never known in my life. And
there’s no harm in it, you know. Is there?”
answered Levin. “I can’t help it if they don’t like it. Though I do believe it’s all
right. Eh?”
“Altogether,” pursued Sergey Ivanovitch, “you’re satisfied with your day?”
“Quite satisfied. We cut the whole meadow. And such a splendid old man I made
friends with there! You can’t fancy how delightful he was!”
“Well, so you’re content with your day. And so am I. First, I solved two chess
problems, and one a very pretty one–a pawn opening. I’ll show it you. And then–I
thought over our conversation yesterday.”
“Eh! our conversation yesterday?” said Levin, blissfully dropping his eyelids and
drawing deep breaths after finishing his dinner, and absolutely incapable of recalling
what their conversation yesterday was about.
“I think you are partly right. Our difference of opinion amounts to this, that you
make the mainspring self-interest, while I suppose that interest in the common weal
is bound to exist in every man of a certain degree of advancement. Possibly you
are right too, that action founded on material interest would be more desirable. You
are altogether, as the French say, too primesautière a nature; you must have intense,
energetic action, or nothing.”
Levin listened to his brother and did not understand a single word, and did not
want to understand. He was only afraid his brother might ask him some question
which would make it evident he had not heard.
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