Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 12
rose over the meadow before the morning. Rousing himself, Levin got up from the
haycock, and looking at the stars, he saw that the night was over.
“Well, what am I going to do? How am I to set about it?” he said to himself,
trying to express to himself all the thoughts and feelings he had passed through
in that brief night. All the thoughts and feelings he had passed through fell into
three separate trains of thought. One was the renunciation of his old life, of his
utterly useless education. This renunciation gave him satisfaction, and was easy and
simple. Another series of thoughts and mental images related to the life he longed
to live now. The simplicity, the purity, the sanity of this life he felt clearly, and he
was convinced he would find in it the content, the peace, and the dignity, of the lack
of which he was so miserably conscious. But a third series of ideas turned upon the
question how to effect this transition from the old life to the new. And there nothing
took clear shape for him. “Have a wife? Have work and the necessity of work?
Leave Pokrovskoe? Buy land? Become a member of a peasant community? Marry a
peasant girl? How am I to set about it?” he asked himself again, and could not find
an answer. “I haven’t slept all night, though, and I can’t think it out clearly,” he said
to himself. “I’ll work it out later. One thing’s certain, this night has decided my fate.
All my old dreams of home life were absurd, not the real thing,” he told himself.
“It’s all ever so much simpler and better...”
“How beautiful!” he thought, looking at the strange, as it were, mother-of-pearl
shell of white fleecy cloudlets resting right over his head in the middle of the sky.
“How exquisite it all is in this exquisite night! And when was there time for that
cloud-shell to form? Just now I looked at the sky, and there was nothing in it–only
two white streaks. Yes, and so imperceptibly too my views of life changed!”
He went out of the meadow and walked along the highroad towards the village.
A slight wind arose, and the sky looked gray and sullen. The gloomy moment had
come that usually precedes the dawn, the full triumph of light over darkness.
Shrinking from the cold, Levin walked rapidly, looking at the ground. “What’s
that? Someone coming,” he thought, catching the tinkle of bells, and lifting his head.
Forty paces from him a carriage with four horses harnessed abreast was driving
towards him along the grassy road on which he was walking. The shaft-horses were
tilted against the shafts by the ruts, but the dexterous driver sitting on the box held
the shaft over the ruts, so that the wheels ran on the smooth part of the road.
This was all Levin noticed, and without wondering who it could be, he gazed
absently at the coach.
In the coach was an old lady dozing in one corner, and at the window, evidently
only just awake, sat a young girl holding in both hands the ribbons of a white cap.
With a face full of light and thought, full of a subtle, complex inner life, that was
remote from Levin, she was gazing beyond him at the glow of the sunrise.
At the very instant when this apparition was vanishing, the truthful eyes glanced
at him. She recognized him, and her face lighted up with wondering delight.
He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the world. There
was only one creature in the world that could concentrate for him all the brightness
and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty. He understood that she was driving
to Ergushovo from the railway station. And everything that had been stirring Levin
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