Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 24
“Don’t trouble, your honor, sure, the womenfolks will pitch it quick enough.” The
ploughs were practically useless, because it never occurred to the laborer to raise
the share when he turned the plough, and forcing it round, he strained the horses
and tore up the ground, and Levin was begged not to mind about it. The horses
were allowed to stray into the wheat because not a single laborer would consent to
be night-watchman, and in spite of orders to the contrary, the laborers insisted on
taking turns for night duty, and Ivan, after working all day long, fell asleep, and was
very penitent for his fault, saying, “Do what you will to me, your honor.”
They killed three of the best calves by letting them into the clover aftermath without
care as to their drinking, and nothing would make the men believe that they had
been blown out by the clover, but they told him, by way of consolation, that one of
his neighbors had lost a hundred and twelve head of cattle in three days. All this
happened, not because anyone felt ill-will to Levin or his farm; on the contrary, he
knew that they liked him, thought him a simple gentleman (their highest praise);
but it happened simply because all they wanted was to work merrily and carelessly,
and his interests were not only remote and incomprehensible to them, but fatally
opposed to their most just claims. Long before, Levin had felt dissatisfaction with
his own position in regard to the land. He saw where his boat leaked, but he did not
look for the leak, perhaps purposely deceiving himself. (Nothing would be left him
if he lost faith in it.) But now he could deceive himself no longer. The farming of
the land, as he was managing it, had become not merely unattractive but revolting
to him, and he could take no further interest in it.
To this now was joined the presence, only twenty-five miles off, of Kitty
Shtcherbatskaya, whom he longed to see and could not see. Darya Alexandrovna
Oblonskaya had invited him, when he was over there, to come; to come with the
object of renewing his offer to her sister, who would, so she gave him to understand,
accept him now. Levin himself had felt on seeing Kitty Shtcherbatskaya that he had
never ceased to love her; but he could not go over to the Oblonskys’, knowing she
was there. The fact that he had made her an offer, and she had refused him, had
placed an insuperable barrier between her and him. “I can’t ask her to be my wife
merely because she can’t be the wife of the man she wanted to marry,” he said to
himself. The thought of this made him cold and hostile to her. “I should not be
able to speak to her without a feeling of reproach; I could not look at her without
resentment; and she will only hate me all the more, as she’s bound to. And besides,
how can I now, after what Darya Alexandrovna told me, go to see them? Can I help
showing that I know what she told me? And me to go magnanimously to forgive
her, and have pity on her! Me go through a performance before her of forgiving, and
deigning to bestow my love on her!... What induced Darya Alexandrovna to tell me
that? By chance I might have seen her, then everything would have happened of
itself; but, as it is, it’s out of the question, out of the question!”
Darya Alexandrovna sent him a letter, asking him for a side-saddle for Kitty’s use.
“I’m told you have a side-saddle,” she wrote to him; “I hope you will bring it over
yourself.”
This was more than he could stand. How could a woman of any intelligence, of
any delicacy, put her sister in such a humiliating position! He wrote ten notes, and
tore them all up, and sent the saddle without any reply. To write that he would go
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