Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART EIGHT CHAPTER 19
gions and their relations to Divinity I have no right to decide, and no possibility of
deciding.”
“Oh, you haven’t gone in then?” he heard Kitty’s voice all at once, as she came by
the same way to the drawing-room.
“What is it? you’re not worried about anything?” she said, looking intently at his
face in the starlight.
But she could not have seen his face if a flash of lightning had not hidden the stars
and revealed it. In that flash she saw his face distinctly, and seeing him calm and
happy, she smiled at him.
“She understands,” he thought; “she knows what I’m thinking about. Shall I tell
her or not? Yes, I’ll tell her.” But at the moment he was about to speak, she began
speaking.
“Kostya! do something for me,” she said; “go into the corner room and see if
they’ve made it all right for Sergey Ivanovitch. I can’t very well. See if they’ve put
the new wash stand in it.”
“Very well, I’ll go directly,” said Levin, standing up and kissing her.
“No, I’d better not speak of it,” he thought, when she had gone in before him. “It
is a secret for me alone, of vital importance for me, and not to be put into words.
“This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy and enlightened
all of a sudden, as I had dreamed, just like the feeling for my child. There was no
surprise in this either. Faith–or not faith–I don’t know what it is–but this feeling has
come just as imperceptibly through suffering, and has taken firm root in my soul.
“I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling
into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the same
wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall
still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be
as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying;
but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every
minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning
of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”
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