Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART ONE CHAPTER 27
Chapter 27
THE house was big and old-fashioned, and Levin, though he lived alone, had the
whole house heated and used. He knew that this was stupid, he knew that it
was positively not right, and contrary to his present new plans, but this house was
a whole world to Levin. It was the world in which his father and mother had lived
and died. They had lived just the life that to Levin seemed the ideal of perfection,
and that he had dreamed of beginning with his wife, his family.
Levin scarcely remembered his mother. His conception of her was for him a sacred
memory, and his future wife was bound to be in his imagination a repetition of that
exquisite, holy ideal of a woman that his mother had been.
He was so far from conceiving of love for woman apart from marriage that he
positively pictured to himself first the family, and only secondarily the woman who
would give him a family. His ideas of marriage were, consequently, quite unlike
those of the great majority of his acquaintances, for whom getting married was one
of the numerous facts of social life. For Levin it was the chief affair of life, on which
its whole happiness turned. And now he had to give up that.
When he had gone into the little drawing room, where he always had tea, and had
settled himself in his armchair with a book, and Agafea Mihalovna had brought him
tea, and with her usual, “Well, I’ll stay a while, sir,” had taken a chair in the window,
he felt that, however strange it might be, he had not parted from his daydreams, and
that he could not live without them. Whether with her, or with another, still it would
be. He was reading a book, and thinking of what he was reading, and stopping to
listen to Agafea Mihalovna, who gossiped away without flagging, and yet with all
that, all sorts of pictures of family life and work in the future rose disconnectedly
before his imagination. He felt that in the depth of his soul something had been put
in its place, settled down, and laid to rest.
He heard Agafea Mihalovna talking of how Prohor had forgotten his duty to God,
and with the money Levin had given him to buy a horse, had been drinking without
stopping, and had beaten his wife till he’d half killed her. He listened, and read his
book, and recalled the whole train of ideas suggested by his reading. It was Tyndall’s
Treatise on Heat. He recalled his own criticisms of Tyndall of his complacent
satisfaction in the cleverness of his experiments, and for his lack of philosophic insight.
And suddenly there floated into his mind the joyful thought: “In two years’
time I shall have two Dutch cows; Pava herself will perhaps still be alive, a dozen
young daughters of Berkoot and the three others–how lovely!”
He took up his book again. “Very good, electricity and heat are the same thing;
but is it possible to substitute the one quantity for the other in the equation for the
solution of any problem? No. Well, then what of it? The connection between all the
forces of nature is felt instinctively.... It’s particulary nice if Pava’s daughter should
be a red-spotted cow, and all the herd will take after her, and the other three, too!
Splendid! To go out with my wife and visitors to meet the herd.... My wife says,
Kostya and I looked after that calf like a child.’ ‘How can it interest you so much?’
says a visitor. ‘Everything that interests him, interests me.’ But who will she be?”
And he remembered what had happened at Moscow.... “Well, there’s nothing to be
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