Emma Watson Pussy
Books:
Anna Karenina
War And Peace
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straight
upstairs to the drawing room.
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, Ill 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 hed half killed her. He listened, and read his book,
and recalled the whole train of ideas suggested by his reading.
It was Tyndalls _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.... Its particulary nice
if Pavas 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, theres
nothing to be done.... Its not my fault. But now everything
shall go on in a new way. Its nonsense to pretend that life
wont let one, that the past wont let one. One must struggle to
live better, much better."... He raised his head, and fell to
dreaming. Old Laska, who had not yet fully digested her delight
at his return, and had run out into the yard to bark, came back
wagging her tail, and crept up to him, bringing in the scent of
fresh air, put her head under his hand, and whined plaintively,
asking to be stroked.
"There, whod have thought it?"
Anna Karenina page 53 Anna Karenina page 55
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