508 509
ideas. I have too much respect or contempt, or both...I respect your
past and despise your present...that I was far from the interpretation
you put on my words.”
Anna sighed and bowed her head.
“Though indeed I fail to comprehend how, with the independence
you show,” he went on, getting hot, “—announcing your infidelity to
your husband and seeing nothing reprehensible in it, apparently—you
can see anything reprehensible in performing a wife’s duties in relation
to your husband.”
“Alexey Alexandrovitch! What is it you want of me?”
“I want you not to meet that man here, and to conduct yourself so
that neither the world nor the servants can reproach you...not to see
him. That’s not much, I think. And in return you will enjoy all the
privileges of a faithful wife without fulfilling her duties. That’s all I
have to say to you. Now it’s time for me to go. I’m not dining at home.”
He got up and moved towards the door.
Anna got up too. Bowing in silence, he let her pass before him.
Chapter 24.
The night spent by Levin on the haycock did not pass without
result for him. The way in which he had been managing his land
revolted him and had lost all attraction for him. In spite of the magnifi-
cent harvest, never had there been, or, at least, never it seemed to him,
had there been so many hindrances and so many quarrels between
him and the peasants as that year, and the origin of these failures and
this hostility was now perfectly comprehensible to him. The delight he
had experienced in the work itself, and the consequent greater inti-
macy with the peasants, the envy he felt of them, of their life, the desire
to adopt that life, which had been to him that night not a dream but an
intention, the execution of which he had thought out in detail —all this
had so transformed his view of the farming of the land as he had
managed it, that he could not take his former interest in it, and could
not help seeing that unpleasant relation between him and the
workspeople which was the foundation of it all. The herd of improved
cows such as Pava, the whole land ploughed over and enriched, the
nine level fields surrounded with hedges, the two hundred and forty
acres heavily manured, the seed sown in drills, and all the rest of it—it
was all splendid if only the work had been done for themselves, or for
themselves and comrades —people in sympathy with them. But he
saw clearly now (his work on a book of agriculture, in which the chief