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counter with the ringlets are vermin to my mind, and all fallen women
are the same.”
“But the Magdalen?”
“Ah, drop that! Christ would never have said those words if He
had known how they would be abused. Of all the Gospel those words
are the only ones remembered. However, I’m not saying so much what
I think, as what I feel. I have a loathing for fallen women. You’re afraid
of spiders, and I of these vermin. Most likely you’ve not made a study
of spiders and don’t know their character; and so it is with me.”
“It’s very well for you to talk like that; it’s very much like that
gentleman in Dickens who used to fling all difficult questions over his
right shoulder. But to deny the facts is no answer. What’s to be
done—you tell me that, what’s to be done? Your wife gets older, while
you’re full of life. Before you’ve time to look round, you feel that you
can’t love your wife with love, however much you may esteem her. And
then all at once love turns up, and you’re done for, done for,” Stepan
Arkadyevitch said with weary despair.
Levin half smiled.
“Yes, you’re done for,” resumed Oblonsky. “But what’s to be done?”
“Don’t steal rolls.”
Stepan Arkadyevitch laughed outright.
“Oh, moralist! But you must understand, there are two women;
one insists only on her rights, and those rights are your love, which you
can’t give her; and the other sacrifices everything for you and asks for
nothing. What are you to do? How are you to act? There’s a fearful
tragedy in it.”
“If you care for my profession of faith as regards that, I’ll tell you
that I don’t believe there was any tragedy about it. And this is why. To
my mind, love...both the sorts of love, which you remember Plato de-
fines in his Banquet, served as the test of men. Some men only under-
stand one sort, and some only the other. And those who only know the
non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love there
can be no sort of tragedy. ‘I’m much obliged for the gratification, my
humble respects’—that’s all the tragedy. And in platonic love there
can be no tragedy, because in that love all is clear and pure, because...”
At that instant Levin recollected his own sins and the inner con-
flict he had lived through. And he added unexpectedly:
“But perhaps you are right. Very likely...I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“It’s this, don’t you see,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, “you’re very
much all of a piece. That’s your strong point and your failing. You have
a character that’s all of a piece, and you want the whole of life to be of
a piece too—but that’s not how it is. You despise public official work
because you want the reality to be invariably corresponding all the
while with the aim—and that’s not how it is. You want a man’s work,
too, always to have a defined aim, and love and family life always to be
undivided—and that’s not how it is. All the variety, all the charm, all
the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”
Levin sighed and made no reply. He was thinking of his own
affairs, and did not hear Oblonsky.
And suddenly both of them felt that though they were friends,
though they had been dining and drinking together, which should
have drawn them closer, yet each was thinking only of his own affairs,
and they had nothing to do with one another. Oblonsky had more than
once experienced this extreme sense of aloofness, instead of intimacy,
coming on after dinner, and he knew what to do in such cases.
“Bill!” he called, and he went into the next room where he promptly
came across and aide-de-camp of his acquaintance and dropped into
conversation with him about an actress and her protector. And at once