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was a necessity to think in that way; it was such a necessity for him in
his humiliation to have some elevated standpoint, however imaginary,
from which, looked down upon by all, he could look down on others,
that he clung, as to his one salvation, to his delusion of salvation.
Chapter 23.
The Countess Lidia Ivanovna had, as a very young and sentimen-
tal girl, been married to a wealthy man of high rank, an extremely good-
natured, jovial, and extremely dissipated rake. Two months after mar-
riage her husband abandoned her, and her impassioned protestations
of affection he met with a sarcasm and even hostility that people know-
ing the count’s good heart, and seeing no defects in the sentimental
Lidia, were at loss to explain. Though they were divorced and lived
apart, yet whenever the husband met the wife, he invariably behaved
to her with the same malignant irony, the cause of which was incom-
prehensible.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna had long given up being in love with her
husband, but from that time she had never given up being in love with
someone. She was in love with several people at once, both men and
women; she had been in love with almost everyone who had been
particularly distinguished in any way. She was in love with all the new
princes and princesses who married into the imperial family; she had
been in love with a high dignitary of the Church, a vicar, and a parish
priest; she had been in love with a journalist, three Slavophiles, with
Komissarov, with a minister, a doctor, an English missionary and Karenin.
All these passions constantly waning or growing more ardent, did not
prevent her from keeping up the most extended and complicated rela-