Page 1085 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

Chapter 20

The next day the sick man received the sacrament and
extreme unction. During the ceremony Nikolay Levin
prayed fervently. His great eyes, fastened on the holy
image that was set out on a card table covered with a
colored napkin, expressed such passionate prayer and hope
that it was awful to Levin to see it. Levin knew that this
passionate prayer and hope would only make him feel
more bitterly parting from the life he so loved. Levin
knew his brother and the workings of his intellect: he
knew that his unbelief came not from life being easier for
him without faith, but had grown up because step by step
the contemporary scientific interpretation of natural
phenomena crushed out the possibility of faith; and so he
knew that his present return was not a legitimate one,
brought about by way of the same working of his intellect,
but simply a temporary, interested return to faith in a
desperate hope of recovery. Levin knew too that Kitty had
strengthened his hope by accounts of the marvelous
recoveries she had heard of. Levin knew all this; and it was
agonizingly painful to him to behold the supplicating,
hopeful eyes and the emaciated wrist, lifted with difficulty,

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