Page 1221 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

youth, but she was not a child; and if she loved him, she
loved him consciously as a woman ought to love; that was
one thing. Another point: she was not only far from being
worldly, but had an unmistakable distaste for worldly

society, and at the same time she knew the world, and had
all the ways of a woman of the best society, which were
absolutely essential to Sergey Ivanovitch’s conception of
the woman who was to share his life. Thirdly: she was
religious, and not like a child, unconsciously religious and
good, as Kitty, for example, was, but her life was founded
on religious principles. Even in trifling matters, Sergey
Ivanovitch found in her all that he wanted in his wife: she
was poor and alone in the world, so she would not bring
with her a mass of relations and their influence into her
husband’s house, as he saw now in Kitty’s case. She would
owe everything to her husband, which was what he had
always desired too for his future family life. And this girl,
who united all these qualities, loved him. He was a modest
man, but he could not help seeing it. And he loved her.
There was one consideration against it—his age. But he
came of a long-lived family, he had not a single gray hair,
no one would have taken him for forty, and he
remembered Varenka’s saying that it was only in Russia
that men of fifty thought themselves old, and that in

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