Page 1272 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

‘I don’t understand you,’ said Levin, sitting up in the
hay; ‘how is it such people don’t disgust you? I can
understand a lunch with Lafitte is all very pleasant, but
don’t you dislike just that very sumptuousness? All these

people, just like our spirit monopolists in old days, get
their money in a way that gains them the contempt of
everyone. They don’t care for their contempt, and then
they use their dishonest gains to buy off the contempt they
have deserved.’
‘Perfectly true!’ chimed in Vassenka Veslovsky.
‘Perfectly! Oblonsky, of course, goes out of bonhomie,
but other people say: ‘Well, Oblonsky stays with them.’..’
‘Not a bit of it.’ Levin could hear that Oblonsky was
smiling as he spoke. ‘I simply don’t consider him more
dishonest than any other wealthy merchant or nobleman.
They’ve all made their money alike—by their work and
their intelligence.’
‘Oh, by what work? Do you call it work to get hold of
concessions and speculate with them?’
‘Of course it’s work. Work in this sense, that if it were
not for him and others like him, there would have been
no railways.’
‘But that’s not work, like the work of a peasant or a
learned profession.’

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