Page 1421 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

‘Oh, well, one does it! What would you have? It’s
habit, and one knows it’s how it should be. And what’s
more,’ the landowner went on, leaning his elbows on the
window and chatting on, ‘my son, I must tell you, has no

taste for it. There’s no doubt he’ll be a scientific man. So
there’ll be no one to keep it up. And yet one does it. Here
this year I’ve planted an orchard.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Levin, ‘that’s perfectly true. I always feel
there’s no real balance of gain in my work on the land,
and yet one does it.... It’s a sort of duty one feels to the
land.’
‘But I tell you what,’ the landowner pursued; ‘a
neighbor of mine, a merchant, was at my place. We
walked about the fields and the garden. ‘No,’ said he,
‘Stepan Vassilievitch, everything’s well looked after, but
your garden’s neglected.’ But, as a fact, it’s well kept up.
‘To my thinking, I’d cut down that lime-tree. Here
you’ve thousands of limes, and each would make two
good bundles of bark. And nowadays that bark’s worth
something. I’d cut down the lot.’ ‘
‘And with what he made he’d increase his stock, or buy
some land for a trifle, and let it out in lots to the peasants,’
Levin added, smiling. He had evidently more than once
come across those commercial calculations. ‘And he’d

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