Page 1702 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

thought and the mass of business with which he was
burdened from all sides, he had completely given up
thinking of the general good, and he busied himself with
all this work simply because it seemed to him that he must

do what he was doing—that he could not do otherwise.
In former days—almost from childhood, and increasingly
up to full manhood—when he had tried to do anything
that would be good for all, for humanity, for Russia, for
the whole village, he had noticed that the idea of it had
been pleasant, but the work itself had always been
incoherent, that then he had never had a full conviction of
its absolute necessity, and that the work that had begun by
seeming so great, had grown less and less, till it vanished
into nothing. But now, since his marriage, when he had
begun to confine himself more and more to living for
himself, though he experienced no delight at all at the
thought of the work he was doing, he felt a complete
conviction of its necessity, saw that it succeeded far better
than in old days, and that it kept on growing more and
more.
Now, involuntarily it seemed, he cut more and more
deeply into the soil like a plough, so that he could not be
drawn out without turning aside the furrow.

1701 of 1759