Page 1744 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

Levin reddened with vexation, not at being defeated,
but at having failed to control himself and being drawn
into argument.
‘No, I can’t argue with them,’ he thought; ‘they wear

impenetrable armor, while I’m naked.’
He saw that it was impossible to convince his brother
and Katavasov, and he saw even less possibility of himself
agreeing with them. What they advocated was the very
pride of intellect that had almost been his ruin. He could
not admit that some dozens of men, among them his
brother, had the right, on the ground of what they were
told by some hundreds of glib volunteers swarming to the
capital, to say that they and the newspapers were
expressing the will and feeling of the people, and a feeling
which was expressed in vengeance and murder. He could
not admit this, because he neither saw the expression of
such feelings in the people among whom he was living,
nor found them in himself (and he could not but consider
himself one of the persons making up the Russian people),
and most of all because he, like the people, did not know
and could not know what is for the general good, though
he knew beyond a doubt that this general good could be
attained only by the strict observance of that law of right
and wrong which has been revealed to every man, and

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