Page 203 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

see what had happened to him in quite a different light.
He felt himself, and did not want to be any one else. All
he wanted now was to be better than before. In the first
place he resolved that from that day he would give up

hoping for any extraordinary happiness, such as marriage
must have given him, and consequently he would not so
disdain what he really had. Secondly, he would never
again let himself give way to low passion, the memory of
which had so tortured him when he had been making up
his mind to make an offer. Then remembering his brother
Nikolay, he resolved to himself that he would never allow
himself to forget him, that he would follow him up, and
not lose sight of him, so as to be ready to help when
things should go ill with him. And that would be soon, he
felt. Then, too, his brother’s talk of communism, which
he had treated so lightly at the time, now made him think.
He considered a revolution in economic conditions
nonsense. But he always felt the injustice of his own
abundance in comparison with the poverty of the peasants,
and now he determined that so as to feel quite in the
right, though he had worked hard and lived by no means
luxuriously before, he would now work still harder, and
would allow himself even less luxury. And all this seemed
to him so easy a conquest over himself that he spent the

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