Page 208 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

Chapter 27

The house was big and old-fashioned, and Levin,
though he lived alone, had the whole house heated and
used. He knew that this was stupid, he knew that it was
positively not right, and contrary to his present new plans,
but this house was a whole world to Levin. It was the
world in which his father and mother had lived and died.
They had lived just the life that to Levin seemed the ideal
of perfection, and that he had dreamed of beginning with
his wife, his family.
Levin scarcely remembered his mother. His conception
of her was for him a sacred memory, and his future wife
was bound to be in his imagination a repetition of that
exquisite, holy ideal of a woman that his mother had been.
He was so far from conceiving of love for woman apart
from marriage that he positively pictured to himself first
the family, and only secondarily the woman who would
give him a family. His ideas of marriage were,
consequently, quite unlike those of the great majority of
his acquaintances, for whom getting married was one of
the numerous facts of social life. For Levin it was the chief

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