Page 209 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

affair of life, on which its whole happiness turned. And
now he had to give up that.
When he had gone into the little drawing room, where
he always had tea, and had settled himself in his armchair

with a book , and Agafea Mihalovna had brought him tea,
and with her usual, ‘Well, I’ll stay a while, sir,’ had taken a
chair in the window, he felt that, however strange it might
be, he had not parted from his daydreams, and that he
could not live without them. Whether with her, or with
another, still it would be. He was reading a book, and
thinking of what he was reading, and stopping to listen to
Agafea Mihalovna, who gossiped away without flagging,
and yet with all that, all sorts of pictures of family life and
work in the future rose disconnectedly before his
imagination. He felt that in the depth of his soul
something had been put in its place, settled down, and laid
to rest.
He heard Agafea Mihalovna talking of how Prohor had
forgotten his duty to God, and with the money Levin had
given him to buy a horse, had been drinking without
stopping, and had beaten his wife till he’d half killed her.
He listened, and read his book, and recalled the whole
train of ideas suggested by his reading. It was Tyndall’s
Treatise on Heat. He recalled his own criticisms of

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