Page 51 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

that other people and she herself could regard him as
worthy of her.
After spending two months in Moscow in a state of
enchantment, seeing Kitty almost every day in society,

into which he went so as to meet her, he abruptly decided
that it could not be, and went back to the country.
Levin’s conviction that it could not be was founded on
the idea that in the eyes of her family he was a
disadvantageous and worthless match for the charming
Kitty, and that Kitty herself could not love him. In her
family’s eyes he had no ordinary, definite career and
position in society, while his contemporaries by this time,
when he was thirty-two, were already, one a colonel, and
another a professor, another director of a bank and
railways, or president of a board like Oblonsky. But he (he
knew very well how he must appear to others) was a
country gentleman, occupied in breeding cattle, shooting
game, and building barns; in other words, a fellow of no
ability, who had not turned out well, and who was doing
just what, according to the ideas of the world, is done by
people fit for nothing else.
The mysterious, enchanting Kitty herself could not
love such an ugly person as he conceived himself to be,
and, above all, such an ordinary, in no way striking

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