Page 523 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

working for the public good. But in the depths of his
heart, the older he became, and the more intimately he
knew his brother, the more and more frequently the
thought struck him that this faculty of working for the

public good, of which he felt himself utterly devoid, was
possibly not so much a quality as a lack of something —
not a lack of good, honest, noble desires and tastes, but a
lack of vital force, of what is called heart, of that impulse
which drives a man to choose someone out of the
innumerable paths of life, and to care only for that one.
The better he knew his brother, the more he noticed that
Sergey Ivanovitch, and many other people who worked
for the public welfare, were not led by an impulse of the
heart to care for the public good, but reasoned from
intellectual considerations that it was a right thing to take
interest in public affairs, and consequently took interest in
them. Levin was confirmed in this generalization by
observing that his brother did not take questions affecting
the public welfare or the question of the immortality of
the soul a bit more to heart than he did chess problems, or
the ingenious construction of a new machine.
Besides this, Konstantin Levin was not at his ease with
his brother, because in summer in the country Levin was
continually busy with work on the land, and the long

522 of 1759