Page 532 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

‘Why is it you can do nothing? You made an attempt
and didn’t succeed, as you think, and you give in. How
can you have so little self-respect?’
‘Self-respect!’ said Levin, stung to the quick by his

brother’s words; ‘I don’t understand. If they’d told me at
college that other people understood the integral calculus,
and I didn’t, then pride would have come in. But in this
case one wants first to be convinced that one has certain
qualifications for this sort of business, and especially that all
this business is of great importance.’
‘What! do you mean to say it’s not of importance?’ said
Sergey Ivanovitch, stung to the quick too at his brother’s
considering anything of no importance that interested
him, and still more at his obviously paying little attention
to what he was saying.
‘I don’t think it important; it does not take hold of me,
I can’t help it,’ answered Levin, making out that what he
saw was the bailiff, and that the bailiff seemed to be letting
the peasants go off the ploughed land. They were turning
the plough over. ‘Can they have finished ploughing?’ he
wondered.
‘Come, really though,’ said the elder brother, with a
frown on his handsome, clever face, ‘there’s a limit to
everything. It’s very well to be original and genuine, and

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