Page 538 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

peasant who’s stolen a flitch of bacon, and listen for six
hours at a stretch to all sorts of jabber from the counsel for
the defense and the prosecution, and the president cross-
examining my old half-witted Alioshka, ‘Do you admit,

prisoner in the dock, the fact of the removal of the
bacon?’ ‘Eh?’’
Konstantin Levin had warmed to his subject, and began
mimicking the president and the half-witted Alioshka: it
seemed to him that it was all to the point.
But Sergey Ivanovitch shrugged his shoulders.
‘Well, what do you mean to say, then?’
‘I simply mean to say that those rights that touch
me...my interest, I shall always defend to the best of my
ability; that when they made raids on us students, and the
police read our letters, I was ready to defend those rights
to the utmost, to defend my rights to education and
freedom. I can understand compulsory military service,
which affects my children, my brothers, and myself, I am
ready to deliberate on what concerns me; but deliberating
on how to spend forty thousand roubles of district council
money, or judging the half-witted Alioshka—I don’t
understand, and I can’t do it.’
Konstantin Levin spoke as though the floodgates of his
speech had burst open. Sergey Ivanovitch smiled.

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