Page 539 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

‘But tomorrow it’ll be your turn to be tried; would it
have suited your tastes better to be tried in the old
criminal tribunal?’
‘I’m not going to be tried. I shan’t murder anybody,

and I’ve no need of it. Well, I tell you what,’ he went on,
flying off again to a subject quite beside the point, ‘our
district self-government and all the rest of it—it’s just like
the birch branches we stick in the ground on Trinity Day,
for instance, to look like a copse which has grown up of
itself in Europe, and I can’t gush over these birch branches
and believe in them.’
Sergey Ivanovitch merely shrugged his shoulders, as
though to express his wonder how the birch branches had
come into their argument at that point, though he did
really understand at once what his brother meant.
‘Excuse me, but you know one really can’t argue in
that way,’ he observed.
But Konstantin Levin wanted to justify himself for the
failing, of which he was conscious, of lack of zeal for the
public welfare, and he went on.
‘I imagine,’ he said, ‘that no sort of activity is likely to
be lasting if it is not founded on self-interest, that’s a
universal principle, a philosophical principle,’ he said,
repeating the word ‘philosophical’ with determination, as

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