Page 563 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

‘Well, you have an appetite!’ he said, looking at his
dark-red, sunburnt face and neck bent over the plate.
‘Splendid! You can’t imagine what an effectual remedy
it is for every sort of foolishness. I want to enrich medicine

with a new word: Arbeitskur.’
‘Well, but you don’t need it, I should fancy.’
‘No, but for all sorts of nervous invalids.’
‘Yes, it ought to be tried. I had meant to come to the
mowing to look at you, but it was so unbearably hot that I
got no further than the forest. I sat there a little, and went
on by the forest to the village, met your old nurse, and
sounded her as to the peasants’ view of you. As far as I can
make out, they don’t approve of this. She said: ‘It’s not a
gentleman’s work.’ Altogether, I fancy that in the people’s
ideas there are very clear and definite notions of certain, as
they call it, ‘gentlemanly’ lines of action. And they don’t
sanction the gentry’s moving outside bounds clearly laid
down in their ideas.’
‘Maybe so; but anyway it’s a pleasure such as I have
never known in my life. And there’s no harm in it, you
know. Is there?’ answered Levin. ‘I can’t help it if they
don’t like it. Though I do believe it’s all right. Eh?’
‘Altogether,’ pursued Sergey Ivanovitch, ‘you’re
satisfied with your day?’

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