Page 591 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

what you love, and then, when you are sure you love her,
you make an offer...’
‘Well, that’s not quite it.’
‘Anyway you make an offer, when your love is ripe or

when the balance has completely turned between the two
you are choosing from. But a girl is not asked. She is
expected to make her choice, and yet she cannot choose,
she can only answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’’
‘Yes, to choose between me and Vronsky,’ thought
Levin, and the dead thing that had come to life within
him died again, and only weighed on his heart and set it
aching.
‘Darya Alexandrovna,’ he said, ‘that’s how one chooses
a new dress or some purchase or other, not love. The
choice has been made, and so much the better.... And
there can be no repeating it.’
‘Ah, pride, pride!’ said Darya Alexandrovna, as though
despising him for the baseness of this feeling in comparison
with that other feeling which only women know. ‘At the
time when you made Kitty an offer she was just in a
position in which she could not answer. She was in doubt.
Doubt between you and Vronsky. Him she was seeing
every day, and you she had not seen for a long while.
Supposing she had been older...I, for instance, in her place

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