Page 750 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

thought the system worked, and that by keeping accounts
strictly and insisting on his own way, he would prove to
them in the future the advantages of the arrangement, and
then the system would go of itself.

These matters, together with the management of the
land still left on his hands, and the indoor work over his
book, so engrossed Levin the whole summer that he
scarcely ever went out shooting. At the end of August he
heard that the Oblonskys had gone away to Moscow,
from their servant who brought back the side-saddle. He
felt that in not answering Darya Alexandrovna’s letter he
had by his rudeness, of which he could not think without
a flush of shame, burned his ships, and that he would
never go and see them again. He had been just as rude
with the Sviazhskys, leaving them without saying good-
bye. But he would never go to see them again either. He
did not care about that now. The business of reorganizing
the farming of his land absorbed him as completely as
though there would never be anything else in his life. He
read the books lent him by Sviazhsky, and copying out
what he had not got, he read both the economic and
socialistic books on the subject, but, as he had anticipated,
found nothing bearing on the scheme he had undertaken.
In the books on political economy—in Mill, for instance,

749 of 1759