第 六 章 · 第6章

When Oblonsky asked Levin what had brought him to town, Levin blushed,

and was furious with himself for blushing, because he could not answer,

“I have come to make your sister-in-law an offer,” though that was

precisely what he had come for.

The families of the Levins and the Shtcherbatskys were old, noble

Moscow families, and had always been on intimate and friendly terms.

This intimacy had grown still closer during Levin’s student days. He

had both prepared for the university with the young Prince

Shtcherbatsky, the brother of Kitty and Dolly, and had entered at the

same time with him. In those days Levin used often to be in the

Shtcherbatskys’ house, and he was in love with the Shtcherbatsky

household. Strange as it may appear, it was with the household, the

family, that Konstantin Levin was in love, especially with the feminine

half of the household. Levin did not remember his own mother, and his

only sister was older than he was, so that it was in the

Shtcherbatskys’ house that he saw for the first time that inner life of

an old, noble, cultivated, and honorable family of which he had been

deprived by the death of his father and mother. All the members of that

family, especially the feminine half, were pictured by him, as it were,

wrapped about with a mysterious poetical veil, and he not only

perceived no defects whatever in them, but under the poetical veil that

shrouded them he assumed the existence of the loftiest sentiments and

every possible perfection. Why it was the three young ladies had one

day to speak French, and the next English; why it was that at certain

hours they played by turns on the piano, the sounds of which were

audible in their brother’s room above, where the students used to work;

why they were visited by those professors of French literature, of

music, of drawing, of dancing; why at certain hours all the three young

ladies, with Mademoiselle Linon, drove in the coach to the Tversky

boulevard, dressed in their satin cloaks, Dolly in a long one, Natalia

in a half-long one, and Kitty in one so short that her shapely legs in

tightly-drawn red stockings were visible to all beholders; why it was

they had to walk about the Tversky boulevard escorted by a footman with

a gold cockade in his hat—all this and much more that was done in their

mysterious world he did not understand, but he was sure that everything

that was done there was very good, and he was in love precisely with

the mystery of the proceedings.

In his student days he had all but been in love with the eldest, Dolly,

but she was soon married to Oblonsky. Then he began being in love with

the second. He felt, as it were, that he had to be in love with one of

the sisters, only he could not quite make out which. But Natalia, too,

had hardly made her appearance in the world when she married the

diplomat Lvov. Kitty was still a child when Levin left the university.

Young Shtcherbatsky went into the navy, was drowned in the Baltic, and

Levin’s relations with the Shtcherbatskys, in spite of his friendship

with Oblonsky, became less intimate. But when early in the winter of

this year Levin came to Moscow, after a year in the country, and saw

the Shtcherbatskys, he realized which of the three sisters he was

indeed destined to love.

One would have thought that nothing could be simpler than for him, a

man of good family, rather rich than poor, and thirty-two years old, to

make the young Princess Shtcherbatskaya an offer of marriage; in all

likelihood he would at once have been looked upon as a good match. But

Levin was in love, and so it seemed to him that Kitty was so perfect in

every respect that she was a creature far above everything earthly; and

that he was a creature so low and so earthly that it could not even be

conceived that other people and she herself could regard him as worthy

of her.

After spending two months in Moscow in a state of enchantment, seeing

Kitty almost every day in society, into which he went so as to meet

her, he abruptly decided that it could not be, and went back to the

country.

Levin’s conviction that it could not be was founded on the idea that in

the eyes of her family he was a disadvantageous and worthless match for

the charming Kitty, and that Kitty herself could not love him. In her

family’s eyes he had no ordinary, definite career and position in

society, while his contemporaries by this time, when he was thirty-two,

were already, one a colonel, and another a professor, another director

of a bank and railways, or president of a board like Oblonsky. But he

(he knew very well how he must appear to others) was a country

gentleman, occupied in breeding cattle, shooting game, and building

barns; in other words, a fellow of no ability, who had not turned out

well, and who was doing just what, according to the ideas of the world,

is done by people fit for nothing else.

The mysterious, enchanting Kitty herself could not love such an ugly

person as he conceived himself to be, and, above all, such an ordinary,

in no way striking person. Moreover, his attitude to Kitty in the

past—the attitude of a grown-up person to a child, arising from his

friendship with her brother—seemed to him yet another obstacle to love.

An ugly, good-natured man, as he considered himself, might, he

supposed, be liked as a friend; but to be loved with such a love as

that with which he loved Kitty, one would need to be a handsome and,

still more, a distinguished man.

He had heard that women often did care for ugly and ordinary men, but

he did not believe it, for he judged by himself, and he could not

himself have loved any but beautiful, mysterious, and exceptional

women.

But after spending two months alone in the country, he was convinced

that this was not one of those passions of which he had had experience

in his early youth; that this feeling gave him not an instant’s rest;

that he could not live without deciding the question, would she or

would she not be his wife, and that his despair had arisen only from

his own imaginings, that he had no sort of proof that he would be

rejected. And he had now come to Moscow with a firm determination to

make an offer, and get married if he were accepted. Or ... he could not

conceive what would become of him if he were rejected.