Anna Karenina

renka, with her white kerchief on her black hair, surrounded by the
children, gaily and good-humoredly looking after them, and at the same
time visibly excited at the possibility of receiving a declaration from
the man she cared for, was very attractive. Sergey Ivanovitch walked
beside her, and never left off admiring her. Looking at her, he
recalled all the delightful things he had heard from her lips, all the
good he knew about her, and became more and more conscious that the
feeling he had for her was something special that he had felt long,
long ago, and only once, in his early youth. The feeling of happiness
in being near her continually grew, and at last reached such a point
that, as he put a huge, slender-stalked agaric fungus in her basket, he
looked straight into her face, and noticing the flush of glad and
alarmed excitement that overspread her face, he was confused himself,
and smiled to her in silence a smile that said too much.

“If so,” he said to himself, “I ought to think it over and make up my
mind, and not give way like a boy to the impulse of a moment.”

“I’m going to pick by myself apart from all the rest, or else my
efforts will make no show,” he said, and he left the edge of the forest
where they were walking on low silky grass between old birch trees
standing far apart, and went more into the heart of the wood, where
between the white birch trunks there were gray trunks of aspen and dark
bushes of hazel. Walking some forty paces away, Sergey Ivanovitch,
knowing he was out of sight, stood still behind a bushy spindle-tree in
full flower with its rosy red catkins. It was perfectly still all round
him. Only overhead in the birches under which he stood, the flies, like
a swarm of bees, buzzed unceasingly, and from time to time the
children’s voices were floated across to him. All at once he heard, not
far from the edge of the wood, the sound of Varenka’s contralto voice,
calling Grisha, and a smile of delight passed over Sergey Ivanovitch’s
face. Conscious of this smile, he shook his head disapprovingly at his
own condition, and taking out a cigar, he began lighting it. For a long
while he could not get a match to light against the trunk of a birch
tree. The soft scales of the white bark rubbed off the phosphorus, and
the light went out. At last one of the matches burned, and the fragrant
cigar smoke, hovering uncertainly in flat, wide coils, stretched away
forwards and upwards over a bush under the overhanging branches of a
birch tree. Watching the streak of smoke, Sergey Ivanovitch walked
gently on, deliberating on his position.

“Why not?” he thought. “If it were only a passing fancy or a passion,
if it were only this attraction—this mutual attraction (I can call it a
mutual attraction), but if I felt that it was in contradiction with
the whole bent of my life—if I felt that in giving way to this
attraction I should be false to my vocation and my duty ... but it’s
not so. The only thing I can say against it is that, when I lost Marie,
I said to myself that I would remain faithful to her memory. That’s the
only thing I can say against my feeling.... That’s a great thing,”
Sergey Ivanovitch said to himself, feeling at the same time that this
consideration had not the slightest importance for him personally, but
would only perhaps detract from his romantic character in the eyes of
others. “But apart from that, however much I searched, I should never
find anything to say against my feeling. If I were choosing by
considerations of suitability alone, I could not have found anything
better.”

However many women and girls he thought of whom he knew, he could not
think of a girl who united to such a degree all, positively all, the
qualities he would wish to see in his wife. She had all the charm and
freshness of youth, but she was not a child; and if she loved him, she
loved him consciously as a woman ought to love; that was one thing.
Another point: she was not only far from being worldly, but had an
unmistakable distaste for worldly society, and at the same time she
knew the world, and had all the ways of a woman of the best society,
which were absolutely essential to Sergey Ivanovitch’s conception of
the woman who was to share his life. Thirdly: she was religious, and
not like a child, unconsciously religious and good, as Kitty, for
example, was, but her life was founded on religious principles. Even in
trifling matters, Sergey Ivanovitch found in her all that he wanted in
his wife: she was poor and alone in the world, so she would not bring
with her a mass of relations and their influence into her husband’s
house, as he saw now in Kitty’s case. She would owe everything to her
husband, which was what he had always desired too for his future family
life. And this girl, who united all these qualities, loved him. He was
a modest man, but he could not help seeing it. And he loved her. There
was one consideration against it—his age. But he came of a long-lived
family, he had not a single gray hair, no one would have taken him for
forty, and he remembered Varenka’s saying that it was only in Russia
that men of fifty thought themselves old, and that in France a man of
fifty considers himself dans la force de l’âge, while a man of forty
is un jeune homme. But what did the mere reckoning of years matter
when he felt as young in heart as he had been twenty years ago? Was it
not youth to feel as he felt now, when coming from the other side to
the edge of the wood he saw in the glowing light of the slanting
sunbeams the gracious figure of Varenka in her yellow gown with her
basket, walking lightly by the trunk of an old birch tree, and when
this impression of the sight of Varenka blended so harmoniously with
the beauty of the view, of the yellow oatfield lying bathed in the
slanting sunshine, and beyond it the distant ancient forest flecked
with yellow and melting into the blue of the distance? His heart
throbbed joyously. A softened feeling came over him. He felt that he
had made up his mind. Varenka, who had just crouched down to pick a
mushroom, rose with a supple movement and looked round. Flinging away
the cigar, Sergey Ivanovitch advanced with resolute steps towards her.