Anna Karenina

hen 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.