Anna Karenina - Part 1 - Page 22/119

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.