love her; but he could not go over to the Oblonskys’, knowing she was there.  The fact that he had made her an offer, and she had refused him, had placed an insuperable barrier between her and him.  “I can’t ask her to be my wife merely because she can’t be the wife of the man she wanted to marry,” he said to himself.  The thought of this made him cold and hostile to her.  “I should not be able to speak to her without a feeling of reproach; I could not look at her without resentment; and she will only hate me all the more, as she’s bound to.  And besides, how can I now, after what Darya Alexandrovna told me, go to see them?  Can I help showing that I know what she told me?  And me to go magnanimously to forgive her, and have pity on her!  Me go through a performance before her of forgiving, and deigning to bestow my love on her!...  What induced Darya Alexandrovna to tell me that?  By chance I might have seen her, then everything would have happened of itself; but, as it is, it’s out of the question, out of the question!”

Darya Alexandrovna sent him a letter, asking him for a side-saddle for Kitty’s use.  “I’m told you have a side-saddle,” she wrote to him; “I hope you will bring it over yourself.”

This was more than he could stand.  How could a woman of any intelligence, of any delicacy, put her sister in such a humiliating position!  He wrote ten notes, and tore them all up, and sent the saddle without any reply.  To write that he would go was impossible, because he could not go; to write that he could not come because something prevented him, or that he would be away, that was still worse.  He sent the saddle without an answer, and with a sense of having done something shameful; he handed over all the now revolting business of the estate to the bailiff, and set off next day to a remote district to see his friend Sviazhsky, who had splendid marshes for grouse in his neighborhood, and had lately written to ask him to keep a long-standing promise to stay with him.  The grouse-marsh, in the Surovsky district, had long tempted Levin, but he had continually put off this visit on account of his work on the estate.  Now he was glad to get away from the neighborhood of the Shtcherbatskys, and still more from his farm work, especially on a shooting expedition, which always in trouble served as the best consolation.

Chapter 25

In the Surovsky district there was no railway nor service of post horses, and Levin drove there with his own horses in his big, old-fashioned carriage.

He stopped halfway at a well-to-do peasant’s to feed his horses.  A bald, well-preserved old man, with a broad, red beard, gray on his cheeks, opened the gate, squeezing against the gatepost to let the three horses pass.  Directing the coachman to a place under the shed in the big, clean, tidy yard, with charred, old-fashioned ploughs in it, the old man asked Levin to come into the parlor.  A cleanly dressed young woman, with clogs on her bare feet, was scrubbing the floor in the new outer room.  She was frightened of the dog, that ran in after Levin, and uttered a shriek, but began laughing at her own fright at once when she was told the dog would not hurt her.  Pointing Levin with her bare arm to the door into the parlor, she bent down again, hiding her handsome face, and went on scrubbing.