tails of his enterprise, which was great and complicated; and from the stable he went directly to the office, and after a long conversation with the intendant and Semyon the contractor, he went back to the house, and marched straight up into the drawing-room.
CHAPTER XXVII
Levin's house was old and large, but, though he lived there alone, he occupied and warmed the whole of it. He knew that this was ridiculous; he knew that it was bad, and contrary to his new plans; but this house was a world in itself to him. It was a world where his father and mother had lived and died. They had lived a life which, for Levin, seemed the ideal of all perfection, and which he dreamed of renewing with his own wife, with his own family.
Levin scarcely remembered his mother. But this remembrance was sacred; and his future wife, as he imagined her, was to be the counterpart of the ideally charming and adorable woman, his mother. For him, love for a woman could not exist outside of marriage; but he imagined the family relationship first, and only afterwards the woman who would be the center of the family. His ideas about marriage were therefore essentially different from those held by the majority of his friends, for whom it was only one of innumerable social affairs; for Levin it was the most important act of his life, whereon all his happiness depended, and now he must renounce it!
When he entered the little parlor where he always took tea, and threw himself into his arm-chair with a book, while Agafya Mikhaïlovna brought him his cup, and sat down near the window, saying as usual, "Well, I'll sit down, batyushka," — then he felt, strangely enough, that he had not renounced his day-dreams, and that he could not live without them. Were it Kitty or another, still it would be. He read his book, had his mind on what he was reading, pausing occasionally to
