Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/137

 meet her master, and jumped upon him, trying to place her fore paws on his breast.

"You are back very soon, batyushka," said Agafya Mikhaïlovna.

"I was bored, Agafya Mikhaïlovna; 't is good to go visiting, but it's better at home," said he. And he went into his library.

The library slowly grew light as the candle that was brought burnt up. The familiar details little by little came into sight—the great antlers, the shelves lined with books, the mirror, the stove with a hole which ought long ago to have been repaired, the ancestral divan, the great table, and on the table an open book, a broken ash-tray, a note-book filled with his writing.

As he saw all these things, for a moment the doubt arose in his mind if it would be possible to bring about this new life which he had dreamed of during his journey. All these signs of his past seemed to say to him, 'No, thou shalt not leave us! thou shalt not become another; but thou shalt still be as thou hast always been,—with thy doubts, thy everlasting self-dissatisfaction, thy idle efforts at reform, thy failures, and thy perpetual striving for a happiness which will never be thine.'

But while these external objects spoke to him thus, a different voice whispered to his soul, bidding him cease to be a slave to his past, and declaring that a man has every possibility within him. And, listening to this voice, he went to one side of the room, where he found two forty-pound dumb-bells. And he began to practise his gymnastic exercises with them, endeavoring to bring himself into a condition of vigor. At the door there was a noise of steps. He hastily put down the dumb-bells.

The intendant came in and said that, thanks to God, everything was all right, but he confessed that the buckwheat in the new drying-room had got burnt. This provoked Levin. This new drying-room he had himself built, and partially invented. But the intendant had been entirely opposed to it, and now he announced with ill-concealed triumph that the buckwheat