Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/25

, but these principles and opinions came to him, just as he never chose the shape of a hat or coat, but took those that others wore. And, living as he did in fashionable society, through the necessity of some mental activity, developing generally in a man's best years, it was as indispensable for him to have views as to have a hat. If there was any reason why he preferred liberal views rather than the conservative direction which many of his circle followed, it was not because he found a liberal tendency more rational, but because he found it better suited to his mode of life.

The liberal party declared that everything in Russia was wretched; and the fact was that Stepan Arkadyevitch had a good many debts and was decidedly short of money. The liberal party said that marriage was a defunct institution and that it needed to be remodeled, and in fact domestic life afforded Stepan Arkadyevitch very little pleasure, and compelled him to lie, and to pretend what was contrary to his nature. The liberal party said, or rather took it for granted, that religion is only a curb on the barbarous portion of the community, and in fact Stepan Arkadyevitch could not bear the shortest prayer without pain in his knees, and he could not comprehend the necessity of all these awful and high-sounding words about the other world when it is so very pleasant to live in this. Moreover, Stepan Arkadyevitch, who liked a merry jest, was sometimes fond of scandalizing a quiet man by saying that any one who was proud of his origin ought not to stop at Rurik and deny his earliest ancestor—the monkey.

Thus the liberal tendency had become a habit with Stepan Arkadyevitch, and he liked his paper, just as he liked his cigar after dinner, because of the slight haziness which it caused in his brain. He was now reading the leading editorial, which proved that in our day a cry is raised, without reason, over the danger that radicalism may swallow up all the conservative elements, and that government ought to take measures to crush the hydra of revolution, and that, on the contrary, "according to our opinion, the danger lies not in this imaginary hydra