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 unwillingly. "I can't do anything. What is to be done about it?"

"Now, why can't you do anything? I confess I don't understand it. I cannot admit that it is indifference or lack of intelligence; is n't it simply laziness?"

"It is not that, or the first or the second. I have tried it, and I see that I cannot do anything," said Levin.

"He was not paying great heed to what his brother said, but was looking intently across the fields on the other side of the river. He saw something black, but he could not make out whether it was only a horse, or his overseer on horseback.

"Why can't you do anything? You have made an experiment, and it does not turn out to your satisfaction, and you give up. Why not have a little pride about you?"

"Pride?" said Levin, touched to the quick by his brother's reproach. "I don't see what that has to do with it. If at the university they had told me that others understood the integral calculus, but I did not, that would have touched my pride; but here one must be convinced in advance that one needs special aptitude for these things, and first of all that these things are very important."

"What! do you mean to say that they are not important?" asked Sergyeï Ivanovitch, in his turn touched to the quick because his brother seemed to attach so little importance to what so deeply interested him, and more than all because he apparently gave him such poor attention.

"What you wish does not seem to me important, and I cannot feel interested in it," replied Levin, who now saw that the black speck was the overseer, and that the overseer was probably taking some muzhiks from their work. They had canted over their plows. "Can they have finished plowing?" he asked himself.

"Now, listen! nevertheless," said his brother, his handsome intellectual face growing a shade darker. "There are limits to everything. It is very fine to be an