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 was impossible was reached by reasoning that in her parents' eyes he was not a suitor sufficiently advantageous or suitable for the beautiful Kitty, and that Kitty herself could not love him. In her parents' eyes, he was engaged in no definite line of activity, and at his age had no position in the world, while his comrades were colonels or staff-officers, distinguished professors, bank directors, railway officials, presidents of tribunals like Oblonsky; but he—and he knew very well how he was regarded by his friends—was only a pomyeshchik, or country proprietor, busy with breeding of cows, hunting woodcock, and building farmhouses: in other words, he was an incapable youth who had accomplished nothing, and who, in the eyes of society, was doing just what men do who have made a failure.

Surely, the mysterious, charming Kitty could not love a man so ill-favored, dull, and good-for-nothing as he felt that he was. Moreover, his former relations with her, consequent upon his friendship with her brother, were those of a grown man with a child, and seemed to him only an additional obstacle to love.

It was possible, he thought, for a girl to have a friendship for a good, homely man, such as he considered himself to be; but if he is to be loved with a love such as he felt for Kitty, he must be good-looking, and above all, a man of distinction.

He had heard that women often fall in love with ill-favored, stupid men, but he did not believe that such would be his own experience, just as he felt that it would be impossible for him to love a woman who was not beautiful, brilliant, and poetic.

But, having spent two months in the solitude of the country, he became convinced that this was not one of his youthful passions, that the state of his feelings allowed him not a moment of rest, and that he could not live without settling this mighty question—whether she would, or would not, be his wife; that his despair arose wholly from his imagination, and that he had no absolute certainty that she would refuse him.

He had now returned to Moscow with the firm