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 CHAPTER XV

were just back from Moscow, and enjoying their solitude. Levin was sitting at his library table, writing; Kitty, dressed in a dark violet dress, which she had worn in the first days of their marriage, and which Levin had always liked, was making broderie anglaise, as she sat on the divan,—on the great leather divan which ever since the days of Levin's father and grandfather had stood in the library.

Levin enjoyed her presence while he was writing and thinking. He had not abandoned his occupations,—his farming, and the treatise in which the principles of his new method of conducting his estate were to be evolved. But, as before, these occupations and thoughts seemed to him small and useless in comparison with the gloom that overshadowed his life; so now they seemed just as petty and unimportant in comparison with the life before him, irradiated as it was with the full light of joy. He kept up his occupations, but felt now that the center of gravity of his interests had shifted, and that consequently he looked otherwise and more clearly than formerly at the matter.

In former days this occupation seemed like the salvation of his life; in former days he felt that without it life would be altogether gloomy; now these occupations were necessary in order that his life might not be too monotonously bright. As he took up his manuscript again, reading over what he had written, he felt with satisfaction that the work was worth his attention. Many of his former thoughts seemed to him exaggerated and extravagant, but many of the gaps became clearly evident to him as he reviewed the whole subject. He was now writing a new chapter, in which he treated of the causes for the unfavorable condition of Russian agriculture. He argued that the poverty of the country was caused not entirely by the unequal distribution of the land property and false economical tendencies, but that this cooperated with the abnormal introduction of a veneer