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 great consolation to think, she almost succeeded in converting him to "Christianity"; in other words, she changed him from an indifferent and lukewarm believer into a fervent and genuine partizan of that new method of explaining the Christian doctrine which shortly after came into vogue in Petersburg. It was easy for Alekseï Aleksandrovitch to put his faith in this exegesis. Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, as well as the countess and all those who shared their views, was not gifted with great imagination, or at least that faculty of the mind by which the illusions of the imagination have sufficient conformity with reality to cause their acceptation. Thus he saw no impossibility or unlikelihood in death existing for unbelievers and not for him, that because he held a complete and unquestioning faith, judged in his own way, his soul was already free from sin, and that even in this world he might look upon his safety as assured.

It is true, Alekseï Aleksandrovitch dimly felt the frivolity, the fallacy, of this presentation of his faith. He knew that when, without a thought that his forgiveness of his wife was the act of a higher power, he gave himself up to this immediate feeling, he experienced a greater happiness than when, as now, he constantly thought that Christ dwelt in his soul, and that by signing certain papers he was following His will. But it was indispensable for Alekseï Aleksandrovitch to think so; it was so indispensable to have, in his present humiliation, this elevation, imaginary though it was, from which he, whom every one despised, could look down on others, that he clung to it as if his salvation depended on it.

CHAPTER XXIII

Countess Lidia Ivanovna had been married when she was a very young and enthusiastic girl to a very wealthy, aristocratic, good-natured, and dissolute young fellow. Two months after the wedding her husband