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 comings and the inward struggles which he had undergone, and he unexpectedly added, "However, you may be right. It is quite possible .... I know nothing—absolutely nothing—about it."

"Do you see," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, "you are a very perfect man? Your great virtue is your only fault. You are a very perfect character and you desire that all the factors of life should also be perfect; but this cannot be. Here you scorn the service of the state, because, according to your idea, every action should correspond to an exact end; but this cannot be. You require also that the activity of every man should always have an object, that conjugal life and love be one and the same; but this cannot be. All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty, of life consists in lights and shades."

Levin sighed, and did not answer; he was absorbed in his own thoughts and did not even listen.

And suddenly both of them felt that, though they were good friends, though they had been dining together and drinking wine, yet each was thinking only of his own affairs and cared nothing for the affairs of the other. Oblonsky had more than once had this experience after dining with a friend, and he knew what had to be done when, instead of coming into closer sympathy, the distance between seemed widened.

"The account," he cried, and went into the next room, where he met an aide whom he knew, and with whom he began to talk about an actress and her lover. This conversation amused and rested Oblonsky after his conversation with Levin, who always kept his mind on too great an intellectual and moral strain.

When the Tatar brought the account, amounting to twenty-six rubles and odd kopeks, and something more for his fee, Levin, who at any other time, as a countryman, would have been shocked at the size of the bill, paid the fourteen rubles of his share without noticing, and went to his lodgings to dress for the reception at the Shcherbatskys', where his fate would be decided.