know, mamma has told me,
there are prayers said for recovery."

"Do you suppose he can possibly recover?" said Levin, watching a
slender tress at the back of her round little head that was
continually hidden when she passed the comb through the front.

"I asked the doctor; he said he couldn't live more than three
days. But can they be sure? I'm very glad, anyway, that I
persuaded him," she said, looking askance at her husband through
her hair. "Anything is possible," she added with that peculiar,
rather sly expression that was always in her face when she spoke
of religion.

Since their conversation about religion when they were engaged
neither of them had ever started a discussion of the subject, but
she performed all the ceremonies of going to church, saying her
prayers, and so on, always with the unvarying conviction that
this ought to be so. In spite of his assertion to the contrary,
she was firmly persuaded that he was as much a Christian as she,
and indeed a far better one; and all that he said about it was
simply one of his absurd masculine freaks, just as he would say
about her _broderie anglaise_ that good people patch holes, but
that she cut them on purpose, and so on.

"Yes, you see this woman, Marya Nikolaevna, did not know how to
manage all this," said Levin. "And...I must own I'm very,
very glad you came. You are such purity that...." He took her
hand and did not kiss it (to kiss her hand in such closeness to
death seemed to him improper); he merely squeezed it with a
penitent air, looking at her brightening eyes.

"It would have been miserable for you to be alone," she said, and
lifting her hands which hid her cheeks flushing with pleasure,
twisted her coil of hair on the nape of her neck and pinned it
there. "No," she went on, "she did not know how.... Luckily, I
learned a lot at Soden."

"Surely there are not people there so ill?"

"Worse."

"What's so awful to me is that I can't see him as he was when he
was young. You would not believe how charming he was as a youth,
but I did not understand him then."

"I can quite, quite believe it. How I feel that we might have
been friends!" she said; and, distressed at what she had said,
she looked round at her husband, and tears came into her eyes.

"Yes, _might have been_," he said mournfully. "He's just one of
those people of whom they say they're not for this world."

"But we have many days before us; we must go to bed," said Kitty