e to my vocation
and my duty...but it's not so. The only thing I can say
against it is that, when I lost Marie, I said to myself that I
would remain faithful to her memory. That's the only thing I can
say against my feeling.... That's a great thing," Sergey
Ivanovitch said to himself, feeling at the same time that this
consideration had not the slightest importance for him
personally, but would only perhaps detract from his romantic
character in the eyes of others. "But apart from that, however
much I searched, I should never find anything to say against my
feeling. If I were choosing by considerations of suitability
alone, I could not have found anything better."

However many women and girls he thought of whom he knew, he could
not think of a girl who united to such a degree all, positively
all, the qualities he would wish to see in his wife. She had all
the charm and freshness of youth, but she was not a child; and if
she loved him, she loved him consciously as a woman ought to
love; that was one thing. Another point: she was not only far
from being worldly, but had an unmistakable distaste for worldly
society, and at the same time she knew the world, and had all the
ways of a woman of the best society, which were absolutely
essential to Sergey Ivanovitch's conception of the woman who was
to share his life. Thirdly: she was religious, and not like a
child, unconsciously religious and good, as Kitty, for example,
was, but her life was founded on religious principles. Even in
trifling matters, Sergey Ivanovitch found in her all that he
wanted in his wife: she was poor and alone in the world, so she
would not bring with her a mass of relations and their influence
into her husband's house, as he saw now in Kitty's case. She
would owe everything to her husband, which was what he had always
desired too for his future family life. And this girl, who
united all these qualities, loved him. He was a modest man, but
he could not help seeing it. And he loved her. There was one
consideration against it--his age. But he came of a long-lived
family, he had not a single gray hair, no one would have taken
him for forty, and he remembered Varenka's saying that it was
only in Russia that men of fifty thought themselves old, and that
in France a man of fifty considers himself _dans la force de
l'age_, while a man of forty is _un jeune homme_. But what did
the mere reckoning of years matter when he felt as young in hea