a dinner for their relations, that
cost twenty-eight roubles, though it did excite in Levin the
reflection that twenty-eight roubles meant nine measures of oats,
which men would with groans and sweat have reaped and bound and
thrashed and winnowed and sifted and sown,--this next one he
parted with more easily. And now the notes he changed no longer
aroused such reflections, and they flew off like little birds.
Whether the labor devoted to obtaining the money corresponded to
the pleasure given by what was bought with it, was a
consideration he had long ago dismissed. His business
calculation that there was a certain price below which he could
not sell certain grain was forgotten too. The rye, for the price
of which he had so long held out, had been sold for fifty kopecks
a measure cheaper than it had been fetching a month ago. Even
the consideration that with such an expenditure he could not go
on living for a year without debt, that even had no force. Only
one thing was essential: to have money in the bank, without
inquiring where it came from, so as to know that one had the
wherewithal to buy meat for tomorrow. And this condition had
hitherto been fulfilled; he had always had the money in the bank.
But now the money in the bank had gone, and he could not quite
tell where to get the next installment. And this it was which,
at the moment when Kitty had mentioned money, had disturbed him;
but he had no time to think about it. He drove off, thinking of
Katavasov and the meeting with Metrov that was before him.

Chapter 3

Levin had on this visit to town seen a great deal of his old
friend at the university, Professor Katavasov, whom he had not
seen since his marriage. He liked in Katavasov the clearness and
simplicity of his conception of life. Levin thought that the
clearness of Katavasov's conception of life was due to the
poverty of his nature; Katavasov thought that the
disconnectedness of Levin's ideas was due to his lack of
intellectual discipline; but Levin enjoyed Katavasov's clearness,
and Katavasov enjoyed the abundance of Levin's untrained ideas,
and they liked to meet and to discuss.

Levin had read Katavasov some parts of his book, and he had liked
them. On the previous day Katavasov had met Levin at a public
lecture and told him that the celebrated Metrov, whose article
Levin had so much liked, was in Moscow, that he had been much
interested by what Katavasov had told him about Levin's