ile.

"But a man may feel himself unworthy sometimes to rise to that
height," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, conscious of hypocrisy in
admitting this religious height, but at the same time unable to
bring himself to acknowledge his free-thinking views before a
person who, by a single word to Pomorsky, might procure him the
coveted appointment.

"That is, you mean that sin keeps him back?" said Lidia Ivanovna.
"But that is a false idea. There is no sin for believers, their
sin has been atoned for. _Pardon,_" she added, looking at the
footman, who came in again with another letter. She read it and
gave a verbal answer: "Tomorrow at the Grand Duchess's, say."
"For the believer sin is not," she went on.

"Yes, but faith without works is dead," said Stepan Arkadyevitch,
recalling the phrase from the catechism, and only by his smile
clinging to his independence.

"There you have it--from the epistle of St. James," said Alexey
Alexandrovitch, addressing Lidia Ivanovna, with a certain
reproachfulness in his tone. It was unmistakably a subject they
had discussed more than once before. "What harm has been done by
the false interpretation of that passage! Nothing holds men back
from belief like that misinterpretation. 'I have not works, so I
cannot believe,' though all the while that is not said. But the
very opposite is said."

"Striving for God, saving the soul by fasting," said Countess
Lidia Ivanovna, with disgusted contempt, "those are the crude
ideas of our monks.... Yet that is nowhere said. It is far
simpler and easier," she added, looking at Oblonsky with the same
encouraging smile with which at court she encouraged youthful
maids of honor, disconcerted by the new surroundings of the
court.

"We are saved by Christ who suffered for us. We are saved by
faith," Alexey Alexandrovitch chimed in, with a glance of
approval at her words.

_"Vous comprenez l'anglais?"_ asked Lidia Ivanovna, and receiving
a reply in the affirmative, she got up and began looking through
a shelf of books.

"I want to read him 'Safe and Happy,' or 'Under the Wing,'" she
said, looking inquiringly at Karenin. And finding the book, and
sitting down again in her place, she opened it. "It's very
short. In it is described the way by which faith can be reached,
and the happiness, above all earthly bliss, with which it fills
the soul. The believer cannot be unhappy because he is not
alone. But you will see." She was just settling he