never ceased to love her; but he
could not go over to the Oblonskys', knowing she was there. The
fact that he had made her an offer, and she had refused him,
had placed an insuperable barrier between her and him. "I can't
ask her to be my wife merely because she can't be the wife of the
man she wanted to marry," he said to himself. The thought of
this made him cold and hostile to her. "I should not be able to
speak to her without a feeling of reproach; I could not look at
her without resentment; and she will only hate me all the more,
as she's bound to. And besides, how can I now, after what Darya
Alexandrovna told me, go to see them? Can I help showing that I
know what she told me? And me to go magnanimously to forgive
her, and have pity on her! Me go through a performance before
her of forgiving, and deigning to bestow my love on her!... What
induced Darya Alexandrovna to tell me that? By chance I might
have seen her, then everything would have happened of itself;
but, as it is, it's out of the question, out of the question!"

Darya Alexandrovna sent him a letter, asking him for a
side-saddle for Kitty's use. "I'm told you have a side-saddle,"
she wrote to him; "I hope you will bring it over yourself."

This was more than he could stand. How could a woman of any
intelligence, of any delicacy, put her sister in such a
humiliating position! He wrote ten notes, and tore them all up,
and sent the saddle without any reply. To write that he would go
was impossible, because he could not go; to write that he could
not come because something prevented him, or that he would be
away, that was still worse. He sent the saddle without an
answer, and with a sense of having done something shameful; he
handed over all the now revolting business of the estate to the
bailiff, and set off next day to a remote district to see his
friend Sviazhsky, who had splendid marshes for grouse in his
neighborhood, and had lately written to ask him to keep a
long-standing promise to stay with him. The grouse-marsh, in the
Surovsky district, had long tempted Levin, but he had continually
put off this visit on account of his work on the estate. Now he
was glad to get away from the neighborhood of the Shtcherbatskys,
and still more from his farm work, especially on a shooting
expedition, which always in trouble served as the best
consolation.

Chapter 25

In the Surovsky district there was no railway nor service of
post ho