t with Spencer; only I've known it a long while.
Schools can do no good; what will do good is an economic
organization in which the people will become richer, will have
more leisure--and then there will be schools."

"Still, all over Europe now schools are obligatory."

"And how far do you agree with Spencer yourself about it?" asked
Levin.

But there was a gleam of alarm in Sviazhsky's eyes, and he said
smiling:

"No; that screaming story is positively capital! Did you really
hear it yourself?"

Levin saw that he was not to discover the connection between this
man's life and his thoughts. Obviously he did not care in the
least what his reasoning led him to; all he wanted was the
process of reasoning. And he did not like it when the process of
reasoning brought him into a blind alley. That was the only
thing he disliked, and avoided by changing the conversation to
something agreeable and amusing.

All the impressions of the day, beginning with the impression
made by the old peasant, which served, as it were, as the
fundamental basis of all the conceptions and ideas of the day,
threw Levin into violent excitement. This dear good Sviazhsky,
keeping a stock of ideas simply for social purposes, and
obviously having some other principles hidden from Levin, while
with the crowd, whose name is legion, he guided public opinion by
ideas he did not share; that irascible country gentleman,
perfectly correct in the conclusions that he had been worried
into by life, but wrong in his exasperation against a whole
class, and that the best class in Russia; his own dissatisfaction
with the work he had been doing, and the vague hope of finding a
remedy for all this--all was blended in a sense of inward
turmoil, and anticipation of some solution near at hand.

Left alone in the room assigned him, lying on a spring mattress
that yielded unexpectedly at every movement of his arm or his
leg, Levin did not fall asleep for a long while. Not one
conversation with Sviazhsky, though he had said a great deal that
was clever, had interested Levin; but the conclusions of the
irascible landowner required consideration. Levin could not help
recalling every word he had said, and in imagination amending his
own replies.

"Yes, I ought to have said to him: You say that our husbandry
does not answer because the peasant hates improvements, and that
they must be forced on him by authority. If no system of
husbandry answered at all witho