come, and all ends; that nothing was even worth beginning,
and that there was no helping it anyway. Yes, it was awful, but
it was so.

"But I am alive still. Now what's to be done? what's to be
done?" he said in despair. He lighted a candle, got up
cautiously and went to the looking-glass, and began looking at
his face and hair. Yes, there were gray hairs about his temples.
He opened his mouth. His back teeth were beginning to decay. He
bared his muscular arms. Yes, there was strength in them. But
Nikolay, who lay there breathing with what was left of lungs, had
had a strong, healthy body too. And suddenly he recalled how
they used to go to bed together as children, and how they only
waited till Fyodor Bogdanitch was out of the room to fling
pillows at each other and laugh, laugh irrepressibly, so that
even their awe of Fyodor Bogdanitch could not check the
effervescing, overbrimming sense of life and happiness. "And now
that bent, hollow chest...and I, not knowing what will become of
me, or wherefore..."

"K...ha! K...ha! Damnation! Why do you keep fidgeting, why
don't you go to sleep?" his brother's voice called to him.

"Oh, I don't know, I'm not sleepy."

"I have had a good sleep, I'm not in a sweat now. Just see, feel
my shirt; it's not wet, is it?"

Levin felt, withdrew behind the screen, and put out the candle,
but for a long while he could not sleep. The question how to
live had hardly begun to grow a little clearer to him, when a
new, insoluble question presented itself--death.

"Why, he's dying--yes, he'll die in the spring, and how help
him? What can I say to him? What do I know about it? I'd even
forgotten that it was at all."

Chapter 32

Levin had long before made the observation that when one is
uncomfortable with people from their being excessively amenable
and meek, one is apt very soon after to find things intolerable
from their touchiness and irritability. He felt that this was
how it would be with his brother. And his brother Nikolay's
gentleness did in fact not last out for long. The very next
morning he began to be irritable, and seemed doing his best to
find fault with his brother, attacking him on his tenderest
points.

Levin felt himself to blame, and could not set things right. He
felt that if they had both not kept up appearances, but had
spoken, as it is called, from the heart--that is to say, had
said only just what they were thinking and feeling--t