`I understand, dear friend,' said Lidia Ivanovna. `I understand it all. Succor and comfort you will find not in me, though I have come only to aid you, if I can. If I could take from off you all these petty, humiliating cares... I understand that a woman's word, a woman's superintendence, is needed. You will intrust it to me?'

Silently and gratefully Alexei Alexandrovich squeezed her hand.

`Together we will take care of Seriozha. Practical affairs are not my strong point. But I will set to work. I will be your housekeeper. Don't thank me. I do it not from myself...'

`I cannot help thanking you.'

`But, dear friend, do not give way to the feeling of which you spoke - being ashamed of what is the Christian's highest glory: he who humbles himself shall be exalted. And you cannot thank me. You must thank Him, and pray to Him for succor. In Him alone we find peace, consolation, salvation, and love,' she said, and turning her eyes heavenward, she began praying, as Alexei Alexandrovich gathered from her silence.

Alexei Alexandrovich listened to her now, and those expressions which had seemed to him, if not distasteful, at least exaggerated, now seemed to him natural and consolatory. Alexei Alexandrovich had disliked this new enthusiastic fervor. He was a believer, who was interested in religion primarily in its political aspect, and the new doctrine which ventured upon several new interpretations, just because it paved the way to discussion and analysis, was in principle disagreeable to him. He had hitherto taken up a cold and even antagonistic attitude to this new doctrine, and with Countess Lidia Ivanovna, who had been carried away by it, he had never argued, but by silence had assiduously parried her attempts to provoke him into argument. Now for the first time he heard her words with pleasure, and did not inwardly oppose them.

`I am very, very grateful to you, both for your deeds and for your words,' he said, when she had finished praying.

Countess Lidia Ivanovna once more squeezed both of her friend's hands.

`Now I will enter upon my duties,' she said with a smile after a pause, as she wiped away the traces of tears. `I am going to Seriozha. Only in the last extremity shall I apply to you.' And she got up and went out.

Countess Lidia Ivanovna went into Seriozha's part of the house, and, dropping tears on the scared child's cheeks, she told him that his father was a saint and his mother was dead.

Countess Lidia Ivanovna kept her promise. She did actually take upon herself the care of the organization and management of Alexei Alexandrovich's household. But she had not overstated the case when saying that practical affairs were not her strong point. All her arrangements had to be modified because they could not be carried out, and they were modified by Kornei, Alexei Alexandrovich's valet, who, though no one was aware of the fact, now managed Karenin's household, and quietly and discreetly reported to his master, while the latter was dressing, all it was necessary for him to know. But Lidia Ivanovna's help was none the less real; she gave Alexei Alexandrovich moral support in the consciousness of her love and respect for him, and still more (as it was soothing to her to believe) by having almost turned him to Christianity - that is, from an indifferent and apathetic believer she had turned him into an ardent and steadfast adherent of the new interpretation of Christian doctrine, which had been gaining ground of late in Peterburg. It was easy for Alexei Alexandrovich to believe in this teaching. Alexei Alexandrovich, like Lidia Ivanovna indeed, and others who shared their views, was completely devoid of profundity of imagination, that spiritual faculty in virtue of which the ideas evoked by the imagination become so actual that they must needs be in harmony with other ideas, and with reality itself. He saw nothing impossible and absurd in the idea that death, though existing for unbelievers, did not exist for him, and that, as he