sacred, and therefore I beg you to interpret your husband's refusal in the spirit of Christian love. I pray to Almighty God to have mercy on you.

COUNTESS LIDIA'

For his part, Alexei Alexandrovich, on returning home from Lidia Ivanovna's, could not all that day concentrate himself on his usual pursuits, and find that spiritual peace of one saved and believing which he had felt of late.

The thought of his wife, who had so greatly sinned against him, and toward whom he had been so saintly, as Countess Lidia Ivanovna had so justly told him, ought not to have troubled him; but he was not easy; he could not understand the book he was reading; he could not drive away harassing recollections of his relations with her, of the mistake which, as it now seemed, he had made in regard to her. The memory of how he had received her confession of infidelity on their way home from the races (especially his having insisted only on the observance of external decorum, and not having sent a challenge) tortured him like a remorse. He was tortured, too, by the thought of the letter he had written her; and, most of all, his forgiveness, which nobody wanted, and his care of the other man's child, seared his heart with shame and remorse.

And just the same feeling of shame and remorse he felt now, as he reviewed all his past with her, recalling the awkward words in which, after long wavering, he proposed to her.

`But how have I been to blame?' he said to himself. And this question always excited another question in him - whether they felt differently, did their loving and marrying differently, these Vronskys and Oblonskys... these gentlemen of the bedchamber, with their fine calves. And there passed before his mind a whole series of these succulent, vigorous, self-confident men, who always and everywhere drew his inquisitive attention in spite of himself. He tried to dispel these thoughts, he tried to persuade himself that he was not living for this transient life, but for the life of eternity, and that there was peace and love in his heart. But the fact that he had in this transient, trivial life made, as it seemed to him, a few trivial mistakes, tortured him as though the eternal salvation in which he believed had no existence. But this temptation did not last long, and soon there was reestablished once more in Alexei Alexandrovich's soul the peace and the loftiness by virtue of which he could forget what he did not want to remember.