Chapter 4

`If so,' he said to himself, `I ought to think it over and make up my mind, and not give way like a boy to the impulse of a moment.'

`I'm going to pick by myself apart from all the rest, or else my efforts will make no show,' he said, and he left the edge of the forest where they were walking on low silky grass between old birch trees standing far apart, and went more into the heart of the wood, where between the white birch trunks there were gray trunks of aspen and dark bushes of hazel. Walking some forty paces away, Sergei Ivanovich, knowing he was out of sight, stood still behind a bushy spindle tree in full flower with its rosy-red catkins. It was perfectly still all round him. Only overhead, in the birches under which he stood, the flies, like a swarm of bees, buzzed unceasingly, and from time to time the children's voices floated across to him. All at once he heard, not far from the edge of the wood, the sound of Varenka's contralto voice, calling Grisha, and a smile of delight passed over Sergei Ivanovich's face. Conscious of this smile, he shook his head disapprovingly at his own state and, taking out a cigar, he began lighting it. For a long while he could not get a match to light against the trunk of a birch tree. The soft pellicle of the white bark stuck around the phosphorus, and the light went out. At last one of the matches burned, and the fragrant cigar smoke, hovering uncertainly in flat, wide coils, stretched away forward and upward over a bush under the overhanging branches of a birch tree. Watching the streak of smoke, Sergei Ivanovich walked gently on, deliberating on his position.

`Why not?' he thought. `If it were only a flash in the pan, or a passion, if it were only this attraction - this mutual attraction (I can call it a mutual attraction), yet if I felt that it was in contradiction with the whole bent of my life; if I felt that in giving way to this attraction I should be false to my vocation and my duty... But it's not so. The only thing I can say against it is that, when I lost Marie, I said to myself that I would remain faithful to her memory. That's the only thing I can say against my feeling.... That's a great thing,' Sergei Ivanovich said to himself, feeling at the same time that this consideration had not the slightest importance for him personally, but would only perhaps detract from his romantic character in the eyes of others. `But apart from that, however much I searched, I should never find anything to say against my feeling. If I were choosing by considerations of intellect alone, I could not have found anything better.'

However many women and girls he thought of whom he knew, he could not think of a girl who united to such a degree all - positively all - the qualities he would wish to see in his wife. She had all the charm and freshness of youth, but she was not a child; and if she loved him, she loved him consciously, as a woman ought to love; that was one thing. Another point: she was not only far from being worldly, but had an unmistakable distaste for worldly society, and at the same time she knew the world, and had all the ways of a woman of the best society, which were absolutely essential to Sergei Ivanovich's conception of the woman who was to share his life. Thirdly: she was religious, and not like a child, unconsciously religious and good, as Kitty, for example, was, but her life was founded on religious principles. Even in trifling matters, Sergei Ivanovich found in her all that he wanted in his wife: she was poor and alone in the world, so she would not bring with her a mass of relations and their influence into her husband's house, as he saw now in Kitty's case. She would owe everything to her husband, which was what he had always desired, too, for his future family life. And this girl, who united all these qualities, loved him. He was a modest man, but he could not help seeing it. And he loved her. There was one consideration