Anna Karenina

muffled up, had taken his
seat in the sleigh and started off, pondering on the work that lay
before him in the village, and staring at the off horse, that had been
formerly his saddle horse, overridden, but a spirited animal from
the Don. He felt himself, and did not want to be anyone else. All he
wanted now was to be better than before. In the first place, he
resolved that from that day on he would give up hoping for the
extraordinary happiness which the marriage was to afford him, and
consequently he would not disdain the present so. In the second place,
he would never again let himself give way to low passion, the memory
of which had so tortured him when he had been making up his mind to
propose. Then, remembering his brother Nikolai, he resolved that he
would never allow himself to forget him, that he would watch him,
and not lose sight of him, so as to be ready to help should things
go ill with him. And that would be soon, he felt. Then, too, his
brother's talk of communism, which he had treated so lightly at the
time, now made him reflect. He considered an alteration in economic
conditions nonsense; yet he had always felt the injustice of his own
abundance in comparison with the poverty of the common folk, and he
now determined that, in order to feel quite in the right, though he
had worked hard and lived by no means luxuriously before, he would now
work still harder, and would allow himself even less luxury. And all
this seemed to him so easy a conquest over himself that he spent the
whole drive in most pleasant reveries. With a lively feeling of hope
in a new, better life, he drove up to his house about nine o'clock
at night.
The snow of the little quadrangle before the house was lit up by
light falling from the windows in the room of his old nurse, Agathya
Mikhailovna, who performed the duties of housekeeper in his house. She
was not yet asleep. Kouzma, awakened by her, sleepy and barefooted,
ran out onto the steps. A setter bitch, Laska, leaped out too,
almost upsetting Kouzma, and whining, rubbed against Levin's knees,
jumping up and longing, yet not daring, to put her forepaws on his
chest.
"You're soon returned, my dear," said Agathya Mikhailovna.
"I grew homesick, Agathya Mikhailovna. East or West, home is
best," he answered, and went into his study.
The study was gradually lit up as the candle was brought in. The
familiar details came out: the stag's horns; the bookshelves; the
plain stove with its warm-hole, which had long wanted mending; his
father's sofa, a large table, and, on the table, an open book, a
broken ash tray, a notebook with his handwriting. As he saw all
this, there came over him for an instant a doubt of the possibility of
arranging the new life, of which he