It is true that the erroneousness and shallowness of this conception of his faith was dimly perceptible to Alexei Alexandrovich, and he knew that when, without the slightest idea that his forgiveness was the action of a higher power, he had surrendered directly to the feeling of forgiveness, he had felt more happiness than now, when he was thinking every instant that Christ was in his heart, and that in signing official papers he was doing His will.70-533 answer analysis But for Alexei Alexandrovich it was a necessity to think in that way; it was such a necessity for him in his humiliation to have some elevated standpoint, however imaginary, from which, looked down upon by all, he could look down on others, that he clung, as to his one salvation, to his delusion of salvation.
Chapter 23
The Countess Lidia Ivanovna had, as a very young and enthusiastic girl, been married to a wealthy man of high rank, a very good-natured, jovial, and extremely dissipated rake. One month after marriage her husband abandoned her, and her enthusiastic protestations of affection he met with an irony and even hostility which people, knowing the Count’s good heart, and seeing no defects in the enthusiastic Lidia, were at a loss to explain. Though they were divorced and lived apart, yet whenever the husband met the wife, he invariably behaved to her with the same malignant irony, the cause of which was incomprehensible.
Countess Lidia Ivanovna had long given up being in love with her husband, but from that time she had never given up being in love with someone. She was in love with several people at once, both men and women; she had been in love with almost everyone who had been particularly distinguished in any way.ADM-201 exam dumps She was in love with all the new princes and princesses who married into the Imperial family; she had been in love with one archbishop, one vicar, and one parish priest; she had been in love with one journalist, three Slavophils, with Komissarov, with one minister, one doctor, one English missionary, and Karenin. All these passions, constantly waning or growing more ardent, did not prevent her from keeping up the most extended and complicated relations with the Court and fashionable society. But from the time that, after Karenin’s trouble, she had taken him under special protection, from the time that she had set to work in Karenin’s household looking after his welfare, she felt that all her other attachments were not the real thing, and that she was now genuinely in love, and with no one but Karenin. The feeling she now experienced for him seemed to her stronger than any of her former feelings. Analyzing her feeling, and comparing it with former passions, she distinctly perceived that she would not have been in love with Komissarov if he had not saved the life of the Czar; that she would not have been in love with Ristich-Kudzhitsky if there had been no Slavonic question; but that she loved Karenin for himself, for his lofty, uncomprehended soul, for the sweet – to her – high notes of his voice, for his drawling intonation, his weary eyes,70-532 exam questions his character, and his soft white hands with their swollen veins. She was not simply overjoyed at meeting him, but she sought in his face signs of the impression she was making on him. She tried to please him, not by her words only, but in her whole person. For his sake it was that she now lavished more care on her dress than before. She caught herself in reveries on what might have been, if she had not been married and he had been free. She blushed with emotion when he came into the room, she could not repress a smile of rapture when he said anything amiable to her.