there. The fact that he had offered himself, and she had refused him, put an unsurmountable barrier between them.
"I cannot ask her to be my wife simply because she cannot be the wife of the man she wanted," he said to himself.
The thought of this made him cold and hostile toward her.
"I have not the strength to go and talk with her without a sense of reproach, to look at her without angry feelings; and she would feel even more incensed against me, and justly so. And besides, how can I go there now, after what Darya Aleksandrovna told me? How can I help showing that I know what she told me? That I go with magnanimity,—to pardon her, to be reconciled to her! I, in her presence, play the rôle of a pardoning and honor-conferring lover to her!—Why did Darya Aleksandrovna tell me that? If I had met her accidentally, then perhaps everything might have been arranged of itself; but now it is impossible, impossible!"
Darya Aleksandrovna sent him a note, asking the loan of a side-saddle for Kitty. "They tell me you have a saddle," she wrote: "I hope that you will bring it yourself."
This was too much for him. How could a sensible woman of any delicacy so lower her sister? He wrote ten notes, and tore them all up, and then sent the saddle without any reply. To write that he would come was impossible, because he could not come: to write that he could not come because he was busy, or was going away somewhere, was still worse. So he sent the saddle without any reply; and, with the consciousness that he was doing something disgraceful, on the next day, leaving the now disagreeable charge of the estate to the overseer, he set off to a distant district where there were magnificent snipe-marshes to see his friend Sviazhsky, who had lately invited him to fulfil an old project of making him a visit. The snipe-marshes in the district of Surof had long been an attraction to Levin, but on account of his
