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Alexei Alexandrovich listened to her now, and these expressions that had once seemed not exactly unpleasant but unnecessary, now seemed natural and comforting. He had not liked the new rapturous spirit. He was a believer who was interested in religion mostly in a political sense, and the new teaching that allowed itself some new interpretations was disagreeable to him on principle, precisely because it opened the door to debate and analysis. His former attitude to this new teaching had been cold and even inimical, and he had never argued with Countess Lydia Ivanovna, who was enthusiastic about it, but had carefully passed over her challenges in silence. But now for the first time he listened to her words with pleasure and did not inwardly object to them.

‘I’m very, very grateful to you, both for your deeds and for your words,’ he said, when she had finished praying.

Countess Lydia Ivanovna once more pressed both her friend’s hands. ‘Now I shall get down to work,’ she said with a smile, after a pause, wiping the remaining tears from her face. ‘I am going to Seryozha. I shall turn to you only in extreme cases.’ And she got up and went out.

Countess Lydia Ivanovna went to Seryozha’s rooms and there, drenching the frightened boy’s cheeks with tears, told him that his father was a saint and his mother was dead.

*

Countess Lydia Ivanovna kept her promise. She indeed took upon herself all the cares of managing and running Alexei Alexandrovich’s house. But she was not exaggerating when she said that she was not strong in practical matters. All her orders had to be changed, they were unfeasible as they were, and the one who changed them was Kornei, Alexei Alexandrovich’s valet, who, unnoticed by anyone, began to run the entire Karenin household and, while dressing his master, calmly and carefully reported to him what was needed. But all the same Lydia Ivanovna’s help was in the highest degree effective: she gave Alexei Alexandrovich moral support in the awareness of her love and respect for him, and especially, as she found it comforting to think, in that she had almost converted him to Christianity — that is, turned him from an indifferent and lazy believer into an ardent and firm adherent of that new explanation of Christian doctrine that had lately spread in Petersburg. Alexei Alexandrovich easily became convinced of it. Like Lydia Ivanovna and other people who shared their views, he was totally lacking in depth of imagination, in that inner capacity owing to which the notions evoked by the imagination become so real that they demand to be brought into correspondence with other notions and with reality. He did not see anything impossible or incongruous in the notion that death, which existed for unbelievers, did not exist for him, and that since he possessed the fullest faith, of the measure of which he himself was the judge, there was no sin in his soul and he already experienced full salvation here on earth.

It is true that Alexei Alexandrovich vaguely sensed the levity and erroneousness of this notion of his faith, and he knew that when, without any thought that his forgiveness was the effect of a higher power, he had given himself to his spontaneous feeling, he had experienced greater happiness than when he thought every moment, as he did now, that Christ lived in his soul and that by signing papers he was fulfilling His will; but it was necessary for him to think that way, it was so necessary for him in his humiliation to possess at least an invented loftiness from which he, despised by everyone, could despise others, that he clung to his imaginary salvation as if it were salvation indeed.

XXIII

Countess Lydia Ivanovna had been given in marriage as a young, rapturous girl to a rich, noble, very good-natured and very dissolute bon vivant. In the second month her husband abandoned her and responded to her rapturous assurances of tenderness only with mockery and even animosity, which people who