Since their conversation about religion when they were engaged neither of them had ever started a discussion of the subject, but she performed all the ceremonies of going to church, saying her prayers, and so on, always with the unvarying conviction that this ought to be so.  In spite of his assertion to the contrary, she was firmly persuaded that he was as much a Christian as she, and indeed a far better one; and all that he said about it was simply one of his absurd masculine freaks, just as he would say about her broderie anglaise that good people patch holes, but that she cut them on purpose, and so on.

“Yes, you see this woman, Marya Nikolaevna, did not know how to manage all this,” said Levin.  “And...I must own I’m very, very glad you came.  You are such purity that....”  He took her hand and did not kiss it (to kiss her hand in such closeness to death seemed to him improper); he merely squeezed it with a penitent air, looking at her brightening eyes.

“It would have been miserable for you to be alone,” she said, and lifting her hands which hid her cheeks flushing with pleasure, twisted her coil of hair on the nape of her neck and pinned it there.  “No,” she went on, “she did not know how....  Luckily, I learned a lot at Soden.”

“Surely there are not people there so ill?”

“Worse.”

“What’s so awful to me is that I can’t see him as he was when he was young.  You would not believe how charming he was as a youth, but I did not understand him then.”

“I can quite, quite believe it.  How I feel that we might have been friends!” she said; and, distressed at what she had said, she looked round at her husband, and tears came into her eyes.

“Yes, might have been,” he said mournfully.  “He’s just one of those people of whom they say they’re not for this world.”

“But we have many days before us; we must go to bed,” said Kitty, glancing at her tiny watch.

Chapter 20

The next day the sick man received the sacrament and extreme unction.  During the ceremony Nikolay Levin prayed fervently.  His great eyes, fastened on the holy image that was set out on a card table covered with a colored napkin, expressed such passionate prayer and hope that it was awful to Levin to see it.  Levin knew that this passionate prayer and hope would only make him feel more bitterly parting from the life he so loved.  Levin knew his brother and the workings of his intellect:  he knew that his unbelief came not from life being easier for him without faith, but had grown up because step by step the contemporary scientific interpretation of natural phenomena crushed out the possibility of faith; and so he knew that his present return was not a legitimate one, brought about by way of the same working of his intellect, but simply a temporary, interested return to faith in a desperate hope of recovery.  Levin knew too