“Do you allow me to listen?” he asked.

“Oh, yes; I did not want to disturb you,” said Lidia Ivanovna, gazing tenderly at him; “sit here with us.”

“One has only not to close one’s eyes to shut out the light,” Alexey Alexandrovitch went on.

“Ah, if you knew the happiness we know, feeling His presence ever in our hearts!” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna with a rapturous smile.

“But a man may feel himself unworthy sometimes to rise to that height,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, conscious of hypocrisy in admitting this religious height, but at the same time unable to bring himself to acknowledge his free-thinking views before a person who, by a single word to Pomorsky, might procure him the coveted appointment.

“That is, you mean that sin keeps him back?” said Lidia Ivanovna.  “But that is a false idea.  There is no sin for believers, their sin has been atoned for. Pardon,” she added, looking at the footman, who came in again with another letter.  She read it and gave a verbal answer:  “Tomorrow at the Grand Duchess’s, say.”  “For the believer sin is not,” she went on.

“Yes, but faith without works is dead,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, recalling the phrase from the catechism, and only by his smile clinging to his independence.

“There you have it—­from the epistle of St. James,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch, addressing Lidia Ivanovna, with a certain reproachfulness in his tone.  It was unmistakably a subject they had discussed more than once before.  “What harm has been done by the false interpretation of that passage!  Nothing holds men back from belief like that misinterpretation.  ’I have not works, so I cannot believe,’ though all the while that is not said.  But the very opposite is said.”

“Striving for God, saving the soul by fasting,” said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, with disgusted contempt, “those are the crude ideas of our monks....  Yet that is nowhere said.  It is far simpler and easier,” she added, looking at Oblonsky with the same encouraging smile with which at court she encouraged youthful maids of honor, disconcerted by the new surroundings of the court.

“We are saved by Christ who suffered for us.  We are saved by faith,” Alexey Alexandrovitch chimed in, with a glance of approval at her words.

"Vous comprenez l’anglais?" asked Lidia Ivanovna, and receiving a reply in the affirmative, she got up and began looking through a shelf of books.

“I want to read him ‘Safe and Happy,’ or ‘Under the Wing,’” she said, looking inquiringly at Karenin.  And finding the book, and sitting down again in her place, she opened it.  “It’s very short.  In it is described the way by which faith can be reached, and the happiness, above all earthly bliss, with which it fills the soul.  The believer cannot be unhappy because he is not alone.  But you will see.”  She was just settling herself to read when the footman