Levin vs. Scherbatskaya
There was only one creature in the world that could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty.
And everything that had been stirring Levin during that sleepless night, all the resolutions he had made, all vanished at once. He recalled with horror his dreams of marrying a peasant girl. There only, in the carriage that had crossed over to the other side of the road and was rapidly disappearing, there only could he find the solution of the riddle of his life, which had weighted so agonizingly upon him of late.
[…]
“No, he said to himself, “however good that life of simplicity and toil may be, I cannot go back to it. I love her.”
—from Anna Karenina by Lev Tolstoy, 1877 (trans. Constance Garnett)
