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Levin scarcely remembered his mother. His conception of her was

for him a sacred memory, and his future wife was bound to be in

his imagination a repetition of that exquisite, holy ideal of a

woman that his mother had been.

He was so far from conceiving of love for woman apart from

marriage that he positively pictured to himself first the family,

and only secondarily the woman who would give him a family. His

ideas of marriage were, consequently, quite unlike those of the

great majority of his acquaintances, for whom getting married was

one of the numerous facts of social life. For Levin it was the

chief affair of life, on which its whole happiness turned. And

now he had to give up that.