" "No, you only say that; no doubt you know all about it as well as I do.

I'm not a professor of sociology, of course, but it interested me, and really, if it interests you, you ought to study it.

" "But what conclusion have they come to?" "Excuse me..." The two neighbors had risen, and Sviazhsky, once more checking Levin in his inconvenient habit of peeping into what was beyond the outer chambers of his mind, went to see his guests out.

Levin was insufferably bored that evening with the ladies; he was stirred as he had never been before by the idea that the dissatisfaction he was feeling with his system of managing his land was not an exceptional case, but the general condition of things in Russia; that the organization of some relation of the laborers to the soil in which they would work, as with the peasant he had met half-way to the Sviazhskys', was not a dream, but a problem which must be solved.