In those days Levin used often to be in the Shtcherbatskys' house, and he was in love with the Shtcherbatsky household.

Strange as it may appear, it was with the household, the family, that Konstantin Levin was in love, especially with the feminine half of the household.

Levin did not remember his own mother, and his only sister was older than he was, so that it was in the Shtcherbatskys' house that he saw for the first time that inner life of an old, noble, cultivated, and honorable family of which he had been deprived by the death of his father and mother.