Anna Karenina

Levin "could not look calmly at his brother; he could not himself be natural and calm in his presence." He smells the awful odor, sees the dirt and disorder, hears the groans—"and felt that nothing could be done to help." The thought of analyzing details, of considering "how that body was lying under the quilt, how those emaciated legs and thighs and spine were lying huddled up," makes his blood run cold. "He was absolutely convinced that nothing could be done." His sense that all aid is futile makes the sick man feel it, which makes everything worse. "To be in the sick-room was agony to him, not to be there still worse." But Kitty "thought, and felt, and acted quite differently." Pity in her "did not arouse at all that feeling of horror and loathing that it aroused in her husband, but a desire to act, to find out all the details of his state, and to remedy them." The very details that reduce Levin to terror "immediately engaged her attention." She takes charge completely. Sends for the doctor, sends to the chemist's, sets servants to cleaning and scrubbing. She washes things herself, brings in clean sheets and pillowcases, orders things removed. The waiter comes "with an irate countenance" but "could not avoid carrying out her orders, as she gave them with such gracious insistence that there was no evading her." Levin "did not approve of all this; he did not believe it would be of any good to the patient." But the sick man, though seeming indifferent, "was not angry, but only abashed, and on the whole as it were interested in what she was doing with him." Soon Nikolay lies "washed and combed, in clean sheets on high raised pillows, in a clean night-shirt with a white collar about his astoundingly thin neck, and with a new expression of hope." When the doctor leaves, Nikolay says something about "Your Katya." By his expression, "Levin saw that he was praising her." "I'm much better already," Nikolay says. "Why, with you I should have got well long ago. How nice it is!" He takes her hand, almost kisses it but changes his mind, just strokes it instead. "No one could make out what he said but Kitty; she alone understood. She understood because she was all the while mentally keeping watch on what he needed." When they must turn him over, Levin—"terrible as it was to him to put his arms round that terrible body"—does it under Kitty's direction. The sick man takes Levin's hand and kisses it. "Levin, shaking with sobs and unable to articulate a word, went out of the room."