“Well, you’ll remember my words, but too late, just as with Dolly.”
“Well, well, we won’t talk of it,” the princess stopped him, recollecting
her unlucky Dolly.
“By all means, and good-night!”
And signing each other with the cross, the husband and wife parted with
a kiss, feeling that they each remained of their own opinion.
The princess had at first been quite certain that that evening had settled
Kitty’s future, and that there could be no doubt of Vronsky’s intentions, but
her husband’s words had disturbed her. And returning to her own room, in
terror before the unknown future, she, too, like Kitty, repeated several times
in her heart, “Lord, have pity; Lord, have pity; Lord, have pity.”
Chapter 16
Vronsky had never had a real home life. His mother had been in her
youth a brilliant society woman, who had had during her married life, and
still more afterwards, many love affairs notorious in the whole fashionable
world. His father he scarcely remembered, and he had been educated in the
Corps of Pages.
Leaving the school very young as a brilliant officer, he had at once got
into the circle of wealthy Petersburg army men. Although he did go more or
less into Petersburg society, his love affairs had always hitherto been
outside it.
In Moscow he had for the first time felt, after his luxurious and coarse
life at Petersburg, all the charm of intimacy with a sweet and innocent girl
of his own rank, who cared for him. It never even entered his head that
there could be any harm in his relations with Kitty. At balls he danced
principally with her. He was a constant visitor at their house. He talked to
her as people commonly do talk in society—all sorts of nonsense, but
nonsense to which he could not help attaching a special meaning in her
case. Although he said nothing to her that he could not have said before
everybody, he felt that she was becoming more and more dependent upon
him, and the more he felt this, the better he liked it, and the tenderer was his
feeling for her. He did not know that his mode of behavior in relation to
Kitty had a definite character, that it is courting young girls with no
intention of marriage, and that such courting is one of the evil actions
common among brilliant young men such as he was. It seemed to him that
he was the first who had discovered this pleasure, and he was enjoying his
discovery.
If he could have heard what her parents were saying that evening, if he
could have put himself at the point of view of the family and have heard
that Kitty would be unhappy if he did not marry her, he would have been
greatly astonished, and would not have believed it. He could not believe
that what gave such great and delicate pleasure to him, and above all to her,
could be wrong. Still less could he have believed that he ought to marry.
Marriage had never presented itself to him as a possibility. He not only
disliked family life, but a family, and especially a husband was, in
accordance with the views general in the bachelor world in which he lived,
conceived as something alien, repellant, and, above all, ridiculous.
But though Vronsky had not the least suspicion what the parents were
saying, he felt on coming away from the Shtcherbatskys’ that the secret
spiritual bond which existed between him and Kitty had grown so much
stronger that evening that some step must be taken. But what step could and
ought to be taken he could not imagine.
“What is so exquisite,” he thought, as he returned from the
Shtcherbatskys’, carrying away with him, as he always did, a delicious
feeling of purity and freshness, arising partly from the fact that he had not
been smoking for a whole evening, and with it a new feeling of tenderness
at her love for him—“what is so exquisite is that not a word has been said
by me or by her, but we understand each other so well in this unseen
language of looks and tones, that this evening more clearly than ever she
told me she loves me. And how secretly, simply, and most of all, how
trustfully! I feel myself better, purer. I feel that I have a heart, and that there
is a great deal of good in me. Those sweet, loving eyes! When she said:
‘Indeed I do….’
“Well, what then? Oh, nothing. It’s good for me, and good for her.” And
he began wondering where to finish the evening.
He passed in review of the places he might go to. “Club? a game of
bezique, champagne with Ignatov? No, I’m not going. Château des Fleurs;
there I shall find Oblonsky, songs, the cancan. No, I’m sick of it. That’s
