Leaving school as a very young and brilliant officer, he immediately fell in with the ways of rich Petersburg military men. Although he occasionally went into Petersburg society, all his amorous interests lay outside it.
In Moscow, after the luxurious and coarse life of Petersburg, he had experienced for the first time the charm of intimacy with a sweet, innocent society girl who had fallen in love with him. It did not even occur to him that there could be anything bad in his relations with Kitty. At balls he danced mostly with her; he visited their house. He said to her the things that are usually said in society, all sorts of nonsense, but nonsense which he unwittingly endowed with a special meaning for her. Though he said nothing to her that he could not have said before everybody, he felt that she was growing increasingly dependent on him, and the more he felt it, the more pleasant it was for him, and his feeling for her grew more tender. He did not know that his behaviour towards Kitty had a specific name, that it was the luring of a young lady without the intention of marriage, and that this luring was one of the bad actions common among brilliant young men such as himself. It seemed to him that he was the first to discover this pleasure, and he enjoyed his discovery.
If he could have heard what her parents said that evening, if he could have taken the family’s point of view and learned that Kitty would be unhappy if he did not marry her, he would have been very surprised and would not have believed it. He could not have believed that something which gave such great and good pleasure to him, and above all to her, could be bad. Still less could he have believed that he was obliged to marry her.
Marriage had never presented itself as a possibility to him. He not only did not like family life, but pictured the family, and especially a husband, according to the general view of the bachelor world in which he lived, as something alien, hostile and, above all, ridiculous. But though Vronsky had no suspicion of what the parents said, he felt as he left the Shcherbatskys’ that evening that the secret spiritual bond existing between him and Kitty had established itself so firmly that something had to be done. But what could and should be done, he was unable to imagine.
‘The charm of it is,’ he thought, going home from the Shcherbatskys’ and bringing with him, as always, a pleasant feeling of purity and freshness, partly because he had not smoked all evening, and together with it a new feeling of tenderness at her love for him, ‘the charm of it is that nothing was said either by me or by her, yet we understood each other so well in that invisible conversation of eyes and intonations, that tonight she told me more clearly than ever that she loves me. And so sweetly, simply and, above all, trustfully! I feel better and purer myself. I feel that I have a heart and that there is much good in me. Those sweet, loving eyes! When she said: “and very much” ...
‘Well, what then? Well, then nothing. It’s good for me, and it’s good for her.’ And he began thinking about where to finish the evening.
He checked in his imagination the places he might go to. ‘The club? A game of bezique,29 champagne with Ignatov? No, not there. The Château des Fleurs?30 I’ll find Oblonsky there, French songs, the cancan. No, I’m sick of it. That’s precisely what I love the Shcherbatskys’ for, that I become better there myself. I’ll go home.’ He went straight to his rooms at the Dussot, ordered supper served, after which he got undressed and, the moment his head touched the pillow, fell into a sound and peaceful sleep, as always.
XVII
The next day at eleven o‘clock in the morning Vronsky drove to the Petersburg railway station to meet his mother, and the first person he ran into on the steps of the main stairway was Oblonsky, who was expecting his sister on the same train.
‘Ah! Your highness!’ cried Oblonsky. ‘Here for someone?’
‘My mother,’ Vronsky replied, shaking his hand and smiling, as did everyone who met Oblonsky, and they went up the stairway together. ‘She arrives today from Petersburg.’
‘And I waited for you till two o’clock. Where did you go from the Shcherbatskys’?’
‘Home,’ replied Vronsky. ‘I confess, I felt so pleasant last night after the Shcherbatskys’ that I didn’t want to go anywhere.’
‘Bold steeds I can tell by their something-or-other thighs, and young men in love by the look in their eyes,’ declaimed Stepan Arkadyich, exactly as he had done to Levin.
Vronsky smiled with a look that said he did not deny it, but at once changed the subject.
‘And whom are you meeting?’ he asked.
‘I? A pretty woman,’ said Oblonsky.
‘Really!’
‘Honi soit qui mal y pense!31 My sister Anna.’
‘Ah, you mean Karenina?’ said Vronsky.
‘I suppose you know her?’
‘I think I do. Or else, no ... I really can’t remember,’ Vronsky replied absentmindedly, vaguely picturing to himself at the name Karenina something standoffish and dull.
‘But surely you know Alexei Alexandrovich, my famous brother-in-law. The whole world knows him.’
‘That is, I know him by sight and by reputation. I know he’s intelligent, educated, something to do with religion ... But you know, it’s not in my ... not in my line,’ Vronsky added in English.
‘Yes, he’s a very remarkable man - a bit conservative, but a nice man,’ observed Stepan Arkadyich, ‘a nice man.’
‘Well, so much the better for him,’ said Vronsky, smiling. ‘Ah, you’re here.’ He turned to his mother’s tall old footman, who was standing by the door. ‘Come inside.’
Vronsky had recently felt himself attached to Stepan Arkadyich, apart from his general agreeableness for everyone, by the fact that in his imagination he was connected with Kitty.
‘Well, then, shall we have a dinner for the diva on Sunday?’ he said to him, smiling and taking his arm.
‘Absolutely. I’ll take up a collection. Ah, did you meet my friend Levin last night?’ asked Stepan Arkadyich.
‘Of course. But he left very early.’
‘He’s a nice fellow,’ Oblonsky went on. ‘Isn’t he?’
‘I don’t know why it is,’ answered Vronsky, ‘but all Muscovites, naturally excluding those I’m talking with,’ he added jokingly, ‘have something edgy about them. They keep rearing up for some reason, getting angry, as if they want to make you feel something ...’
‘There is that, it’s true, there is ...’ Stepan Arkadyich said, laughing merrily.
‘Soon now?’ Vronsky asked an attendant.
‘The train’s pulling in,’ the attendant answered.
The approach of the train was made more and more evident by the preparatory movements in the station, the running of attendants, the appearance of gendarmes and porters, and the arrival of those coming to meet the train. Through the frosty steam, workers in sheepskin jackets and soft felt boots could be seen crossing the curved tracks. The whistle of the engine could be heard down the line, and the movement of something heavy.
‘No,’ said Stepan Arkadyich, who wanted very much to tell Vronsky about Levin’s intentions regarding Kitty. ‘No, you’re wrong in your appraisal of my Levin. He’s a very nervous man and can be unpleasant, true, but sometimes he can be very nice. He has such an honest, truthful nature, and a heart of gold. But last night there were special reasons,’ Stepan Arkadyich went on with a meaningful smile, forgetting completely the sincere sympathy he had felt for his friend yesterday and now feeling the same way for Vronsky. ‘Yes, there was a reason why he might have been either especially happy, or especially unhappy.’