Kitty silently smiled. ‘But how did she go through it? I’d so love to know her whole romance!’ thought Kitty, recalling the unpoetical appearance of Alexei Alexandrovich, her husband.
‘There’s something I know. Stiva told me, and I congratulate you, I like him very much,’ Anna went on. ‘I met Vronsky at the railway station.’
‘Ah, he was there?’ Kitty asked, blushing. ‘But what did Stiva tell you?’
‘Stiva gave it all away. And I’d be very glad. I travelled with Vronsky’s mother yesterday,’ she went on, ‘and his mother didn’t stop talking to me about him; he’s her favourite; I know how partial mothers can be, but...’
‘But what did his mother tell you?’
‘Oh, a lot! I know he’s her favourite, but even so one can tell he’s chivalrous ... Well, for instance, she told me he wanted to give the whole fortune to his brother, that while still a child he did something extraordinary, rescued a woman from the water. In short, a hero,’ Anna said, smiling and remembering the two hundred roubles he gave at the station.
But she did not mention the two hundred roubles. For some reason it was unpleasant for her to remember it. She felt there was something in it that concerned her, and of a sort that should not have been.
‘She insisted that I call on her,’ Anna went on, ‘and I’ll be glad to see the old lady and will call on her tomorrow. However, thank God Stiva has spent a long time in Dolly’s boudoir,’ Anna added, changing the subject and getting up, displeased at something, as it seemed to Kitty.
‘No, me first! no, me!’ the children shouted, having finished their tea and rushing out to Aunt Anna.
‘All together!’ said Anna and, laughing, she ran to meet them, and embraced and brought down the whole heap of swarming, rapturously squealing children.
XXI
For the grown-ups’ tea Dolly came from her room. Stepan Arkadyich did not come out. He must have left his wife’s room through the back door.
‘I’m afraid you’ll be cold upstairs,’ Dolly remarked, addressing Anna. ‘I’d like to move you down, and we’ll be nearer each other.’
‘Oh, now, please don’t worry about me,’ Anna replied, peering into Dolly’s eyes and trying to make out whether or not there had been a reconciliation.
‘There’s more light here,’ her sister-in-law replied.
‘I tell you, I sleep always and everywhere like a dormouse.’
‘What’s this about?’ asked Stepan Arkadyich, coming out of his study and addressing his wife.
By his tone Kitty and Anna both understood at once that a reconciliation had taken place.
‘I want to move Anna down here, but the curtains must be changed. No one else knows how to do it, I must do it myself,’ Dolly replied, turning to him.
‘God knows, are they completely reconciled?’ thought Anna, hearing her cold and calm tone.
‘Oh, enough, Dolly, you keep making difficulties,’ said her husband. ‘Well, I’ll do it, if you like ...’
‘Yes,’ thought Anna, ‘they must be reconciled.’
‘I know how you’ll do it,’ Dolly answered, ‘you’ll tell Matvei to do something impossible, then you’ll leave, and he’ll get it all wrong’ - and a habitual mocking smile wrinkled Dolly’s lips as she said it.
‘Complete, complete reconciliation, complete,’ thought Anna, ‘thank God!’ and rejoicing that she had been the cause of it, she went over to Dolly and kissed her.
‘Not at all, why do you despise me and Matvei so?’ Stepan Arkadyich said, smiling barely perceptibly and turning to his wife.
All evening, as usual, Dolly was slightly mocking towards her husband, and Stepan Arkadyich was content and cheerful, but just enough so as not to suggest that, having been forgiven, he had forgotten his guilt.
At half-past nine an especially joyful and pleasant family conversation around the evening tea table at the Oblonskys’ was disrupted by an apparently very simple event, but this simple event for some reason seemed strange to everyone. As they talked about mutual Petersburg acquaintances, Anna quickly stood up.
‘I have her in my album,’ she said, ‘and, incidentally, I’ll show you my Seryozha,’ she added with the smile of a proud mother.
Towards ten o,’clock when she usually said good night to her son, and often put him to bed herself before going to a ball, she felt sad to be so far away from him; and whatever they talked about, she kept returning in thought to her curly-headed Seryozha. She wanted to look at his picture and talk about him. Taking advantage of the first pretext, she got up and, with her light, resolute step, went to fetch the album. The stairs that led up to her room began on the landing of the big, heated front stairway.
Just as she was leaving the drawing room, there was a ring at the door.
‘Who could that be?’ said Dolly.
‘It’s too early for me and too late for anyone else,’ observed Kitty.
‘Probably someone with papers,’ Stepan Arkadyich put in, and, as Anna was crossing the landing, a servant came running up the stairs to announce the visitor, while the visitor himself stood by the lamp. Anna, looking down, at once recognized Vronsky, and a strange feeling of pleasure suddenly stirred in her heart, together with a fear of something. He stood without removing his coat, and was taking something from his pocket. Just as she reached the centre of the landing, he raised his eyes, saw her, and something ashamed and frightened appeared in his expression. Inclining her head slightly, she went on, and behind her heard the loud voice of Stepan Arkadyich inviting him to come in, and the soft, gentle and calm voice of Vronsky declining.
When Anna came back with the album, he was no longer there, and Stepan Arkadyich was saying that he had dropped in to find out about a dinner they were giving the next day for a visiting celebrity.
‘And he wouldn’t come in for anything. He’s somehow strange,’ Stepan Arkadyich added.
Kitty blushed. She thought that she alone understood why he had called by and why he had not come in. ‘He was at our house,’ she thought, ‘didn’t find me, and thought I was here; but he didn’t come in because he thought it was late, and Anna’s here.’
They all exchanged glances without saying anything and began looking through Anna’s album.
There was nothing either extraordinary or strange in a man calling at his friend’s house at half-past nine to find out the details of a dinner that was being planned and not coming in; but they all thought it strange. To Anna especially it seemed strange and not right.
XXII
The ball had only just begun when Kitty and her mother went up the big, light-flooded stairway, set with flowers and lackeys in powder and red livery. From the inner rooms drifted a steady rustle of movement, as in a beehive, and while they were adjusting their hair and dresses in front of a mirror between potted trees on the landing, the cautiously distinct sounds of the orchestra’s violins came from the ballroom, beginning the first waltz. A little old man in civilian dress, who had been straightening his grey side-whiskers at another mirror and who exuded a smell of scent, bumped into them by the stairway and stepped aside, obviously admiring Kitty, whom he did not know. A beardless young man, one of those young men of society whom the old prince Shcherbatsky called twits, wearing an extremely low-cut waistcoat, straightening his white tie as he went, bowed to them and, after running past, came back to invite Kitty to a quadrille. The first quadrille had already been given to Vronsky; she had to give this young man the second. A military man, buttoning his glove, stepped aside at the doorway and, stroking his moustache, admired the pink Kitty.