Anna Karenina (Annotated Maude Translation). Leo Tolstoy

continued Dolly, going straight to the point.

      ‘No, because he has despised me,’ said Kitty with a shaking voice. ‘Don’t speak! Please don’t speak!’

      ‘But who told you so? Nobody says so! I am sure he was in love with you and is still in love, but …’

      ‘Oh dear! these commiserations are what I dread most of all!’ cried Kitty, suddenly flaring up. She turned on her chair, blushed, and began rapidly moving her fingers, pressing now with one hand and now with the other the buckle of a belt she was holding. Dolly knew her sister’s habit of fingering something when she was heated, and she knew how apt Kitty was to forget herself when in a passion and to say much that was unpleasant and had better not have been said. She tried to pacify her; but it was too late.

      ‘What do you want me to feel, what?’ said Kitty quickly. ‘That I was in love with a man who wouldn’t have anything to do with me, and that I am dying for love of him? And it is my sister who says that to me. My sister who imagines … that … that she sympathizes with me… . I don’t want this commiseration and hypocrisy!’

      ‘Kitty, you are unfair!’

      ‘Why do you torment me?’

      ‘On the contrary, I see you are in distress… .’

      But Kitty in her excitement did not listen to her.

      ‘There is nothing for me to grieve for or seek comfort about. I have enough pride never to let myself love a man who does not love me.’

      ‘But I am not suggesting it… . Only, tell me frankly,’ said Dolly, taking her by the hand, ‘did Levin speak to you?’

      The mention of Levin seemed to deprive Kitty of the last fragments of self-control: she jumped up from her chair, threw the buckle on the floor, and rapidly gesticulating with her hands she began:

      ‘What has Levin to do with it? I don’t understand why you need torment me! I have said and I repeat I will never, never do what you are doing — returning to a man who has betrayed you and has loved another woman. I can’t understand it! You may do it, but I can’t.’

      Having said these words she looked at her sister and seeing that Dolly remained silent with her head bowed sadly, Kitty, instead of leaving the room as she had intended to do, sat down by the door, and hiding her face in her handkerchief let her head sink down.

      For a minute or two there was silence. Dolly was thinking about herself. The humiliation of which she was always conscious was peculiarly painful when her sister touched on it. She had not expected such cruelty from her, and was angry with her. But suddenly she heard the rustle of a dress and a burst of suppressed sobbing. A pair of arms encircled her neck from below and Kitty was kneeling before her.

      ‘Dolly dear, I am so, so unhappy!’ she whispered guiltily. And the sweet tear-stained face hid itself in the folds of Dolly’s dress.

      As if tears were the necessary lubricant without which the machine of mutual confidence could not work properly between the sisters, after having had a cry they started talking of indifferent matters, and in so doing understood one another. Kitty knew that what she had said in her anger about the unfaithfulness of Dolly’s husband and about her humiliation had cut her poor sister to the depths of her heart, but that she was forgiven; while Dolly on her side learnt all that she wanted to know, her suspicions were confirmed and she understood that Kitty’s grief, her hopeless grief was really caused by the fact that Levin had proposed to her and that she had rejected him, and now that Vronsky had deceived her, she was prepared to love Levin and to hate Vronsky. Kitty did not say a word of this; she spoke only of her state of mind.

      ‘I have no troubles whatever,’ she said when she had grown calm, — ‘but can you understand that everything has become horrid, disgusting and coarse to me, and above all I myself? You can’t think what horrid thoughts I have about everything.’

      ‘But what horrid thoughts can you have?’ asked Dolly smiling.

      ‘The very nastiest and coarsest, I can’t tell you. It is not grief, not dullness, but much worse. It is as if all that was good in me had hidden itself, and only what is horrid remains. How am I to tell you?’ — she continued, noticing perplexity in her sister’s eyes: — ‘Papa began to speak to me just now… . It seems to me that he thinks that all I need is to get married. Mama takes me to a ball: and it seems to me she only takes me there to marry me off as quickly as possible and get rid of me. I know it is not true, but I can’t get rid of the idea. I can’t bear to see the so-called eligible men. I always think they are taking my measure. Formerly to go anywhere in a ball-dress was just a pleasure to me. I used to like myself in it; but now I feel ashamed and uncomfortable. Well, what is one to do? The doctor …’ Kitty became confused; she was going to say that since this change had come over her, Oblonsky had become intolerably disagreeable to her, and that she could not see him without having the coarsest and most monstrous fancies.

      ‘Well, you see, everything appears to me in the coarsest and most horrid aspect,’ she continued. ‘That is my illness. Perhaps it will pass …’

      ‘But don’t think …’

      ‘I can’t. I only feel comfortable with children, only in your house.’

      ‘What a pity you can’t come to see us!’

      ‘But I will come. I have had scarlet fever, and I will persuade Mama to let me.’

      And Kitty insisted on having her own way, went to her sister’s, and nursed the children all through the scarlet fever that really attacked them. The two sisters nursed all the six children successfully through the illness, but Kitty’s health did not improve, and in Lent the Shcherbatskys went abroad.

      Chapter 4

      THE highest Petersburg Society is really all one: all who belong to it know and even visit one another. But this large circle has its subdivisions. Anna Arkadyevna Karenina had friends and close connections in three different sets. One of these was her husband’s official set, consisting of his colleagues and subordinates, who in most varied and capricious ways were connected and separated by social conditions. Anna found it hard now to recall the feeling of almost religious respect she had at first felt for these people. Now she knew them all as well as the inhabitants of a provincial town know one another; she knew the habits and weaknesses of each of them, and where the shoe pinched this or that foot; she knew their relations to one another and to the governing centre; she knew who sided with whom, and how and by what means each supported himself, and who agreed or disagreed with whom and about what; but (in spite of admonitions and advice from the Countess Lydia Ivanovna) this bureaucratic circle of male interests could not interest Anna, and she avoided it.

      Another circle with which Anna was intimate was that through which Karenin had made his career. The centre of that circle was the Countess Lydia Ivanovna. It consisted of elderly, plain, philanthropic and pious women and clever, well-educated, ambitious men. One of the clever men who belonged to it called it, ‘the conscience of Petersburg Society.’

      Karenin set great value on this circle, and Anna, who knew how to get on with every one, had during the first part of her life in Petersburg made friends in it too. But now, on her return from Moscow, that circle became unbearable to her. It seemed to her that she, and all of them, were only pretending, and she felt so bored and uncomfortable in that Society that she visited Lydia Ivanovna as rarely as possible.

      The third circle with which Anna was connected was Society in the accepted meaning of the word: the Society of balls, dinner-parties, brilliant toilettes, the Society which clung to the Court with one hand lest it should sink to the demi-monde, for this the members of that Society thought they despised, though its tastes were not only similar but identical with their own. Anna was connected with this set through the Princess Betsy Tverskaya, the wife of her cousin, who had an income of Rs. 120,000 a year, and who, from the time Anna first appeared in Society, had particularly liked her, made much of her, and drawn her into her own set, making fun of that to which the Countess Lydia