Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina

PART 6 Chapter 2 (continued)

Kitty felt a peculiar pleasure in being able now to talk to her mother on equal terms about those questions of such paramount interest in a woman's life.

"Of course I did; he had come to stay with us in the country."

"But how was it settled between you, mamma?"

"You imagine, I dare say, that you invented something quite new? It's always just the same: it was settled by the eyes, by smiles..."

"How nicely you said that, mamma! It's just by the eyes, by smiles that it's done," Dolly assented.

"But what words did he say?"

"What did Kostya say to you?"

"He wrote it in chalk. It was wonderful.... How long ago it seems!" she said.

And the three women all fell to musing on the same thing. Kitty was the first to break the silence. She remembered all that last winter before her marriage, and her passion for Vronsky.

"There's one thing ...that old love affair of Varenka's," she said, a natural chain of ideas bringing her to this point. "I should have liked to say something to Sergey Ivanovitch, to prepare him. They're all--all men, I mean," she added, "awfully jealous over our past."

"Not all," said Dolly. "You judge by your own husband. It makes him miserable even now to remember Vronsky. Eh? that's true, isn't it?"

"Yes," Kitty answered, a pensive smile in her eyes.

"But I really don't know," the mother put in in defense of her motherly care of her daughter, "what there was in your past that could worry him? That Vronsky paid you attentions--that happens to every girl."

"Oh, yes, but we didn't mean that," Kitty said, flushing a little.