Anna Karenina

She was already close to the door when she heard his steps. ‘No, it’s dishonest! What am I afraid of? I haven’t done anything wrong. What will be, will be! I’ll tell the truth. I can’t feel awkward with him. Here he is,’ she said to herself, seeing his whole strong and timid figure, with his shining eyes directed at her. She looked straight into his face, as if begging him for mercy, and gave him her hand.

‘I’ve come at the wrong time, it seems - too early,’ he said, glancing around the empty drawing room. When he saw that his expectations had been fulfilled, that nothing prevented him from speaking out, his face darkened.

‘Oh, no,’ said Kitty, and she sat down at the table.

‘But this is just what I wanted, to find you alone,’ he began, not sitting down and not looking at her, so as not to lose courage.

‘Mama will come out presently. Yesterday she got very tired. Yesterday...’

She spoke, not knowing what her lips were saying, and not taking her pleading and caressing eyes off him.

He glanced at her; she blushed and fell silent.

‘I told you I didn’t know whether I had come for long ... that it depended on you ...’

She hung her head lower and lower, not knowing how she would reply to what was coming.

‘That it depended on you,’ he repeated. ‘I wanted to say ... I wanted to say... I came for this ... that ... to be my wife!’ he said, hardly aware of what he was saying; but, feeling that the most dreadful part had been said, he stopped and looked at her.

She was breathing heavily, not looking at him. She was in ecstasy. Her soul overflowed with happiness. She had never imagined that the voicing of his love would make such a strong impression on her. But this lasted only a moment. She remembered Vronsky. Raising her light, truthful eyes to Levin and seeing his desperate face, she hastily replied:

‘It cannot be ... forgive me ...’

How close she had been to him just a minute ago, how important for his life! And now how alien and distant from him she had become!

‘It couldn’t have been otherwise,’ he said, not looking at her.

He bowed and was about to leave.

XIV

But just then the princess came out. Horror showed on her face when she saw them alone and looking upset. Levin bowed to her and said nothing. Kitty was silent, not raising her eyes. ‘Thank God, she’s refused him,’ thought the mother, and her face brightened with the usual smile with which she met her guests on Thursdays. She sat down and began asking Levin about his life in the country. He sat down again, awaiting the arrival of other guests so that he could leave inconspicuously.

Five minutes later Kitty’s friend, Countess Nordston, who had been married the previous winter, came in.

She was a dry, yellow woman, sickly and nervous, with black shining eyes. She loved Kitty, and her love expressed itself, as a married woman’s love for young girls always does, in her wish to get Kitty married according to her own ideal of happiness, and therefore she wished her to marry Vronsky. Levin, whom she had met often in their house at the beginning of winter, she had always found disagreeable. Her constant and favourite occupation when she met him consisted in making fun of him.

‘I love it when he looks down at me from the height of his grandeur: either he breaks off his clever conversation with me because I’m stupid, or he condescends to me. Condescends! I just love it! I’m very glad he can’t stand me,’ she said of him.

She was right, because Levin indeed could not stand her and had contempt for what she took pride in and counted as a merit - her nervousness, her refined contempt and disregard for all that was coarse and common.

Between Countess Nordston and Levin there had been established those relations, not infrequent in society, in which two persons, while ostensibly remaining on friendly terms, are contemptuous of each other to such a degree that they cannot even treat each other seriously and cannot even insult one another.

Countess Nordston fell upon Levin at once.

‘Ah! Konstantin Dmitrich! You’ve come back to our depraved Babylon,’ she said, giving him her tiny yellow hand and recalling the words he had spoken once at the beginning of winter, that Moscow was Babylon. ‘Has Babylon become better, or have you become worse?’ she added, glancing at Kitty with a mocking smile.

‘I’m very flattered, Countess, that you remember my words so well,’ answered Levin, who had managed to recover and by force of habit entered at once into his banteringly hostile attitude towards Countess Nordston. ‘They must have had a very strong effect on you.’

‘Oh, surely! I write it all down. Well, Kitty, so you went skating again?’