Kitty replied that there had been nothing between them, and that she decidedly did not understand why Anna Pavlovna seemed displeased with her. Kitty’s reply was perfectly truthful. She did not know the reason for Anna Pavlovna’s change towards her, but she guessed it. Her guess was something she could not tell her mother any more than she could tell it to herself. It was one of those things that one knows but cannot even tell oneself - so dreadful and shameful it would be to be mistaken.
Again and again she went over her whole relationship with this family in her memory. She remembered the naive joy that had shown on Anna Pavlovna’s round, good-natured face when they met; remembered their secret discussions about the sick man, conspiracies for distracting him from his work, which was forbidden him, and taking him for a walk; the attachment of the younger boy, who called her ‘my Kitty’ and refused to go to bed without her. How good it had all been! Then she remembered the thin, thin figure of Petrov, with his long neck, in his brown frock coat - his scant, wavy hair, his inquisitive blue eyes, which Kitty had found so frightening at first, and his painful attempts to look cheerful and animated in her presence. She remembered her own efforts at first to overcome the revulsion she felt for him, as for all the consumptives, and her attempts to think of something to say to him. She remembered the timid, tender gaze with which he had looked at her, and the strange feeling of compassion and awkwardness, and then the consciousness of her own virtue which she had experienced at that. How good it had all been! But all that was in the beginning. And now, a few days ago, everything had suddenly gone bad. Anna Pavlovna met Kitty with a false amiability and constantly watched her and her husband.
Could it be that his touching joy at her coming was the cause of Anna Pavlovna’s chilliness?
‘Yes,’ she remembered, ‘there had been something unnatural in Anna Pavlovna, and quite unlike her kindness, when she had said crossly two days ago: “Here, he’s been waiting for you, didn’t want to have coffee without you, though he got terribly weak.”
‘Yes, maybe it was unpleasant for her when I gave him the rug. It’s all so simple, but he took it so awkwardly, thanked me so profusely, that I, too, felt awkward. And then the portrait of me that he painted so well. And above all - that embarrassed and tender look! Yes, yes, it’s so!’ Kitty repeated to herself in horror. ‘No, it cannot, it must not be! He’s so pathetic!’ she said to herself after that.
This doubt poisoned the charm of her new life.
XXXIV
Before the end of the course of waters, Prince Shcherbatsky, who had gone on from Karlsbad to Baden and Kissingen to visit Russian acquaintances and pick up some Russian spirit, as he said, returned to his family.
The prince and the princess held completely opposite views on life abroad. The princess found everything wonderful and, despite her firm position in Russian society, made efforts abroad to resemble a European lady - which she was not, being a typical Russian lady - and therefore had to pretend, which was somewhat awkward for her. The prince, on the contrary, found everything abroad vile and European life a burden, kept to his Russian habits and deliberately tried to show himself as less of a European than he really was.
The prince came back thinner, with bags of skin hanging under his eyes, but in the most cheerful state of mind. His cheerful disposition was strengthened when he saw Kitty completely recovered. The news of Kitty’s friendship with Mme Stahl and Varenka, and the observations conveyed to him by the princess about some change that had taken place in Kitty, troubled the prince and provoked in him the usual feeling of jealousy towards everything that interested his daughter to the exclusion of himself, and a fear lest his daughter escape from his influence into some spheres inaccessible to him. But this unpleasant news was drowned in the sea of good-natured cheerfulness that was always in him and that had been especially strengthened by the waters of Karlsbad.
The day after his arrival the prince, in his long coat, with his Russian wrinkles and bloated cheeks propped up by a starched collar, in the most cheerful state of mind, went to the springs with his daughter.
