‘I’ll spend July with them.’
‘And will you go?’ Stepan Arkadyich turned to his wife.
‘I’ve long wanted to go and certainly will,’ said Dolly. ‘I pity her, and I know her. She’s a wonderful woman. I’ll go alone after you leave, and I won’t be in anyone’s way. It will even be better without you.’
‘Well, splendid,’ said Stepan Arkadyich. ‘And you, Kitty?’
‘Me? Why should I go?’ said Kitty, flushing all over. And she turned to look at her husband.
‘Are you acquainted with Anna Arkadyevna?’ Veslovsky asked her. ‘She’s a very attractive woman.’
‘Yes,’ Kitty, turning still more red, replied to Veslovsky, got up and went to her husband.
‘So you’re going hunting tomorrow?’ she said.
His jealousy had gone far in those few minutes, especially after the blush that had covered her cheeks as she talked with Veslovsky. Listening to her words, he now understood them in his own way. Strange as it was for him to recall it later, it seemed clear to him now that if she asked him whether he was going hunting, she was interested only in knowing whether he would give this pleasure to Vasenka Veslovsky, with whom, to his mind, she was already in love.
‘Yes, I am,’ he replied in an unnatural voice that he himself found disgusting.
‘No, better if you stay at home tomorrow, since Dolly hasn’t seen her husband at all, and go the day after,’ said Kitty.
Levin now interpreted the meaning of Kitty’s words as follows: ‘Don’t part me from
‘Oh, if you wish, we can stay at home tomorrow,’ Levin replied with special pleasantness.
Vasenka meanwhile, not in the least suspecting all the suffering his presence caused, got up from the table after Kitty and followed her with a smiling, gentle gaze.
Levin saw this gaze. He paled and could not catch his breath for a moment. ‘How can he allow himself to look at my wife like that!’ seethed in him.
‘Tomorrow, then? Let’s go, please,’ said Vasenka, sitting down on a chair and again tucking his leg under, as was his habit.
Levin’s jealousy had gone further still. He already saw himself as a deceived husband, needed by his wife and her lover only to provide them with life’s conveniences and pleasures ... But, despite that, he courteously and hospitably questioned Vasenka about his hunting, guns, boots and agreed to go the next day.
Fortunately for Levin, the old princess put an end to his agony by getting up herself and advising Kitty to go to bed. But here, too, it did not pass without new suffering for Levin. Saying good-night to his hostess, Vasenka again went to kiss her hand, but Kitty, blushing, with a naive rudeness for which she was later reprimanded by her mother, drew back her hand and said:
‘That’s not done in our house.’
In Levin’s eyes she was to blame for having permitted such relations, and still more to blame for showing so awkwardly that she did not like them.
‘Well, who cares about sleep!’ said Stepan Arkadyich, who, after drinking several glasses of wine at dinner, was in his sweetest, most poetical mood. ‘Look, Kitty, look!’ he said, pointing to the moon rising from behind the lindens. ‘How lovely! Veslovsky, it’s time for a serenade. You know, he has a fine voice; he and I sang together on our way here. He’s brought some wonderful romances along, two new ones. We should sing with Varvara Andreevna.’
When they had all dispersed, Stepan Arkadyich and Veslovsky paced up and down the drive for a long time, and their voices could be heard singing a new romance together.
Listening to those voices, Levin sat scowling in the armchair in his wife’s bedroom and to her questions about what was the matter maintained an obstinate silence; but when she finally asked with a timid smile: ‘Was it something you disliked about Veslovsky?’ - he burst out and said everything. What he said was insulting to himself and therefore irritated him still more.
He stood before her, his eyes flashing terribly from under his scowling eyebrows, pressing his strong hands to his chest, as if straining with all his might to hold himself back. The expression on his face would have been stern and even cruel had it not at the same time expressed suffering, which touched her. His jaw was twitching, and his voice broke.
‘You understand that I’m not jealous: it’s a vile word. I cannot be jealous, or believe that ... I cannot say what I’m feeling, but it’s terrible ... I’m not jealous, but I’m offended, humiliated that someone dares to think, dares to look at you with such eyes...’
‘What eyes?’ said Kitty, trying as conscientiously as she could to recall all the words and gestures of that evening and all their nuances.
In the depths of her soul she found that there had been something of the sort, precisely at the moment when he had gone after her to the other end of the table, but she dared not confess it even to herself, much less venture to tell it to him and so increase his suffering.
‘But what can be attractive in me the way I am? ...’
