‘Probably someone with papers,’ Stepan Arkadyich put in, and, as Anna was crossing the landing, a servant came running up the stairs to announce the visitor, while the visitor himself stood by the lamp. Anna, looking down, at once recognized Vronsky, and a strange feeling of pleasure suddenly stirred in her heart, together with a fear of something. He stood without removing his coat, and was taking something from his pocket. Just as she reached the centre of the landing, he raised his eyes, saw her, and something ashamed and frightened appeared in his expression. Inclining her head slightly, she went on, and behind her heard the loud voice of Stepan Arkadyich inviting him to come in, and the soft, gentle and calm voice of Vronsky declining.
When Anna came back with the album, he was no longer there, and Stepan Arkadyich was saying that he had dropped in to find out about a dinner they were giving the next day for a visiting celebrity.
‘And he wouldn’t come in for anything. He’s somehow strange,’ Stepan Arkadyich added.
Kitty blushed. She thought that she alone understood why he had called by and why he had not come in. ‘He was at our house,’ she thought, ‘didn’t find me, and thought I was here; but he didn’t come in because he thought it was late, and Anna’s here.’
They all exchanged glances without saying anything and began looking through Anna’s album.
There was nothing either extraordinary or strange in a man calling at his friend’s house at half-past nine to find out the details of a dinner that was being planned and not coming in; but they all thought it strange. To Anna especially it seemed strange and not right.
XXII
The ball had only just begun when Kitty and her mother went up the big, light-flooded stairway, set with flowers and lackeys in powder and red livery. From the inner rooms drifted a steady rustle of movement, as in a beehive, and while they were adjusting their hair and dresses in front of a mirror between potted trees on the landing, the cautiously distinct sounds of the orchestra’s violins came from the ballroom, beginning the first waltz. A little old man in civilian dress, who had been straightening his grey side-whiskers at another mirror and who exuded a smell of scent, bumped into them by the stairway and stepped aside, obviously admiring Kitty, whom he did not know. A beardless young man, one of those young men of society whom the old prince Shcherbatsky called
Though Kitty’s toilette, coiffure and all the preparations for the ball had cost her a good deal of trouble and planning, she was now entering the ballroom, in her intricate tulle gown over a pink underskirt, as freely and simply as if all these rosettes and laces, and all the details of her toilette, had not cost her and her household a moment’s attention, as if she had been born in this tulle and lace, with this tall coiffure, topped by a rose with two leaves.
When the old princess, at the entrance to the ballroom, wanted to straighten the twisted end of her ribbon sash, Kitty drew back slightly. She felt that everything on her must of itself be good and graceful, and there was no need to straighten anything.
