The silence lasted for some two minutes. Dolly was thinking about herself. Her humiliation, which she always felt, echoed especially painfully in her when her sister reminded her of it. She had not expected such cruelty from her sister and was angry with her. But suddenly she heard the rustling of a dress, along with the sound of suppressed sobs bursting out, and someone’s arms encircled her neck from below. Kitty was kneeling before her.
‘Dolinka, I’m so, so unhappy!’ she whispered guiltily.
And she hid her sweet, tear-bathed face in Darya Alexandrovna’s skirts.
As if tears were the necessary lubricant without which the machine of mutual communication could not work successfully, the two sisters, after these tears, started talking, not about what preoccupied them, but about unrelated things, and yet they understood each other. Kitty understood that her poor sister had been struck to the depths of her heart by the words she had spoken in passion about her husband’s unfaithfulness and her humiliation, but that she forgave her. Dolly, for her part, understood everything she had wanted to know; she was satisfied that her guesses were right, that Kitty’s grief, her incurable grief, was precisely that Levin had made a proposal and that she had refused him, while Vronsky had deceived her, and that she was ready to love Levin and hate Vronsky. Kitty did not say a word about it; she spoke only of her state of mind.
‘I have no grief,’ she said, once she had calmed down, ‘but can you understand that everything has become vile, disgusting, coarse to me, and my own self first of all? You can’t imagine what vile thoughts I have about everything.’
‘Why, what kind of vile thoughts could you have?’ Dolly asked, smiling.
‘The most, most vile and coarse - I can’t tell you. It’s not anguish, or boredom, it’s much worse. As if all that was good in me got hidden, and only what’s most vile was left. Well, how can I tell you?’ she went on, seeing the perplexity in her sister’s eyes. ‘Papa started saying to me just now ... it seems to me all he thinks is that I’ve got to get married. Mama takes me to a ball: it seems to me she only takes me in order to get me married quickly and be rid of me. I know it’s not true, but I can’t drive these thoughts away. The so-called suitors I can’t even look at. It seems as if they’re taking my measurements. Before it was simply a pleasure for me to go somewhere in a ball gown, I admired myself; now I feel ashamed, awkward. Well, what do you want! The doctor ... Well ...’
Kitty faltered; she wanted to go on to say that ever since this change had taken place in her, Stepan Arkadyich had become unbearably disagreeable to her, and that she could not see him without picturing the most coarse and ugly things.
‘Well, yes, I picture things in the most coarse, vile way,’ she went on. ‘It’s my illness. Maybe it will pass ...’
‘But don’t think ...’
‘I can’t help it. I feel good only with children, only in your house.’
‘It’s too bad you can’t visit me.’
‘No, I will come. I’ve had scarlet fever, and I’ll persuade
Kitty got her way and moved to her sister‘s, and there spent the whole time of the scarlet fever, which did come, taking care of the children. The two sisters nursed all six children back to health, but Kitty’s condition did not improve, and during the Great Lent1 the Shcherbatskys went abroad.
IV
There is essentially one highest circle in Petersburg; they all know each other, and even call on each other. But this big circle has its subdivisions. Anna Arkadyevna Karenina had friends and close connections in three different circles. One was her husband’s official service circle, consisting of his colleagues and subordinates, who, in social condition, were connected or divided in the most varied and whimsical way. It was hard now for Anna to remember the sense of almost pious respect she had first felt for all these people. Now she knew them all as people know each other in a provincial town; knew who had which habits and weaknesses, whose shoe pinched on which foot; knew their relations to one another and to the main centre; knew who sided with whom, and how, and in what; and who agreed or disagreed with whom, and about what; but this circle of governmental, male interests never could interest her, despite Countess Lydia Ivanovna’s promptings, and she avoided it.
