Anna Karenina (Dole)/Part One/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
Vronsky had never known anything of family life. His mother, in her youth, had been a very brilliant society woman, who, in her husband's lifetime and after his death, had engaged in many love-affairs that had made talk. Vronsky scarcely remembered his father, and he had been educated in the School of Pages.
Graduating very young and with brilliancy as an officer, he immediately began to follow the course of wealthy military men of Petersburg. Though he occasionally went into general society, all his love-affairs were with a different class.
At Moscow, after the luxurious, dissipated life of Petersburg, he for the first time felt the charm of familiar intercourse with a lovely, innocent society girl, who was evidently in love with him. It never occurred to him that there might be anything wrong in his relations with Kitty. At balls he preferred to dance with her, he called on her, talked with her as people generally talk in society: all sorts of trifles, but trifles to which he involuntarily attributed a different meaning when spoken to her. Although he never said anything to her which he would not have said in the hearing of others, he was conscious that she kept growing more and more dependent on him; and, the more he felt this consciousness, the pleasanter it was to him, and his feeling toward her grew warmer and warmer. He did not know that his behavior toward Kitty had a definite name, that this way of leading on young girls without any intention of marriage is one of the most dishonorable tricks practised among the members of the brilliant circles of society in which he moved. He simply imagined that he had discovered a new pleasure, and he enjoyed his discovery.
Could he have heard the conversation between Kitty's parents that evening, could he have taken the family point of view and realized that Kitty would be made unhappy if he did not propose to her, he would have been amazed and would not have believed it. He would not have believed that what gave him and her such a great delight could be wrong, still less that it brought any obligation to marry.
He had never considered the possibility of his getting married. Not only was family life distasteful to him, but, from his view as a bachelor, the family, and especially the husband, belonged to a strange, hostile, and, worst of all, ridiculous world. But though Vronsky had not the slightest suspicion of the conversation of which he had been the subject, he left the Shcherbatskys' with the feeling that the mysterious bond that attached him to Kitty was closer than ever, so close, indeed, that he felt that he must do something. But what he ought to do or could do he could not imagine.
"How charming!" he thought, as he went to his rooms, feeling, as he always felt when he left the Shcherbatskys', a deep impression of purity and freshness, arising partly from the fact that he had not smoked all the evening, and a new sensation of tenderness caused by her love for him. "How charming that, without either of us saying anything, we understand each other so perfectly through this mute language of glances and tones, so that to-day more than ever before she told me that she loves me! And how lovely, natural, and, above all, confidential, she was! I feel that I myself am better, purer. I feel that I have a heart, and that there is something good in me. Those gentle, lovely eyes! When she said .... Well! what did she say? .... Nothing much, but it was pleasant for me, and pleasant for her."
And he reflected how he could best finish up the evening. He passed in review the places where he might go: "The 'club,' a hand of bezique and some champagne with Ignatof? No, not there. The Château des Fleurs, to find Oblonsky, songs, and the cancan? No, it's a bore. And this is just why I like the Shcherbatskys,—because I feel better for having been there. I'll go home!"
He went to his room at Dusseaux's, ordered supper, and then, having undressed, he had scarcely touched his head to the pillow before he was sound asleep.