บทที่ บทที่ 16 · 第16章

Vronsky had never had a real home life. His mother had been in her

youth a brilliant society woman, who had had during her married life,

and still more afterwards, many love affairs notorious in the whole

fashionable world. His father he scarcely remembered, and he had been

educated in the Corps of Pages.

Leaving the school very young as a brilliant officer, he had at once

got into the circle of wealthy Petersburg army men. Although he did go

more or less into Petersburg society, his love affairs had always

hitherto been outside it.

In Moscow he had for the first time felt, after his luxurious and

coarse life at Petersburg, all the charm of intimacy with a sweet and

innocent girl of his own rank, who cared for him. It never even entered

his head that there could be any harm in his relations with Kitty. At

balls he danced principally with her. He was a constant visitor at

their house. He talked to her as people commonly do talk in society—all

sorts of nonsense, but nonsense to which he could not help attaching a

special meaning in her case. Although he said nothing to her that he

could not have said before everybody, he felt that she was becoming

more and more dependent upon him, and the more he felt this, the better

he liked it, and the tenderer was his feeling for her. He did not know

that his mode of behavior in relation to Kitty had a definite

character, that it is courting young girls with no intention of

marriage, and that such courting is one of the evil actions common

among brilliant young men such as he was. It seemed to him that he was

the first who had discovered this pleasure, and he was enjoying his

discovery.

If he could have heard what her parents were saying that evening, if he

could have put himself at the point of view of the family and have

heard that Kitty would be unhappy if he did not marry her, he would

have been greatly astonished, and would not have believed it. He could

not believe that what gave such great and delicate pleasure to him, and

above all to her, could be wrong. Still less could he have believed

that he ought to marry.

Marriage had never presented itself to him as a possibility. He not

only disliked family life, but a family, and especially a husband was,

in accordance with the views general in the bachelor world in which he

lived, conceived as something alien, repellant, and, above all,

ridiculous.

But though Vronsky had not the least suspicion what the parents were

saying, he felt on coming away from the Shtcherbatskys’ that the secret

spiritual bond which existed between him and Kitty had grown so much

stronger that evening that some step must be taken. But what step could

and ought to be taken he could not imagine.

“What is so exquisite,” he thought, as he returned from the

Shtcherbatskys’, carrying away with him, as he always did, a delicious

feeling of purity and freshness, arising partly from the fact that he

had not been smoking for a whole evening, and with it a new feeling of

tenderness at her love for him—“what is so exquisite is that not a word

has been said by me or by her, but we understand each other so well in

this unseen language of looks and tones, that this evening more clearly

than ever she told me she loves me. And how secretly, simply, and most

of all, how trustfully! I feel myself better, purer. I feel that I have

a heart, and that there is a great deal of good in me. Those sweet,

loving eyes! When she said: ‘Indeed I do....’

“Well, what then? Oh, nothing. It’s good for me, and good for her.” And

he began wondering where to finish the evening.

He passed in review of the places he might go to. “Club? a game of

bezique, champagne with Ignatov? No, I’m not going. _Château des

Fleurs_; there I shall find Oblonsky, songs, the cancan. No, I’m sick

of it. That’s why I like the Shtcherbatskys’, that I’m growing better.

I’ll go home.” He went straight to his room at Dussots’ Hotel, ordered

supper, and then undressed, and as soon as his head touched the pillow,

fell into a sound sleep.