Anna Karenina (Annotated Maude Translation). Leo Tolstoy

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      Chapter 16

      VRONSKY had never known family life. His mother in her youth had been a brilliant Society woman, and during her married life and especially in her widowhood had had many love affairs, known to everybody. He hardly remembered his father, and had been educated in the Cadet Corps.

      On leaving that Corps as a very young and brilliant officer he at once joined the swim of the wealthy military Petersburg set. Though he occasionally went into the highest Petersburg Society, all his love interests lay outside it.

      In Moscow, after this luxurious course of Petersburg life, he experienced for the first time the delight of intimacy with a sweet, innocent Society girl who fell in love with him. It never entered his head that there could be any wrong in his relations with Kitty. At balls he danced chiefly with her and he visited her at her home. He talked with her the usual Society talk: all sorts of rubbish, but rubbish into which involuntarily he put a special meaning for her. Though he never said anything to her which could not have been said before everybody he was conscious that she was becoming more and more dependent upon him, and the more he felt this the pleasanter it was, and the more tender became his feelings toward her. He did not know that his behaviour toward Kitty had a name of its own, that it was decoying a girl with no intentions of marrying her, and is one of the evil actions common among brilliant young men like himself. He thought he was the first to discover this pleasure and he enjoyed his discovery.

      If he could have heard what her parents said that night, if he could have known her family’s point of view and learnt that Kitty would be unhappy if he did not marry her, he would have been much surprised and would not have believed it. He would not have believed that what gave so much and such excellent pleasure to him, and — what was more — to her, could be wrong. Even less could he have believed that he ought to marry.

      Marriage had never presented itself to him as a possibility. Not only did he dislike family life, but in accordance with the views generally held in the bachelor world in which he lived he regarded the family, and especially a husband, as something alien, hostile, and above all ridiculous. But although Vronsky had no suspicion of what Kitty’s parents were saying, he felt, as he left the Shcherbatskys’ house that night, that the secret spiritual bond which existed between him and Kitty had so strengthened during the evening that some action ought to be taken. But what this should or could be he could not imagine.

      ‘That’s what is so delightful,’ he thought as he left the Shcherbatskys’ house, carrying away from there, as usual, a pleasant feeling of purity and freshness (partly due to the fact that he had not smoked at all that evening) and deeply touched by a new sense of tender joy in the consciousness of her love for him. ‘That is what is so delightful, that nothing was said either by me or by her, yet we so well understand one another in that subtle language of looks and tones that to-day more plainly than ever she has told me that she loves me. And how sweetly, simply, and above all trustfully! I feel myself better and purer, I feel I have a heart and that there is much that is good in me. Those dear loving eyes! when she said, “and very much”.’

      ‘Well, and what of it? Nothing, of course. It’s pleasant for me and for her,’ and he considered where he should finish his evening.

      He passed in review the places he might go to. ‘The Club: a game of bezique, a bottle of champagne with Ignatev? No, I won’t go there. Château des Fleurs? There I should find Oblonsky, French couplets, the cancan. No, I am sick of it. That’s just what I like about the Shcherbatskys’, that I myself become better there. I’ll go home.’ He went straight to his rooms at the Hotel Dusseaux, had supper, and after undressing had hardly laid his head on his pillow before he was fast asleep.