Anna Karenina

Chapter 16
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 ov 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.
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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. Chateau 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 Dussot's Hotel, ordered supper, and then undressed,
and as soon as his head touched the pillow, fell into a sound sleep.
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