Anna Karenina - Part 1 - Page 59/119

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.

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.