"Ah, that's so strange, how and when a man makes an offer!...
There is a sort of barrier, and all at once it's broken down,"
said Dolly, smiling pensively and recalling her past with Stepan
Arkadyevitch.
"Mamma, how did papa make you an offer?" Kitty asked suddenly.
"There was nothing out of the way, it was very simple," answered
the princess, but her face beamed all over at the recollection.
"Oh, but how was it? You loved him, anyway, before you were
allowed to speak?"
Kitty felt a peculiar pleasure in being able now to talk to her
mother on equal terms about those questions of such paramount
interest in a woman's life.
"Of course I did; he had come to stay with us in the country."
"But how was it settled between you, mamma?"
"You imagine, I dare say, that you invented something quite new?
It's always just the same: it was settled by the eyes, by
smiles..."
"How nicely you said that, mamma! It's just by the eyes, by
smiles that it's done," Dolly assented.
"But what words did he say?"
"What did Kostya say to you?"
"He wrote it in chalk. It was wonderful.... How long ago it
seems!" she said.
And the three women all fell to musing on the same thing. Kitty
was the first to break the silence. She remembered all that last
winter before her marriage, and her passion for Vronsky.
"There's one thing ...that old love affair of Varenka's," she
said, a natural chain of ideas bringing her to this point. "I
should have liked to say something to Sergey Ivanovitch, to
prepare him. They're all--all men, I mean," she added, "awfully
jealous over our past."
"Not all," said Dolly. "You judge by your own husband. It makes
him miserable even now to remember Vronsky. Eh? that's true,
isn't it?"
"Yes," Kitty answered, a pensive smile in her eyes.
"But I really don't know," the mother put in in defense of her
motherly care of her daughter, "what there was in your past that
could worry him? That Vronsky paid you attentions--that happens
to every girl."
"Oh, yes, but we didn't mean that," Kitty said, flushing a
little.
"No, let me speak," her mother went on, "why, you yourself would
not let me have a talk to Vronsky. Don't you remember?"
"Oh, mamma!" said Kitty, with an expression of suffering.