Page 1206 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

‘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

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