Page 275 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

Kitty, instead of running out of the room as she had meant
to do, sat down near the door, and hid her face in her
handkerchief.
The silence lasted for two minutes: Dolly was thinking

of herself. That humiliation of which she was always
conscious came back to her with a peculiar bitterness
when her sister reminded her of it. She had not looked for
such cruelty in her sister, and she was angry with her. But
suddenly she heard the rustle of a skirt, and with it the
sound of heart-rending, smothered sobbing, and felt arms
about her neck. Kitty was on her knees before her.
‘Dolinka, I am so, so wretched!’ she whispered
penitently. And the sweet face covered with tears hid itself
in Darya Alexandrovna’s skirt.
As though tears were the indispensable oil, without
which the machinery of mutual confidence could not run
smoothly between the two sisters, the sisters after their
tears talked, not of what was uppermost in their minds,
but, though they talked of outside matters, they
understood each other. Kitty knew that the words she had
uttered in anger about her husband’s infidelity and her
humiliating position had cut her poor sister to the heart,
but that she had forgiven her. Dolly for her part knew all
she had wanted to find out. She felt certain that her

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