Page 496 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

secret confabulations about the invalid, their plots to draw
him away from the work which was forbidden him, and
to get him out-of-doors; the devotion of the youngest
boy, who used to call her ‘my Kitty,’ and would not go to

bed without her. How nice it all was! Then she recalled
the thin, terribly thin figure of Petrov, with his long neck,
in his brown coat, his scant, curly hair, his questioning
blue eyes that were so terrible to Kitty at first, and his
painful attempts to seem hearty and lively in her presence.
She recalled the efforts she had made at first to overcome
the repugnance she felt for him, as for all consumptive
people, and the pains it had cost her to think of things to
say to him. She recalled the timid, softened look with
which he gazed at her, and the strange feeling of
compassion and awkwardness, and later of a sense of her
own goodness, which she had felt at it. How nice it all
was! But all that was at first. Now, a few days ago,
everything was suddenly spoiled. Anna Pavlovna had met
Kitty with affected cordiality, and had kept continual
watch on her and on her husband.
Could that touching pleasure he showed when she
came near be the cause of Anna Pavlovna’s coolness?
‘Yes,’ she mused, ‘there was something unnatural about
Anna Pavlovna, and utterly unlike her good nature, when

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