Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART TWO CHAPTER 32
“Look,” said the colonel, looking out of the window, “what an audience has collected
to listen to you.” There actually was quite a considerable crowd under the
windows.
“I am very glad it gives you pleasure,” Varenka answered simply.
Kitty looked with pride at her friend. She was enchanted by her talent, and her
voice, and her face, but most of all by her manner, by the way Varenka obviously
thought nothing of her singing and was quite unmoved by their praises. She seemed
only to be asking: “Am I to sing again, or is that enough?”
“If it had been I,” thought Kitty, “how proud I should have been! How delighted I
should have been to see that crowd under the windows! But she’s utterly unmoved
by it. Her only motive is to avoid refusing and to please mamma. What is there in
her? What is it gives her the power to look down on everything, to be calm independently
of everything? How I should like to know it and to learn it of her!” thought
Kitty, gazing into her serene face. The princess asked Varenka to sing again, and
Varenka sang another song, also smoothly, distinctly, and well, standing erect at the
piano and beating time on it with her thin, dark-skinned hand.
The next song in the book was an Italian one. Kitty played the opening bars, and
looked round at Varenka.
“Let’s skip that,” said Varenka, flushing a little. Kitty let her eyes rest on Varenka’s
face, with a look of dismay and inquiry.
“Very well, the next one,” she said hurriedly, turning over the pages, and at once
feeling that there was something connected with the song.
“No,” answered Varenka with a smile, laying her hand on the music, “no, let’s
have that one.” And she sang it just as quietly, as coolly, and as well as the others.
When she had finished, they all thanked her again, and went off to tea. Kitty and
Varenka went out into the little garden that adjoined the house.
“Am I right, that you have some reminiscences connected with that song?” said
Kitty. “Don’t tell me,” she added hastily, “only say if I’m right.”
“No, why not? I’ll tell you simply,” said Varenka, and, without waiting for a reply,
she went on: “Yes, it brings up memories, once painful ones. I cared for someone
once, and I used to sing him that song.”
Kitty with big, wide-open eyes gazed silently, sympathetically at Varenka.
“I cared for him, and he cared for me; but his mother did not wish it, and he
married another girl. He’s living now not far from us, and I see him sometimes.
You didn’t think I had a love story too,” she said, and there was a faint gleam in her
handsome face of that fire which Kitty felt must once have glowed all over her.
“I didn’t think so? Why, if I were a man, I could never care for anyone else after
knowing you. Only I can’t understand how he could, to please his mother, forget
you and make you unhappy; he had no heart.”
“Oh, no, he’s a very good man, and I’m not unhappy; quite the contrary, I’m very
happy. Well, so we shan’t be singing any more now,” she added, turning towards
the house.
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