Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART TWO CHAPTER 33
Kitty answered that nothing had happened between them, and that she could not
tell why Anna Pavlovna seemed displeased with her. Kitty answered perfectly truly.
She did not know the reason Anna Pavlovna had changed to her, but she guessed it.
She guessed at something which she could not tell her mother, which she did not put
into words to herself. It was one of those things which one knows but which one can
never speak of even to oneself, so terrible and shameful would it be to be mistaken.
Again and again she went over in her memory all her relations with the family.
She remembered the simple delight expressed on the round, good-humored face of
Anna Pavlovna at their meetings; she remembered their 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 she said angrily the day before yesterday: ‘There,
he will keep waiting for you; he wouldn’t drink his coffee without you, though he’s
grown so dreadfully weak.”’
“Yes, perhaps, too, she didn’t like it when I gave him the rug. It was all so simple,
but he took it so awkwardly, and was so long thanking me, that I felt awkward too.
And then that portrait of me he did so well. And most of all that look of confusion
and tenderness! Yes, yes, that’s it!” Kitty repeated to herself with horror. “No, it
can’t be, it oughtn’t to be! He’s so much to be pitied!” she said to herself directly
after.
This doubt poisoned the charm of her new life.
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