Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART FIVE CHAPTER 5
position, not to be ridiculous. And he’s not ridiculous, and not affected; one can see
he’s moved.”
“You expected it, I suppose?”
“Almost. She always cared for him.”
“Well, we shall see which of them will step on the rug first. I warned Kitty.”
“It will make no difference,” said Madame Lvova; “we’re all obedient wives; it’s
in our family.”
“Oh, I stepped on the rug before Vassily on purpose. And you, Dolly?”
Dolly stood beside them; she heard them, but she did not answer. She was deeply
moved. The tears stood in her eyes, and she could not have spoken without crying.
She was rejoicing over Kitty and Levin; going back in thought to her own wedding,
she glanced at the radiant figure of Stepan Arkadyevitch, forgot all the present, and
remembered only her own innocent love. She recalled not herself only, but all her
women-friends and acquaintances. She thought of them on the one day of their triumph,
when they had stood like Kitty under the wedding crown, with love and
hope and dread in their hearts, renouncing the past, and stepping forward into the
mysterious future. Among the brides that came back to her memory, she thought
too of her darling Anna, of whose proposed divorce she had just been hearing. And
she had stood just as innocent in orange flowers and bridal veil. And now? “It’s terribly
strange,” she said to herself. It was not merely the sisters, the women-friends
and female relations of the bride who were following every detail of the ceremony.
Women who were quite strangers, mere spectators, were watching it excitedly, holding
their breath, in fear of losing a single movement or expression of the bride and
bridegroom, and angrily not answering, often not hearing, the remarks of the callous
men, who kept making joking or irrelevant observations.
“Why has she been crying? Is she being married against her will?”
“Against her will to a fine fellow like that? A prince, isn’t he?”
“Is that her sister in the white satin? Just listen how the deacon booms out, ‘And
fearing her husband.”’
“Are the choristers from Tchudovo?”
“No, from the Synod.”
“I asked the footman. He says he’s going to take her home to his country place at
once. Awfully rich, they say. That’s why she’s being married to him.”
“No, they’re a well-matched pair.”
“I say, Marya Vassilievna, you were making out those fly-away crinolines were
not being worn. Just look at her in the puce dress–an ambassador’s wife they say
she is–how her skirt bounces out from side to side!”
“What a pretty dear the bride is–like a lamb decked with flowers! Well, say what
you will, we women feel for our sister.”
Such were the comments in the crowd of gazing women who had succeeded in
slipping in at the church doors.
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