ith Kitty. At balls he danced principally with her.
He was a constant visitor at their house. He talked to her as
people commonly do talk in society--all sorts of nonsense, but
nonsense to which he could not help attaching a special meaning
in her case. Although he said nothing to her that he could not
have said before everybody, he felt that she was becoming more
and more dependent upon him, and the more he felt this, the
better he liked it, and the tenderer was his feeling for her. He
did not know that his mode of behavior in relation to Kitty had a
definite character, that it is courting young girls with no
intention of marriage, and that such courting is one of the evil
actions common among brilliant young men such as he was. It
seemed to him that he was the first who had discovered this
pleasure, and he was enjoying his discovery.

If he could have heard what her parents were saying that evening,
if he could have put himself at the point ov view of the family
and have heard that Kitty would be unhappy if he did not marry
her, he would have been greatly astonished, and would not have
believed it. He could not believe that what gave such great and
delicate pleasure to him, and above all to her, could be wrong.
Still less could he have believed that he ought to marry.

Marriage had never presented itself to him as a possibility. He
not only disliked family life, but a family, and especially a
husband was, in accordance with the views general in the bachelor
world in which he lived, conceived as something alien, repellant,
and, above all, ridiculous.

But though Vronsky had not the least suspicion what the parents
were saying, he felt on coming away from the Shtcherbatskys' that
the secret spiritual bond which existed between him and Kitty had
grown so much stronger that evening that some step must be taken.
But what step could and ought to be taken he could not imagine.

"What is so exquisite," he thought, as he returned from the
Shtcherbatskys', carrying away with him, as he always did, a
delicious feeling of purity and freshness, arising partly from
the fact that he had not been smoking for a whole evening, and
with it a new feeling of tenderness at her love for him--"what
is so exquisite is that not a word has been said by me or by her,
but we understand each other so well in this unseen language of
looks and tones, that this evening more clearly than ever she
told me she loves me. And how secretly, s