362 363
“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. Chapter 34.
Before the end of the course of drinking the waters, Prince
Shtcherbatsky, who had gone on from Carlsbad to Baden and Kissingen
to Russian friends—to get a breath of Russian air, as he said—came
back to his wife and daughter.
The views of the prince and of the princess on life abroad were
completely opposed. The princess thought everything delightful, and
in spite of her established position in Russian society, she tried abroad
to be like a European fashionable lady, which she was not—for the
simple reason that she was a typical Russian gentlewoman; and so she
was affected, which did not altogether suit her. The prince, on the
contrary, thought everything foreign detestable, got sick of European
life, kept to his Russian habits, and purposely tried to show himself
abroad less European than he was in reality.
The prince returned thinner, with the skin hanging in loose bags on
his cheeks, but in the most cheerful frame of mind. His good humor
was even greater when he saw Kitty completely recovered. The news
of Kitty’s friendship with Madame Stahl and Varenka, and the reports
the princess gave him of some kind of change she had noticed in Kitty,
troubled the prince and aroused his habitual feeling of jealousy of
everything that drew his daughter away from him, and a dread that his
daughter might have got out of the reach of his influence into regions