“No, he’s still getting ready for the journey.”

“Oh, that’s it!” said the prince.  “And so am I to be getting ready for a journey too?  At your service,” he said to his wife, sitting down.  “And I tell you what, Katia,” he went on to his younger daughter, “you must wake up one fine day and say to yourself:  Why, I’m quite well, and merry, and going out again with father for an early morning walk in the frost.  Hey?”

What her father said seemed simple enough, yet at these words Kitty became confused and overcome like a detected criminal.  “Yes, he sees it all, he understands it all, and in these words he’s telling me that though I’m ashamed, I must get over my shame.”  She could not pluck up spirit to make any answer.  She tried to begin, and all at once burst into tears, and rushed out of the room.

“See what comes of your jokes!” the princess pounced down on her husband.  “You’re always...” she began a string of reproaches.

The prince listened to the princess’s scolding rather a long while without speaking, but his face was more and more frowning.

“She’s so much to be pitied, poor child, so much to be pitied, and you don’t feel how it hurts her to hear the slightest reference to the cause of it.  Ah! to be so mistaken in people!” said the princess, and by the change in her tone both Dolly and the prince knew she was speaking of Vronsky.  “I don’t know why there aren’t laws against such base, dishonorable people.”

“Ah, I can’t bear to hear you!” said the prince gloomily, getting up from his low chair, and seeming anxious to get away, yet stopping in the doorway.  “There are laws, madam, and since you’ve challenged me to it, I’ll tell you who’s to blame for it all:  you and you, you and nobody else.  Laws against such young gallants there have always been, and there still are!  Yes, if there has been nothing that ought not to have been, old as I am, I’d have called him out to the barrier, the young dandy.  Yes, and now you physic her and call in these quacks.”

The prince apparently had plenty more to say, but as soon as the princess heard his tone she subsided at once, and became penitent, as she always did on serious occasions.

“Alexander, Alexander,” she whispered, moving to him and beginning to weep.

As soon as she began to cry the prince too calmed down.  He went up to her.

“There, that’s enough, that’s enough!  You’re wretched too, I know.  It can’t be helped.  There’s no great harm done.  God is merciful...thanks...” he said, not knowing what he was saying, as he responded to the tearful kiss of the princess that he felt on his hand.  And the prince went out of the room.