Before this, as soon as Kitty went out of the room in tears, Dolly, with her motherly, family instincts, had promptly perceived that here a woman’s work lay before her, and she prepared to do it.  She took off her hat, and, morally speaking, tucked up her sleeves and prepared for action.  While her mother was attacking her father, she tried to restrain her mother, so far as filial reverence would allow.  During the prince’s outburst she was silent; she felt ashamed for her mother, and tender towards her father for so quickly being kind again.  But when her father left them she made ready for what was the chief thing needful—­to go to Kitty and console her.

“I’d been meaning to tell you something for a long while, mamma:  did you know that Levin meant to make Kitty an offer when he was here the last time?  He told Stiva so.”

“Well, what then?  I don’t understand...”

“So did Kitty perhaps refuse him?...  She didn’t tell you so?”

“No, she has said nothing to me either of one or the other; she’s too proud.  But I know it’s all on account of the other.”

“Yes, but suppose she has refused Levin, and she wouldn’t have refused him if it hadn’t been for the other, I know.  And then, he has deceived her so horribly.”

It was too terrible for the princess to think how she had sinned against her daughter, and she broke out angrily.

“Oh, I really don’t understand!  Nowadays they will all go their own way, and mothers haven’t a word to say in anything, and then...”

“Mamma, I’ll go up to her.”

“Well, do.  Did I tell you not to?” said her mother.

Chapter 3

When she went into Kitty’s little room, a pretty, pink little room, full of knick-knacks in vieux saxe, as fresh, and pink, and white, and gay as Kitty herself had been two months ago, Dolly remembered how they had decorated the room the year before together, with what love and gaiety.  Her heart turned cold when she saw Kitty sitting on a low chair near the door, her eyes fixed immovably on a corner of the rug.  Kitty glanced at her sister, and the cold, rather ill-tempered expression of her face did not change.

“I’m just going now, and I shall have to keep in and you won’t be able to come to see me,” said Dolly, sitting down beside her.  “I want to talk to you.”

“What about?” Kitty asked swiftly, lifting her head in dismay.

“What should it be, but your trouble?”

“I have no trouble.”

“Nonsense, Kitty.  Do you suppose I could help knowing?  I know all about it.  And believe me, it’s of so little consequence....  We’ve all been through it.”

Kitty did not speak, and her face had a stern expression.

“He’s not worth your grieving over him,” pursued Darya Alexandrovna, coming straight to the point.

“No, because he has treated me with contempt,” said Kitty, in a breaking voice.  “Don’t talk of it!  Please, don’t talk of it!”