“I sent to Alexey to find out how he is, and he writes me he is quite well and unhurt, but in despair.”

“So he will be here,” she thought.  “What a good thing I told him all!”

She glanced at her watch.  She had still three hours to wait, and the memories of their last meeting set her blood in flame.

“My God, how light it is!  It’s dreadful, but I do love to see his face, and I do love this fantastic light....  My husband!  Oh! yes....  Well, thank God! everything’s over with him.”

Chapter 30

In the little German watering-place to which the Shtcherbatskys had betaken themselves, as in all places indeed where people are gathered together, the usual process, as it were, of the crystallization of society went on, assigning to each member of that society a definite and unalterable place.  Just as the particle of water in frost, definitely and unalterably, takes the special form of the crystal of snow, so each new person that arrived at the springs was at once placed in his special place.

Fuerst Shtcherbatsky, sammt Gemahlin und Tochter, by the apartments they took, and from their name and from the friends they made, were immediately crystallized into a definite place marked out for them.

There was visiting the watering-place that year a real German Fuerstin, in consequence of which the crystallizing process went on more vigorously than ever.  Princess Shtcherbatskaya wished, above everything, to present her daughter to this German princess, and the day after their arrival she duly performed this rite.  Kitty made a low and graceful curtsey in the very simple, that is to say, very elegant frock that had been ordered her from Paris.  The German princess said, “I hope the roses will soon come back to this pretty little face,” and for the Shtcherbatskys certain definite lines of existence were at once laid down from which there was no departing.  The Shtcherbatskys made the acquaintance too of the family of an English Lady Somebody, and of a German countess and her son, wounded in the last war, and of a learned Swede, and of M. Canut and his sister.  But yet inevitably the Shtcherbatskys were thrown most into the society of a Moscow lady, Marya Yevgenyevna Rtishtcheva and her daughter, whom Kitty disliked, because she had fallen ill, like herself, over a love affair, and a Moscow colonel, whom Kitty had known from childhood, and always seen in uniform and epaulets, and who now, with his little eyes and his open neck and flowered cravat, was uncommonly ridiculous and tedious, because there was no getting rid of him.  When all this was so firmly established, Kitty began to be very much bored, especially as the prince went away to Carlsbad and she was left alone with her mother.  She took no interest in the people she knew, feeling that nothing fresh would come of them.  Her chief mental interest in the watering-place consisted in