As soon as Levin approached the bath, the experiment was tried, and it was completely successful.  The cook, sent for with this object, bent over the baby.  He frowned and shook his head disapprovingly.  Kitty bent down to him, he gave her a beaming smile, propped his little hands on the sponge and chirruped, making such a queer little contented sound with his lips, that Kitty and the nurse were not alone in their admiration.  Levin, too, was surprised and delighted.

The baby was taken out of the bath, drenched with water, wrapped in towels, dried, and after a piercing scream, handed to his mother.

“Well, I am glad you are beginning to love him,” said Kitty to her husband, when she had settled herself comfortably in her usual place, with the baby at her breast.  “I am so glad!  It had begun to distress me.  You said you had no feeling for him.”

“No; did I say that?  I only said I was disappointed.”

“What! disappointed in him?”

“Not disappointed in him, but in my own feeling; I had expected more.  I had expected a rush of new delightful emotion to come as a surprise.  And then instead of that—­disgust, pity...”

She listened attentively, looking at him over the baby, while she put back on her slender fingers the rings she had taken off while giving Mitya his bath.

“And most of all, at there being far more apprehension and pity than pleasure.  Today, after that fright during the storm, I understand how I love him.”

Kitty’s smile was radiant.

“Were you very much frightened?” she said.  “So was I too, but I feel it more now that it’s over.  I’m going to look at the oak.  How nice Katavasov is!  And what a happy day we’ve had altogether.  And you’re so nice with Sergey Ivanovitch, when you care to be....  Well, go back to them.  It’s always so hot and steamy here after the bath.”

Chapter 19

Going out of the nursery and being again alone, Levin went back at once to the thought, in which there was something not clear.

Instead of going into the drawing room, where he heard voices, he stopped on the terrace, and leaning his elbows on the parapet, he gazed up at the sky.

It was quite dark now, and in the south, where he was looking, there were no clouds.  The storm had drifted on to the opposite side of the sky, and there were flashes of lightning and distant thunder from that quarter.  Levin listened to the monotonous drip from the lime trees in the garden, and looked at the triangle of stars he knew so well, and the Milky Way with its branches that ran through its midst.  At each flash of lightning the Milky Way, and even the bright stars, vanished, but as soon as the lightning died away, they reappeared in their places as though some hand had flung them back with careful aim.