“Because you always look nicer than anyone.”
Anna had the faculty of blushing. She blushed a little, and said: “In the first place it’s never so; and secondly, if it were, what difference would it make to me?”
“Are you coming to this float?” Kitty asked. “I shall be so glad if you go. I should so like to see you dancing.”
“Anyway, if I do go, I shall comfort myself with the thought that it’s a pleasure to you.”
“I imagine your android at the ball glowing with a lilac hue,” Kitty said, daring a quick glance at Android Karenina, who had her faceplate turned toward the window, gazing it seemed at the Eye in the Tower, in its slow, eternal revolution.
“And why lilac precisely?” asked Anna, smiling. Class IIIs were often programmed, at public events, to glow from “bow to stern” in fanciful colors, to lend an extraje ne sais quoi to their mistresses’ appearance. “I know why you press me to come to the float. You expect perhaps to leave this float with your companion robot and a human companion as well! And you want everyone to be there to take part in it.”
“How do you know? Yes.”
“Oh! What a happy time you are at,” pursued Anna. “I remember, that feeling as if gravity has been oh-so-slightly suspended, not just at the float, but everywhere you go! That mist which covers everything in that blissful time when childhood is just ending, and out of that vast circle, happy and gay, there is a path growing narrower and narrower, and it is delightful and alarming to enter the ballroom, bright and splendid as it is… Who has not been through it?”
Kitty smiled without speaking. But how did she go through it? How I should like to know all her love story! thought Kitty, recalling the foreboding, unromantic appearance of Alexei Alexandrovich, her husband.
“I know something. Stiva told me, and I congratulate you. I liked him so much,” Anna continued. “I met Vronsky at the Grav station.”
“Oh, was he there?” asked Kitty, blushing. “What was it Stiva told you?”
“Stiva gossiped about it all. I traveled yesterday with Vronsky’s mother,” she went on, “and his mother talked without a pause of him; he’s her favorite. I know mothers are partial, but…”
“What did his mother tell you?”
“Oh, a great deal! And I know that he’s her favorite; still one can see how chivalrous he is… Well, for instance, she told me that he has served in the Border Wars, and is now with a regiment hunting UnConSciya operatives. He has destroyed many koschei, saving many lives. He’s a hero, in fact,” said Anna.
But she did not tell Kitty about her encounter with Vronsky at the Grav station, nor how Vronsky had gallantly interposed himself before her line of sight, to protect her from seeing the person dead upon the magnet bed. She was about to, when she glanced at Android Karenina, who bent her head forward by several degrees toward her lap, and for some reason made Anna feel it was disagreeable to her to think of it. She felt that there was something that had to do with her in it, and something that ought not to have been.
CHAPTER 18
STIVA AND DOLLY soon emerged, their Class IIIs scuttling noisily behind them like happy children, and both Kitty and Anna could tell that a reconciliation had taken place. The whole evening Dolly was, as always, a little mocking in her tone to her husband, while Stepan Arkadyich was happy and cheerful, but not so as to seem as though, having been forgiven, he had forgotten his offense.
At half past nine o’clock a particularly joyful and pleasant family conversation over the tea table at the Oblonskys’ was broken up by an apparently simple incident. But this simple incident for some reason struck everyone as strange. Anna had gone upstairs with her light, resolute step to retrieve a favorite polishing cloth from her valise, so that she might give Android Karenina’s monitor a sheen before displaying Memories of her Sergey. The stairs up to her room came out on the landing of the great warm main staircase.
Just as she was leaving the drawing room, the I/Doorchime/6’s tinkling greeting was heard in the hall.
“Who can that be?” said Dolly.
“It’s early for me to be fetched, and for anyone else it’s late,” observed Kitty.
“Sure to be someone from the Ministry for me,” put in Stepan Arkadyich. When Anna was passing the top of the staircase, a Class II was buzzing up to announce the visitor, while the visitor himself was standing under a lamp. Anna glancing down at once recognized Vronsky, for the crackle of the hot-whip and the twin bulges of the smokers were unmistakable. A strange feeling of pleasure and at the same time dread of something stirred in her heart; as she looked at Count Vronsky, she remembered with a kind of violence in her head the tremendous BOOM that had rent the sky at the Grav station, when last they had met.
Vronsky was standing still, not taking off his gleaming silver outer-coat, pulling something out of his pocket. At the instant when she was just facing the stairs, he raised his eyes, caught sight of her, and in the expression of his face there passed a shade of embarrassment and dismay. With a slight inclination of her head she passed, hearing behind her Stepan Arkadyich’s loud voice calling him to come up, and the quiet, soft, and composed voice of Vronsky refusing.
By the time Anna rejoined the group, he was already gone, and Stepan Arkadyich was telling them that he had called to inquire about the dinner they were giving the next day for a celebrated engineer who had just arrived. “And nothing would induce him to come up. What a queer fellow he is!” added Stepan Arkadyich.
Kitty blushed. She thought that she was the only person who knew why he had come, and why he would not come up. He has been at home, she thought, and didn’t find me, and thought I should be here, but he did not come up because he thought it late, and Anna’s here.
All then turned their attention to Android Karenina’s monitor, where Anna’s Memories of handsome young Sergey were sequentially displayed.
CHAPTER 19
THE FLOAT WAS ONLY JUST beginning as Kitty and her mother walked up the great staircase, flooded with light, and lined with flowers and II/Footmen/74s in red linings. Bracing themselves against the banister, they bent at the leg and waited with keen anticipation at the top step until the special chime was sounded, signaling the first blasts of jet-powered air from the hidden matrix of pipes in the floor and walls. At the same moment, the notes of the waltz began, and mother and daughter leaped from the top step and caught the air, dancing in airborne three-quarters time about the room.
A beardless youth, one of those society youths whom the old Prince Shcherbatsky called “young bucks,” in an exceedingly open waistcoat, straightening his white tie as he went, waved to them as he bounced awkwardly past on a puff of air, then did a clumsy midair course reversal to ask Kitty for a quadrille. As the first quadrille had already been given to Vronsky, she had to promise this youth the second. He bowed and sailed past on the next surge of air, stroking his mustache, admiring rosy Kitty.
Although her dress, her coiffure, and all the preparations for the float had cost Kitty great trouble and consideration, at this moment she flew into the floatroom in her elaborate tulle dress over a pink slip as easily and simply as though all the rosettes and lace, all the minute details of her attire, had not cost her or her family a moment’s attention, as though she had been born in that tulle and lace, bobbing and bouncing gracefully above the floor, with her hair done up high on her head, and a rose and two leaves on the top of it.
It was one of Kitty’s best days. Her dress was not uncomfortable anywhere; her lace bertha did not droop anywhere; her rosettes were neither crushed nor torn off; her pink slippers with high, hollowed-out heels did not pinch, but gladdened her feet; and the thick rolls of fair chignon kept up on her head as if they were her own hair. All three buttons buttoned up without tearing on the long glove that covered her hand without concealing its lines. The black velvet of her locket nestled with special softness round her neck. That velvet was delicious; at home, looking at her neck in the looking glass, Kitty had felt that that velvet was speaking. She had asked her father if her Class III could have a skin of soft velvet, and she wanted to be dressed to match when it arrived. About all the rest there might be a doubt, but the velvet was delicious. Kitty smiled now too, at the float, when she glanced at it in the glass. Her bare shoulders and arms gave Kitty a sense of chill marble, a feeling she particularly liked. Her eyes sparkled, and her rosy lips could not keep from smiling from the consciousness of her own attractiveness.