Chapter 17
THE WHOLE OF THAT DAY ANNA and Android Karemna spent at the Oblonskys’, and received no one, though some of Anna’s acquaintances had already heard of their arrival, and came to call. Anna spent the whole morning with Dolly and the children. She merely sent a brief note to her brother to tell him that he must not fail to dine at home. “Come, God is merciful,” she wrote.
Oblonsky did dine at home: the conversation was general, and his wife, speaking to him, addressed him as “Stiva,” as she had not done before. In the relations of the husband and wife the same estrangement still remained, but there was no talk now of separation, and Stepan Arkadyich saw the possibility of explanation and reconciliation. Small Stiva, while attending as usual to his master, once dared to flash the red eye-shapes of his frontal display flirtatiously at Dolichka, who turned away but did not swat him.
Immediately after dinner Kitty came in. She knew Anna Arkadyevna, but only very slightly, and she came now to her sister’s with some trepidation at the prospect of meeting this fashionable Petersburg lady, whom everyone spoke so highly of. But she made a favorable impression on Anna Arkadyevna—she saw that at once. Anna was unmistakably admiring her loveliness and her youth, and before Kitty knew where she was she found herself not merely under Anna’s sway, but in love with her, as young girls do fall in love with older and married women. Anna was not like a fashionable lady, nor like the mother of a boy of eight years old. In the elasticity of her movements, the freshness and the unflagging eagerness which persisted in her face and broke out in her smile and her glance, she would rather have passed for a girl of twenty, had it not been for a serious and at times mournful look in her eyes, which struck and attracted Kitty. Her Class III, Android Karenina, too, seemed even in her perfect silence to be marked by a soulful depth of emotions—inaccessible, complex, and poetic—unlike any companion robot Kitty had ever seen.
After dinner, when Dolly went away to her own room, Anna rose quickly and went up to her brother, who was just lighting a cigar, having flicked open Small Stiva’s torso to use his groznium core for a light.
“Stiva,” she said to him, winking gaily, crossing him and glancing toward the door, “go, and God help you.”
He chucked the cigar into Small Stiva’s core, where it was consumed, winked back at his sister, and departed through the doorway.
“And when is your next float?” Anna asked Kitty.
“Next week, and a splendid float it shall be! Finally I am considered a woman, old enough to receive my very own Class III at last.”
“My congratulations,” murmured Anna Karenina, trying to remember the days of her own life, so many years ago, before her android had been brought to her—it seemed she could hardly recall a time when she hadn’t had the comforting presence of her beloved-companion at her heel.
“Yes,” Kitty added brightly. “I feel it will be one of those floats where one always enjoys oneself.”
“For me there are no floats now where one enjoys oneself,” said Anna, and Kitty detected in her eyes that mysterious world which was not open to her. “For me there are some less dull and tiresome.”
“How can you be dull at a float?”
“Why should I not be dull at a float?” inquired Anna.
“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.