wealthy military men of Petersburg. Though he occasionally went into general society, all his love-affairs were with a different class.
At Moscow, after the luxurious, dissipated life of Petersburg, he for the first time felt the charm of familiar intercourse with a lovely, innocent society girl, who was evidently in love with him. It never occurred to him that there might be anything wrong in his relations with Kitty. At balls he preferred to dance with her, he called on her, talked with her as people generally talk in society: all sorts of trifles, but trifles to which he involuntarily attributed a different meaning when spoken to her. Although he never said anything to her which he would not have said in the hearing of others, he was conscious that she kept growing more and more dependent on him; and, the more he felt this consciousness, the pleasanter it was to him, and his feeling toward her grew warmer and warmer. He did not know that his behavior toward Kitty had a definite name, that this way of leading on young girls without any intention of marriage is one of the most dishonorable tricks practised among the members of the brilliant circles of society in which he moved. He simply imagined that he had discovered a new pleasure, and he enjoyed his discovery.
Could he have heard the conversation between Kitty's parents that evening, could he have taken the family point of view and realized that Kitty would be made unhappy if he did not propose to her, he would have been amazed and would not have believed it. He would not have believed that what gave him and her such a great delight could be wrong, still less that it brought any obligation to marry.
He had never considered the possibility of his getting married. Not only was family life distasteful to him, but, from his view as a bachelor, the family, and especially the husband, belonged to a strange, hostile, and, worst of all, ridiculous world. But though Vronsky had not the slightest suspicion of the conversation of which he had been the subject, he left the Shcherbatskys' with
