“Why, how can one want to go to bed!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, who, after drinking several glasses of wine at supper, was now in his most charming and sentimental humor. “Look, Kitty,” he said, pointing to the moon, which had just risen behind the lime trees—“how exquisite! Veslovsky, this is the time for a serenade. You know, he has a splendid voice; we practiced songs together along the road. He has brought some lovely songs with him, two new ones. Varvara Andreevna and he must sing some duets.”
When the party had broken up, Stepan Arkadyevitch walked a long while about the avenue with Veslovsky; their voices could be heard singing one of the new songs.
Levin hearing these voices sat scowling in an easy-chair in his wife’s bedroom, and maintained an obstinate silence when she asked him what was wrong. But when at last with a timid glance she hazarded the question: “Was there perhaps something you disliked about Veslovsky?”—it all burst out, and he told her all. He was humiliated himself at what he was saying, and that exasperated him all the more.
He stood facing her with his eyes glittering menacingly under his scowling brows, and he squeezed his strong arms across his chest, as though he were straining every nerve to hold himself in. The expression of his face would have been grim, and even cruel, if it had not at the same time had a look of suffering which touched her. His jaws were twitching, and his voice kept breaking.
“You must understand that I’m not jealous, that’s a nasty word. I can’t be jealous, and believe that.... I can’t say what I feel, but this is awful.... I’m not jealous, but I’m wounded, humiliated that anybody dare think, that anybody dare look at you with eyes like that.”
“Eyes like what?” said Kitty, trying as conscientiously as possible to recall every word and gesture of that evening and every shade implied in them.
At the very bottom of her heart she did think there had been something precisely at the moment when he had crossed over after her to the other end of the table; but she dared not own it even to herself, and would have been even more unable to bring herself to say so to him, and so increase his suffering.
“And what can there possibly be attractive about me as I am now?...”
“Ah!” he cried, clutching at his head, “you shouldn’t say that!... If you had been attractive then....”
“Oh, no, Kostya, oh, wait a minute, oh, do listen!” she said, looking at him with an expression of pained commiseration. “Why, what can you be thinking about! When for me there’s no one in the world, no one, no one!... Would you like me never to see anyone?”