is showing me her sympathy! .... I hate such sympathy and such hypocrisy!"
"Kitty, you are unjust."
"Why do you torment me?"
"Why, on the contrary .... I saw that you were sad ...."
Kitty in her anger did not heed her.
"I have nothing to break my heart over, and need no consolation. I am too proud ever to love a man who does not love me."
"Well! I do not say .... I say only one thing .... Tell me the truth," added Darya Aleksandrovna, taking her hand. "Tell me, did Levin speak to you?"....
At the name of Levin, Kitty lost all control of herself; she sprang up from her chair, threw the buckle on the floor, and with quick, indignant gestures cried:—
"Why do you speak to me of Levin? I don't see why you need to torment me. I have already said, and I repeat it, that I am proud, and never, never would I do what you have done,—go back to a man who had been false to me, who had made love to another woman. I do not understand this; you can, but I cannot!"
As she said these words, she looked at her sister, and seeing that Dolly bent her head sadly without answering, she sat down near the door again, and hid her face in her handkerchief instead of leaving the room as she had intended to do.
The silence lasted several minutes. Dolly was thinking of herself. Her humiliation, of which she was always conscious, appeared to her more cruel than ever, thus recalled by her sister. She did not expect such bitterness from her sister, and it made her angry. But suddenly she heard the rustling of a dress, a broken sob, and some one's arms were thrown around her neck. Kitty was on her knees before her.
"Dolinka, I am so unhappy!" she murmured in exculpation; and her pretty face, wet with tears, was hid in Dolly's skirt.
Those tears were evidently the indispensable lubricant without which the machinery of mutual communion between the two sisters could not work. At all events,
