“Ah, that’s so strange, how and when a man makes an offer! … There is a sort of barrier, and all at once it’s broken down,” said Dolly, smiling pensively and recalling her past with Stepan Arkadyevitch.
“Mamma, how did papa make you an offer?” Kitty asked suddenly.
“There was nothing out of the way, it was very simple,” answered the princess, but her face beamed all over at the recollection.
“Oh, but how was it? You loved him, anyway, before you were allowed to speak?”
Kitty felt a peculiar pleasure in being able now to talk to her mother on equal terms about those questions of such paramount interest in a woman’s life.
“Of course I did; he had come to stay with us in the country.”
“But how was it settled between you, mamma?”
“You imagine, I dare say, that you invented something quite new? It’s always just the same: it was settled by the eyes, by smiles. …”
“How nicely you said that, mamma! It’s just by the eyes, by smiles that it’s done,” Dolly assented.
“But what words did he say?”
“What did Kostya say to you?”
“He wrote it in chalk. It was wonderful. … How long ago it seems!” she said.
And the three women all fell to musing on the same thing. Kitty was the first to break the silence. She remembered all that last winter before her marriage, and her passion for Vronsky.