he said, “that’s how one chooses a new dress or some purchase or other, not love. The choice has been made, and so much the better.... And there can be no repeating it.”

“Ah, pride, pride!” said Darya Alexandrovna, as though despising him for the baseness of this feeling in comparison with that other feeling which only women know. “At the time when you made Kitty an offer she was just in a position in which she could not answer. She was in doubt. Doubt between you and Vronsky. Him she was seeing every day, and you she had not seen for a long while. Supposing she had been older...I, for instance, in her place could have felt no doubt. I always disliked him, and so it has turned out.”

Levin recalled Kitty’s answer. She had said: “No, that cannot be...”