happy and gay, there is a path growing narrower and narrower, and
it is delightful and alarming to enter the ballroom, bright and
splendid as it is.... Who has not been through it?"

Kitty smiled without speaking. "But how did she go through it?
How I should like to know all her love story!" thought Kitty,
recalling the unromantic appearance of Alexey Alexandrovitch, her
husband.

"I know something. Stiva told me, and I congratulate you. I
liked him so much," Anna continued. "I met Vronsky at the
railway station."

"Oh, was he there?" asked Kitty, blushing. "What was it Stiva
told you?"

"Stiva gossiped about it all. And I should be so glad...I
traveled yesterday with Vronsky's mother," she went on; "and his
mother talked without a pause of him, he's her favorite. I know
mothers are partial, but..."

"What did his mother tell you?"

"Oh, a great deal! And I know that he's her favorite; still one
can see how chivalrous he is.... Well, for instance, she told me
that he had wanted to give up all his property to his brother,
that he had done something extraordinary when he was quite a
child, saved a woman out of the water. He's a hero, in fact,"
said Anna, smiling and recollecting the two hundred roubles he
had given at the station.