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 CHAPTER XXII

ball was just beginning when Kitty and her mother mounted the grand staircase, brilliantly lighted and adorned with flowers and with powdered lackeys in red kaftans. In the ball-rooms there was an incessant bustle of movement, which sounded like the humming of a beehive, and, as they stopped to give the last touches to their hair and gowns, before a mirror hung on the tree-decorated landing, they heard the scraping of violins as the orchestra was tuning up for the first waltz.

A little old man, a civilian, who was smoothing his white locks at another mirror, and who exhaled a penetrating odor of perfumes, brushed against them on the stairway and stood aside, evidently impressed by Kitty's youth and beauty. A beardless young man, such as the old Prince Shcherbatsky would have reckoned among the "mashers," wearing a very low-cut waistcoat and a white necktie which he adjusted as he walked, bowed to them, and after he had passed them turned back to ask Kitty for a quadrille. The first quadrille was already promised to Vronsky, and so she was obliged to content the young man with the second. An officer buttoning his gloves was standing near the door of the ball-room; he cast a glance of admiration at the blooming Kitty, and caressed his mustache.

Although Kitty had taken great pains and spent much labor on her toilet, her gown, and all the preparations for this ball, yet now she entered the ball-room, in her complicated robe of tulle with its rose-colored overdress, as easily and naturally as if all these rosettes and laces, all the requirements of her toilet, had not caused her or her people a moment's attention, as if she had been born in this lace-trimmed ball-dress, and with a rose and two ribbons placed on the top of her graceful head. When the old princess, her mother, just before they entered the ball-room, was about to readjust her broad sash-ribbon, Kitty gently declined. She felt that everything about her must surely be right and