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 "Do not get so excited. You really must not get so excited," said her mother.

"But I am not excited, mamma. I think that he will surely propose to her to-day."

"Oh, how strange it is how and when a man proposes.—Even if there is an obstacle, it is suddenly swept away," said Dolly, smiling pensively and recalling the old days with Stepan Arkadyevitch.

"Mamma, how did papa propose to you," asked Kitty, suddenly.

"There was nothing extraordinary about it—very simply," replied the princess; but her face grew all radiant at the remembrance.

"No, but how was it? Did you love him before you allowed him to speak?"

Kitty found a special charm in the fact that now she could talk with her mother, as with an equal, on the most important questions in the lives of women.

"Of course I loved him. He came to visit us in the country."

"But how was it decided, mamma?"

"Do you really think that you young people have invented something new? It is always one and the same thing; it is decided by looks and smiles."

"How well you describe it, mamma. That is just it, 'by looks and smiles,'" said Dolly, confirming what her mother had said.

"But what words did he say?"

"What words did Kostia say to you?"

"He wrote in chalk. .... How long it seems since then," said Kitty.

And the three ladies sat occupied with the same thought.

Kitty was the first to break the silence. She had been thinking about that long-past winter before her marriage, and her infatuation for Vronsky.

"There is one thing—Varenka's first love," said she, remembering this by a natural connection of thought. "I wanted to give Sergyeï Ivanovitch a hint of that to warn him. All men," she added, "are awfully jealous of our past."