The colonel smiled, as he always did, at the prince's jokes, but as far as regards Europe, of which he believed himself to be making a careful study, he took the princess's side.

The simple-hearted Marya Yevgenyevna simply roared with laughter at everything absurd the prince said, and his jokes made Varenka helpless with feeble but infectious laughter, which was something Kitty had never seen before.

Kitty was glad of all this, but she could not be light-hearted.

She could not solve the problem her father had unconsciously set her by his goodhumored view of her friends, and of the life that had so attracted her.

To this doubt there was joined the change in her relations with the Petrovs, which had been so conspicuously and unpleasantly marked that morning.