Chapter 33

Kitty made the acquaintance of Madame Stahl too, and this acquaintance, together with her friendship with Varenka, did not merely exercise a great influence on her, it also comforted her in her mental distress.  She found this comfort through a completely new world being opened to her by means of this acquaintance, a world having nothing in common with her past, an exalted, noble world, from the height of which she could contemplate her past calmly.  It was revealed to her that besides the instinctive life to which Kitty had given herself up hitherto there was a spiritual life.  This life was disclosed in religion, but a religion having nothing in common with that one which Kitty had known from childhood, and which found expression in litanies and all-night services at the Widow’s Home, where one might meet one’s friends, and in learning by heart Slavonic texts with the priest.  This was a lofty, mysterious religion connected with a whole series of noble thoughts and feelings, which one could do more than merely believe because one was told to, which one could love.

Kitty found all this out not from words.  Madame Stahl talked to Kitty as to a charming child that one looks on with pleasure as on the memory of one’s youth, and only once she said in passing that in all human sorrows nothing gives comfort but love and faith, and that in the sight of Christ’s compassion for us no sorrow is trifling—­and immediately talked of other things.  But in every gesture of Madame Stahl, in every word, in every heavenly—­as Kitty called it—­look, and above all in the whole story of her life, which she heard from Varenka, Kitty recognized that something “that was important,” of which, till then, she had known nothing.

Yet, elevated as Madame Stahl’s character was, touching as was her story, and exalted and moving as was her speech, Kitty could not help detecting in her some traits which perplexed her.  She noticed that when questioning her about her family, Madame Stahl had smiled contemptuously, which was not in accord with Christian meekness.  She noticed, too, that when she had found a Catholic priest with her, Madame Stahl had studiously kept her face in the shadow of the lamp-shade and had smiled in a peculiar way.  Trivial as these two observations were, they perplexed her, and she had her doubts as to Madame Stahl.  But on the other hand Varenka, alone in the world, without friends or relations, with a melancholy disappointment in the past, desiring nothing, regretting nothing, was just that perfection of which Kitty dared hardly dream.  In Varenka she realized that one has but to forget oneself and love others, and one will be calm, happy, and noble.  And that was what Kitty longed to be.  Seeing now clearly what was the most important, Kitty was not satisfied with being enthusiastic over it; she at once gave herself up with her whole soul to the new