Kitty's plans, and the Petrovs

Through Varenka and Madame Stahl a new world opens to Kitty: a spiritual life, revealed by a lofty mystical religion quite unlike the Slavonic texts and the chapel at the Widow's Almshouse where one met one's friends. She notices flaws — Madame Stahl smiling contemptuously about her relatives, hiding her face behind a lampshade when a Roman Catholic priest calls — but Varenka, wishing for nothing and regretting nothing, remains her image of perfection. Kitty plans a future of seeking out the unfortunate, distributing Gospels, reading to criminals as Madame Stahl's niece Aline does, and keeps it all secret from her mother, precisely because she is her mother. Meanwhile she attaches herself to the family of Petrov, a poor consumptive artist, and is called a ministering angel by the German Princess. Then Anna Pavlovna cools toward her, and Kitty, going back over the plaid, the portrait, the coffee he would not drink without her, guesses the reason and will not say it even to herself.

Kitty's conversion is shown as imitation — she copies Varenka's walk and blink before she copies her charity — and Tolstoy plants the flaws in Madame Stahl early so the collapse will read as sight returning rather than cynicism. The self-forgetting she has adopted founders on the same thing that ruined her winter: being looked at by a man.