The old Prince deflates Madame Stahl

The old Prince returns from Carlsbad, Baden and Kissingen, thinner but in the brightest of spirits, and takes Kitty to the Springs. Where the Princess tries abroad to pass for a European lady, he makes himself more Russian than he is, and among the melancholy living corpses of Europe he feels almost ashamed of his own healthy stride. Madame Berthe calls Kitty a ministering angel; the Prince names her angel No. 2, since Varenka is No. 1, and likes Varenka too much to mock her. He knew Madame Stahl before she joined the Pietists, and remarks that she thanks God for everything including her husband's death. At the Petrovs' bench the artist's wife sends word he was not going out, he contradicts her furiously, and his voice fails. Then Madame Stahl in her bath-chair, snapping at Varenka over a plaid. The Prince says it is better to do good so that no one knows of it — and the divine image Kitty has carried for a month vanishes like the shape of a cast-off garment.

The father dismantles a month of Kitty's devotion in an afternoon, and Tolstoy has him do it with jokes rather than argument — the short legs, the unnamed Pietists, the good done in public. The cast-off garment is one of the novel's exact images for disillusion: nothing was ever there but a shape. Kitty resists his opinion and loses the idea anyway.