Kitty turns on herself

The Prince spreads his good humour over the household, sets coffee under a chestnut tree, distributes the caskets and paper-knives he cannot resist buying once a shopkeeper reaches 'Durchlaucht', and tells the Colonel that Germany amounts to plum soup and pea sausages. Everyone laughs, even Varenka; Kitty cannot, and feels like a child locked up hearing her sisters. Following Varenka indoors, she extracts the truth: Petrov no longer wants to leave because Kitty is here, and the couple have quarrelled about her. Kitty breaks the sunshade in her hands and turns on herself — it was all pretence, invented to appear better than others to herself and to God; let her be bad but not a humbug. Then she turns it on Varenka: 'I can't live except by my own heart, but you live by principles.' She apologises within the hour. The month's world is gone, her affection is not; Varenka promises to visit when she marries. Kitty returns to Russia cured.

Kitty's cure is the recognition that she was performing goodness, and Tolstoy makes the accusation cost her — she wounds the one person who helped her, then apologises within the page. Her charge against Varenka, living by principles rather than by the heart, is the standard the whole novel applies. Part Two ends with her at peace and Anna in ruin, on the same page of the calendar.