Koznyshev makes up his mind

Varenka among the children in her white kerchief looks very attractive, and Koznyshev, putting an enormous wood mushroom into her basket, meets her eyes, sees the flush of frightened joy, and gives her a smile that says too much. Telling himself not to be carried away like a boy, he goes deeper into the wood, stands behind a spindle bush where he cannot be seen, and struggles to light a cigar on birch bark. Then he reasons it out. Nothing opposes the feeling except the promise he made to Marie's memory, which he knows matters only to his poetic role in other people's eyes. He runs through every woman he has known and finds none who unites so completely what he would want in a wife: the freshness of youth without childishness, knowledge of the world with a repulsion from it, religion founded on conviction rather than kindness, and poverty and solitude, so that she brings no crowd of relations as Kitty does and will owe her husband everything. Against it stands only his age, which he dismisses. Seeing her rise with her basket in the slanting light, he throws away the cigar and walks toward her.

A proposal arrived at by audit: Tolstoy lets Koznyshev list the qualifications in order, including that she will be indebted to him for everything, and the reasoning is impeccable and fatal. The one line that convicts him is the fidelity to Marie he keeps only because others find it poetic. He is carried away at last not by her but by a view of oats in slanting light.