‘How good, how good you are!’ Kitty cried and, stopping her, she kissed her. ‘If only I could be a little bit like you!’
‘Why do you need to be like anyone? You’re good as you are,’ said Varenka, smiling her meek and weary smile.
‘No, I’m not good at all. Well, tell me ... Wait, let’s sit down,’ said Kitty, seating her on the bench again next to herself. ‘Tell me, isn’t it insulting to think that a man scorned your love, that he didn’t want ... ?’
‘But he didn’t scorn it. I believe he loved me, but he was an obedient son...’
‘Yes, but if it wasn’t by his mother’s will, but he himself simply ...’ Kitty said, feeling that she had given away her secret and that her face, burning with a blush of shame, had already betrayed her.
‘Then he would have acted badly, and I would not feel sorry about him,’ Varenka replied, obviously understanding that it was now a matter not of her but of Kitty.
‘But the insult?’ said Kitty. ‘It’s impossible to forget an insult, impossible,’ she said, remembering how she had looked at him at the last ball when the music stopped.
‘Where is the insult? Did you do anything bad?’
‘Worse than bad - shameful.’
Varenka shook her head and placed her hand on Kitty’s hand.
‘But why shameful?’ she said. ‘You couldn’t have told a man who is indifferent to you that you loved him?’
‘Of course not, I never said a single word, but he knew. No, no, there are looks, there are ways. If I live to be a hundred, I won’t forget it.’
‘So what then? I don’t understand. The point is whether you love him now or not,’ said Varenka, calling everything by its name.
‘I hate him; I can’t forgive myself.’
‘So what then?’
‘The shame, the insult.’
‘Ah, if everybody was as sensitive as you are!’ said Varenka. ‘There’s no girl who hasn’t gone through that. And it’s all so unimportant.’
‘Then what is important?’ asked Kitty, peering into her face with curious amazement.
‘Ah, many things are important,’ Varenka said, smiling.
‘But what?’
‘Ah, many things are more important,’ Varenka replied, not knowing what to say. But at that moment the princess’s voice came from the window:
‘Kitty, it’s chilly! Either take your shawl or come inside.’
‘True, it’s time!’ said Varenka, getting up. ‘I still have to stop and see Mme Berthe. She asked me to.’
Kitty held her by the hand and with passionate curiosity and entreaty her eyes asked: ‘What is it, what is this most important thing that gives such tranquillity? You know, tell me!’ But Varenka did not even understand what Kitty’s eyes were asking her. All she remembered was that she still had to stop and see Mme Berthe and be in time for tea with
‘Allow me to accompany you,’ said the colonel.
‘Yes, how can you go alone now that it’s night?’ the princess agreed. ‘I’ll send Parasha at least.’
Kitty saw that Varenka could hardly keep back a smile at the suggestion that she needed to be accompanied.
‘No, I always go alone and nothing ever happens to me,’ she said, taking her hat. And, kissing Kitty once more and never saying what was important, at a brisk pace, with the music under her arm, she vanished into the semi-darkness of the summer night, taking with her the secret of what was important and what gave her that enviable tranquillity and dignity.
XXXIII
Kitty made the acquaintance of Mme Stahl as well, and this acquaintance, together with her friendship for Varenka, not only had great influence on her, but comforted her in her grief. The comfort lay in the fact that, thanks to this acquaintance, a completely new world was opened to her which had nothing in common with her past: a lofty, beautiful world, from the height of which she could calmly look over that past. It was revealed to her that, besides the instinctive life to which Kitty had given herself till then, there was a spiritual life. This life was revealed by religion, but a religion that had nothing in common with the one Kitty had known from childhood and which found expression in the liturgy and vigils at the Widows’ Home,31 where one could meet acquaintances, and in learning Slavonic32 texts by heart with a priest; it was a lofty, mysterious religion, bound up with a series of beautiful thoughts and feelings which one could not only believe in because one was told to, but could also love.
Kitty did not learn all this from words. Mme Stahl spoke with Kitty as with a dear child, whom one looks upon fondly as a memory of one’s youth, and she only once mentioned that in all human griefs consolation is given by faith and love alone and that no griefs are too negligible for Christ’s compassion for us, and at once turned the conversation to something else. Yet in her every movement, in every word, in every heavenly glance, as Kitty put it, especially in the whole story of her life, which she knew from Varenka, in everything, Kitty learned ‘what was important’, which till then she had not known.
