watching and making theories about the people she did not know.  It was characteristic of Kitty that she always imagined everything in people in the most favorable light possible, especially so in those she did not know.  And now as she made surmises as to who people were, what were their relations to one another, and what they were like, Kitty endowed them with the most marvelous and noble characters, and found confirmation of her idea in her observations.

Of these people the one that attracted her most was a Russian girl who had come to the watering-place with an invalid Russian lady, Madame Stahl, as everyone called her.  Madame Stahl belonged to the highest society, but she was so ill that she could not walk, and only on exceptionally fine days made her appearance at the springs in an invalid carriage.  But it was not so much from ill-health as from pride—­so Princess Shtcherbatskaya interpreted it—­that Madame Stahl had not made the acquaintance of anyone among the Russians there.  The Russian girl looked after Madame Stahl, and besides that, she was, as Kitty observed, on friendly terms with all the invalids who were seriously ill, and there were many of them at the springs, and looked after them in the most natural way.  This Russian girl was not, as Kitty gathered, related to Madame Stahl, nor was she a paid attendant.  Madame Stahl called her Varenka, and other people called her “Mademoiselle Varenka.”  Apart from the interest Kitty took in this girl’s relations with Madame Stahl and with other unknown persons, Kitty, as often happened, felt an inexplicable attraction to Mademoiselle Varenka, and was aware when their eyes met that she too liked her.

Of Mademoiselle Varenka one would not say that she had passed her first youth, but she was, as it were, a creature without youth; she might have been taken for nineteen or for thirty.  If her features were criticized separately, she was handsome rather than plain, in spite of the sickly hue of her face.  She would have been a good figure, too, if it had not been for her extreme thinness and the size of her head, which was too large for her medium height.  But she was not likely to be attractive to men.  She was like a fine flower, already past its bloom and without fragrance, though the petals were still unwithered.  Moreover, she would have been unattractive to men also from the lack of just what Kitty had too much of—­of the suppressed fire of vitality, and the consciousness of her own attractiveness.

She always seemed absorbed in work about which there could be no doubt, and so it seemed she could not take interest in anything outside it.  It was just this contrast with her own position that was for Kitty the great attraction of Mademoiselle Varenka.  Kitty felt that in her, in her manner of life, she would find an example of what she was now so painfully seeking:  interest in life, a dignity in life—­apart from the worldly relations of girls with men, which so revolted Kitty, and appeared to her now as a shameful hawking about of goods in search of a purchaser.  The more attentively Kitty watched her unknown friend, the more convinced she was this girl was the perfect creature she fancied her, and the more eagerly she wished to make her acquaintance.