"But who is a cheat?" said Varenka reproachfully. "You speak as
if..."
But Kitty was in one of her gusts of fury, and she would not let
her finish.
"I don't talk about you, not about you at all. You're
perfection. Yes, yes, I know you're all perfection; but what am
I to do if I'm bad? This would never have been if I weren't bad.
So let me be what I am. I won't be a sham. What have I to do
with Anna Pavlovna? Let them go their way, and me go mine. I
can't be different.... And yet it's not that, it's not that."
"What is not that?" asked Varenka in bewilderment.
"Everything. I can't act except from the heart, and you act
from principle. I liked you simply, but you most likely only
wanted to save me, to improve me."
"You are unjust," said Varenka.
"But I'm not speaking of other people, I'm speaking of myself."
"Kitty," they heard her mother's voice, "come here, show papa
your necklace."
Kitty, with a haughty air, without making peace with her friend,
took the necklace in a little box from the table and went to her
mother.
"What's the matter? Why are you so red?" her mother and father
said to her with one voice.
"Nothing," she answered. "I'll be back directly," and she ran
back.
"She's still here," she thought. "What am I to say to her? Oh,
dear! what have I done, what have I said? Why was I rude to
her? What am I to do? What am I to say to her?" thought Kitty,
and she stopped in the doorway.
Varenka in her hat and with the parasol in her hands was sitting
at the table examining the spring which Kitty had broken. She
lifted her head.
"Varenka, forgive me, do forgive me," whispered Kitty, going up
to her. "I don't remember what I said. I..."
"I really didn't mean to hurt you," said Varenka, smiling.
Peace was made. But with her father's coming all the world in
which she had been living was transformed for Kitty. She did not
give up everything she had learned, but she became aware that she
had deceived herself in supposing she could be what she wanted to
be. Her eyes were, it seemed, opened; she felt all the
difficulty of maintaining herself without hypocrisy and
self-conceit on the pinnacle to which she had wished to mount.
Moreover, she became aware of all the dreariness of the world of
sorrow, of sick and dying people, in which she had been living.
The efforts she had made to like it seemed to her intolerable,
and she felt a longing to get back quickly into the fresh air, to
Russia, to Ergushovo, where, as she knew from letters, her sister
Dolly had already gone with her children.