Page 472 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

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

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