Slavonic texts with the priest. This was a lofty, mysterious religion connected with a whole series of noble thoughts and feelings, which one could do more than merely believe because one was told to, which one could love.

Kitty found all this out not from words. Madame Stahl talked to Kitty as to a charming child that one looks on with pleasure as on the memory of one’s youth, and only once she said in passing that in all human sorrows nothing gives comfort but love and faith, and that in the sight of Christ’s compassion for us no sorrow is trifling—�and immediately talked of other things. But in every gesture of Madame Stahl, in every word, in every heavenly—�as Kitty called it—�look, and above all in the whole story of her life, which she heard from Varenka, Kitty recognized that something