Chapter 67 — Anna Karenina

Kitty's friendship with Varenka and contact with Madame Stahl open what feels like a higher spiritual world after her emotional collapse. She starts imagining a life of service: seeking out the sick, reading the Gospel to the dying and imprisoned, and giving herself to mercy work rather than social vanity. At the spa she imitates Varenka's habits and begins helping the invalid painter Petrov's family with sincere energy.

Her mother notices both genuine compassion and dangerous excess. Kitty reads scripture, avoids society, and takes pride in being useful, but she also hides her inner program from the princess. What began as healing starts to acquire performance pressure, and the relationship with the Petrovs becomes strained. Anna Pavlovna grows guarded, cancels plans, and behaves with forced politeness that Kitty cannot read at first.

Kitty replays recent moments and begins to suspect why: Petrov's gratitude, his portrait of her, and his tender confusion may have crossed into personal attachment. That possibility horrifies her because she wanted pure charity, not emotional entanglement. The final line lands hard: this doubt poisons the very new life that had seemed spiritually clean only days before. Charity without boundaries, she learns, can poison the very healing she sought at the waters.