Anna Karenina

Before the end of the spa treatment, "Prince Shtcherbatsky, who had gone on from Carlsbad to Baden and Kissingen to Russian friends—to get a breath of Russian air, as he said—came back to his wife and daughter." Kitty's father arrives. "The views of the prince and of the princess on life abroad were completely opposed. The princess thought everything delightful, and in spite of her established position in Russian society, she tried abroad to be like a European fashionable lady, which she was not—for the simple reason that she was a typical Russian gentlewoman; and so she was affected." The princess tries to be European but it's unnatural. "The prince, on the contrary, thought everything foreign detestable, got sick of European life, kept to his Russian habits, and purposely tried to show himself abroad less European tha" -n he was. He's determinedly Russian. The prince is skeptical about Madame Stahl. His down-to-earth view destroys Kitty's idealization: "she felt that the heavenly image of Madame Stahl, which she had carried for a whole month in her heart, had vanished, never to return, just as the fantastic figure made up of some clothes thrown down at random vanishes when one sees that it is only some garment lying there." The perfect image dissolves like seeing a pile of clothes isn't actually a person. "All that was left was a woman with short legs, who lay down because she had a bad figure, and worried patient Varenka for not arranging her rug to her liking." The spiritual invalid becomes just a difficult woman with physical problems who complains about her rug. "And by no effort of the imagination could Kitty bring back the former Madame Stahl." Once you see the reality, you can't restore the illusion. This chapter shows how Kitty's spiritual phase is punctured by her father's practical skepticism. What seemed elevated and noble is revealed as partly affectation and self-deception.