Kitty's sojourn at the German spa is the story of her maturation. This period of reflection and purification allows her to accept fulfillment through marriage and family life. Because she violently rejected her womanhood at first, Varenka was Kitty's ideal of perfection. Tolstoy describes Varenka as lacking precisely what Kitty had too much of--"a suppressed fire of vitality and a consciousness of her own attractiveness"--qualities of sensuousness, in other words. As Kitty attempts to live a "soulful" life as Varenka does, she learns it was impossible to deny one's own nature. This became apparent to her when she is accused of turning the head of a married man, although the reader learned this sooner when Kitty immediately rejected the very ill Nicolai Levin. Varenka, Kitty's opposite, learns the same lesson in a different way: Later in the novel she is unable to achieve the love of Koznyshev. Both girls submit to their peculiar destiny, Varenka by remaining single and living selflessly, and Kitty by accepting her womanly nature.
