But Kitty thought, and felt, and acted quite differently. On
seeing the sick man, she pitied him. And pity in her womanly
heart did not arouse at all that feeling of horror and loathing
that it aroused in her husband, but a desire to act, to find out
all the details of his state, and to remedy them. And since she
had not the slightest doubt that it was her duty to help him, she
had no doubt either that it was possible, and immediately set to
work. The very details, the mere thought of which reduced her
husband to terror, immediately engaged her attention. She sent
for the doctor, sent to the chemist's, set the maid who had come
with her and Marya Nikolaevna to sweep and dust and scrub; she
herself washed up something, washed out something else, laid
something under the quilt. Something was by her directions
brought into the sick-room, something else was carried out. She
herself went several times to her room, regardless of the men she
met in the corridor, got out and brought in sheets, pillow cases,
towels, and shirts.

The waiter, who was busy with a party of engineers dining in the
dining hall, came several times with an irate countenance in
answer to her summons, and could not avoid carrying out her
orders, as she gave them with such gracious insistence that there
was no evading her. Levin did not approve of all this; he did
not believe it would be of any good to the patient. Above all,
he feared the patient would be angry at it. But the sick man,
though he seemed and was indifferent about it, was not angry, but
only abashed, and on the whole as it were interested in what she
was doing with him. Coming back from the doctor to whom Kitty
had sent him, Levin, on opening the door, came upon the sick man
at the instant when, by Kitty's directions, they were changing
his linen. The long white ridge of his spine, with the huge,
prominent shoulder blades and jutting ribs and vertebrae, was
bare, and Marya Nikolaevna and the waiter were struggling with
the sleeve of the night shirt, and could not get the long, limp
arm into it. Kitty, hurriedly closing the door after Levin, was
not looking that way; but the sick man groaned, and she moved
rapidly towards him.