Sitting at a card-table with Miss Sophia Behrs, Tolstoy wrote the initial letters of the sentence:
'In your family a false opinion exists about me and your sister Lisa; you and Tánitchka should destroy it.'
Miss Sophia read the letters, understood what words they stood for, and nodded her head.
Tolstoy then wrote the initial letters of another sentence:
'Your youth and need of happiness, to-day remind me too strongly of my age and the impossibility of happiness.'
The nature of the Russian language (with its inflections instead of particles, and the absence of articles) somewhat diminishes the miracle; but the test was a very severe one, and again the girl guessed the words aright. The two understood one another, and their fate was practically sealed.
The Behrs returned to Pokróvskoe-Glébovo in September. Tolstoy accompanied them on the carriage-journey back to Moscow and visited them every day, bringing music for the young ladies, playing the piano for them, and accompanying the youngest—whom he nicknamed 'Madame Viardot' after the famous singer.
On the 17th of that month (the name's day of Sophia) Tolstoy handed his future wife a letter containing a proposal of marriage, which she gladly accepted. Her father, displeased that the second daughter should be preferred to the eldest, at first refused his assent. But Tolstoy was strenuously insistent—I have even heard that he threatened to shoot himself—and the doctor soon yielded to the united persuasion of daughter and suitor.
The bridegroom's sense of honour led him to hand his future wife the Diary, in which, mingled with hopes, prayers, self-castigations and self-denunciations, the sins and excesses of his bachelorhood were recorded. To the girl, who had looked upon him as a personification of the virtues, this revelation came as a great shock; but after a sleepless night passed in weeping bitterly over it, she returned the Diary and forgave the past.
To get married it was necessary first to confess and receive the eucharist. Tolstoy's own experiences in this matter are narrated in Chapter I of Part V of Anna Karénina, where they are attributed to Lévin.