Dolly refuses to be consoled

Darya Alexandrovna is in her bedroom among scattered clothes, sorting things to take to her mother's for the tenth time in three days and unable to finish, because she cannot stop regarding Oblonsky as her husband and cannot manage five children anywhere but here. He comes in fresh and healthy, which she hates, and tells her Anna arrives today. The interview collapses: he calls the affair 'a momentary infatuation', she staggers, he sobs and offers to be punished, she tells him his tears are water and that he is a stranger to her. A child cries in another room and her face softens. She threatens to call the servants and goes out slamming the door. Alone, Oblonsky is embarrassed chiefly by how vulgar her shouting was, cheers up over an old joke about the German clockmaker, orders Anna's room prepared and leaves. Dolly, returning, drowns her grief in the day's cares.

The first of the novel's marital confrontations, and the template for all of them: two people arguing past each other because one wants absolution and the other wants to be loved. Tolstoy gives Dolly the interior life the scene needs and then denies her an exit, establishing that in this book economic dependence decides what women can do.