Skating at the Zoological Gardens

At four Levin gets out of a hired sledge at the Zoological Gardens, where the birches stand weighed down with snow, and finds Kitty on the skating lake at once — 'as easy to recognize in that crowd as to find a rose among nettles'. Her cousin Nicholas Shcherbatsky hails him as the Russian champion skater; Levin hires skates from an attendant who remembers him. Kitty asks him to skate with her, and the faster they go the closer she presses his hands. When he says he is confident of himself when she leans on him, her face closes; she sends him off to Mlle Linon, who reminds him of his old joke about the Three Bears. Returning, he tells her how long he stays 'depends on you', and she skates hurriedly away. The Princess is dry with him, and Kitty, to counteract her mother, turns and says 'Au revoir!' Oblonsky arrives and takes him off to the Angleterre.

Tolstoy gives Kitty a paragraph of her own consciousness at the exact moment Levin is most blinded by her, and it is devastating in retrospect: she knows it is not him she loves. The sun image belongs to Levin's view and the novel never endorses it. Physical skill stands in for courtship, twice, and both times he overreaches.