Kitty's two suitors

Kitty is eighteen and in her first season, more successful than either of her sisters, with two serious suitors — Levin, then Vronsky. The old Prince wants nothing better for her than Levin; the Princess, who expects a brilliant match, dislikes his harsh criticisms, his awkwardness, his cattle and peasants, and above all that he called for six weeks without declaring himself and then left. Vronsky satisfies every wish she has. But she is in a dreadful state all winter, because she cannot find out how marriages are now arranged: the French way of parents deciding is condemned, the English way of perfect freedom impossible in Russia, the professional match-maker laughed at, and 'nowadays they don't give us away in marriage as they used to'. Kitty has repeated Vronsky's remark about waiting for his mother's arrival from Petersburg, which the Princess chooses to read as intention. Levin's return alarms her.

The novel's clearest sociological chapter, and it works by putting a real historical problem — the collapse of arranged marriage before anything replaced it — inside one woman's anxiety. The Princess's loaded-pistols image is the book's own warning. Her misreading of Vronsky's remark about his mother is the error that ruins Kitty's winter.