Levin proposes and is refused

Between dinner and the evening party Kitty feels something like a young man's nerves before a battle, knowing this is the night the two men meet. Looking back, her friendship with Levin — bound up with childhood and with her dead brother — is simple and clear; with Vronsky there is a sense of something false, not in him but in herself, yet a future with him rises up brilliant while a future with Levin is wrapped in mist. She dresses, notes with pleasure that this is one of her best days, and comes down at half-past seven, whereupon the footman announces Constantine Dmitrich Levin. Only now does she understand that she will have to wound him. He asks her to be his wife, hardly knowing what he is saying. For an instant her soul overflows with happiness; then she remembers Vronsky and answers, 'It cannot be . . . forgive me.'

Tolstoy stages the refusal from inside Kitty, so the cruelty is involuntary and the reader cannot simply pity Levin. The instant of overflowing happiness before she remembers Vronsky is the chapter's whole argument: she refuses him against her own feeling, on a calculation that Part Two will demolish.