Anna arrives; a watchman is crushed

Anna appears, stepping out of the compartment as Vronsky waits to enter it. He looks twice, not for her beauty but for the tenderness in her face and the subdued animation she is trying to put out, which shows in her eyes and her faint smile regardless. She has travelled with the old Countess Vronsky, each talking of her son; Anna has an eight-year-old boy in Petersburg and has never been parted from him. Introductions are made, the Countess says she has lost her heart to her, and Anna's firm handshake gives Vronsky unusual pleasure. As they leave the carriage a watchman, tipsy or too muffled against the frost, is run over by a shunting train. Oblonsky comes back from the corpse near tears; Vronsky is perfectly calm, and quietly gives the station-master 200 roubles for the widow. Driving away, Anna's lips tremble. 'It's a bad omen,' she says.

The most heavily loaded chapter in Part One: Anna's entrance, the suppressed vitality that is her whole character in one image, and the death under the wheels that the last chapter of Part Seven will answer. Tolstoy has her name the omen herself, then shake it off, which makes the ending hers rather than fate's. Vronsky's 200 roubles is courtship, not charity.