Vronsky on the snowbound platform

On the platform, in a blustering storm that covers everything on one side with snow, Anna is taking her fill of air when a man in a military overcoat steps between her and the wavering lamp. She recognises Vronsky, and does not need to ask why he is there. She asks anyway. 'You know that I am going in order to be where you are. I cannot do otherwise.' The wind scatters snow from the carriage roofs and the engine howls; the awfulness of the storm seems more beautiful to her. He has said what her soul desired and her reason dreaded. She tells him it is wrong and begs him to forget it as she will; he answers that he will never forget a word or a movement of hers. In the little lobby she stops, frightened and happy at how near the conversation has drawn them. She does not sleep. At Petersburg the first face she sees is her husband's, and she is struck by his gristly ears.

The declaration is given fourteen words and the storm around it a paragraph, because what matters is that Anna finds the violence beautiful. Tolstoy then cuts to the ears — the first of the physical disgusts that will do the work of argument in her marriage, and the sign that the change has already happened before anything has been done.