Karenin returns without haste or rest

Karenin returns from the Ministry at four without time to see his wife, and enters the drawing-room exactly at five, in white tie with two stars, every moment of his life apportioned under the motto 'Without haste and without rest'. At dinner with the Director and his wife and a young man recommended for a post, the talk is of Petersburg service affairs. Anna stays home that evening — a dress was not ready and she loses her temper at the dressmaker, then is ashamed — and puts Serezha to bed herself, feeling light-hearted and clear that the train had been a trivial incident of Society life. Karenin returns at half-past nine, hears her news, judges her brother severely, and is led on to describe the ovations for the new Statute he carried in the Council. Alone, she defends him to an unseen accuser as truthful and kind, and then wonders why his ears stick out so.

Tolstoy builds Karenin out of a timetable and lets his one vanity — reading what he does not enjoy so as to have opinions — stand in for a whole interior. The chapter's structure is a defence that keeps collapsing into the ears. Part One closes on Anna's face with the fire quenched, the exact reverse of the suppressed light Vronsky saw at the station.