Petritsky, the Baroness, and the set

Vronsky comes home to the Morskaya flat he lent to Petritsky — a lieutenant in debt, tipsy every evening, often under arrest, popular with everyone — and finds him with Captain Kamerovsky and the Baroness Chilton in lilac satin, making coffee and asking advice about forcing her husband to a divorce so she can keep her property. Vronsky falls at once into his habitual manner with such women. His Petersburg world divides people in two: the ridiculous sort who think a husband should live with his wife and debts should be paid, and the real people, well-bred and bold, who abandon themselves to their passions and laugh at everything else. For a moment Moscow staggers him; then it is like putting on an old slipper. The coffee boils over. Petritsky reports his creditors and his new Oriental beauty and the tale of Buzulukov's helmet full of pears and sweets, at which Vronsky roars with laughter. Then he goes out to begin visiting the set where he can meet Anna.

The two-sorts-of-people passage is the novel's sharpest piece of free indirect style: Tolstoy states Vronsky's code in Vronsky's terms and lets it convict itself. Closing Part One on farce rather than on Anna's quenched face makes the point structurally — the world Vronsky will ask her to join is one that pays for nothing, and the last line is a plan.