The sisters in the pink snuggery

In Kitty's pink snuggery with its vieux saxe figures, which the sisters decorated together the year before, Dolly goes straight to the point: he is not worthy of her suffering. Kitty flares up, saying she dreads commiseration most of all, that she has pride enough never to love a man who does not love her, and — at the mention of Levin — that she will never do what Dolly is doing, returning to a man who has betrayed her. Dolly bows her head. Then Kitty is kneeling with her arms round her sister's neck, whispering that she is so unhappy. Tears work as the lubricant of confidence: they talk of indifferent things and understand each other, Dolly learning what she came for. Kitty says everything has become horrid and coarse to her, above all herself. She goes to Dolly's, nurses all six children through scarlet fever, does not get better, and in Lent the Shcherbatskys go abroad.

The cruellest line in the novel so far is spoken by its most sympathetic young woman, to her sister, about her sister's marriage — and Tolstoy has it forgiven within a page without being retracted. Kitty's account of her illness, everything coarsened and herself worst of all, is a better description of shame than the specialist's tuberculosis.