Anna's three Petersburg circles

Anna's Petersburg runs in three sets: her husband's official circle, which she now knows as well as a provincial town knows itself and cannot find interesting; Countess Lydia Ivanovna's pious philanthropic circle, 'the conscience of Petersburg Society', which since Moscow feels to her like pretence; and Society proper — balls, dinners and brilliant toilettes — entered through her cousin's wife the Princess Betsy Tverskaya, who tells her it is too early to settle down in that almshouse. After Moscow she avoids her moral friends for grand Society, where she meets Vronsky and cannot keep the joy out of her eyes. Going to a party where he failed to appear, she understood from her own sadness that his persecution supplies the whole interest of her life. At the Opera, Betsy teases him about being caught; he knows that pursuing a married woman can never be ridiculous, only beautiful and dignified, and says he is beginning to lose hope.

A map before a fall: Tolstoy lays out the three societies so the reader can watch Anna be expelled from each in turn. The chapter's hinge is the party Vronsky did not attend, where absence tells her what presence could not. The note on what Society finds ridiculous explains why the affair will be permitted and the honesty about it will not.