Karenin talks to smother thought

Anna, in the Grand Stand beside Betsy, feels her husband approaching before she sees him, and watches him bow to the great and joke with the ladies, every mannerism repulsive to her: nothing but ambition, she decides, with enlightenment and religion as means to getting on. Betsy calls him over. He argues with a General Aide-de-Camp that cavalry steeplechases are an unavoidable element of racing, that England's brilliant charges come from it, and that specialized sport is a sign of progress where prize-fighting and bull-fights are barbarism. Anna hears every word as false, not understanding that his volubility is his way of smothering thought, as a hurt child skips to dull the pain. She thinks she could respect him if he killed her or Vronsky. During the race Karenin, bored, looks at the spectators, finds her face, and reads in it against his will what he does not want to know. She meets his eyes once, frowns, and looks away. More than half the seventeen officers are thrown; the Emperor is displeased.

The race is watched from the stand, so the reader gets the discovery rather than the riding. Tolstoy supplies the explanation Anna refuses — the hurt child skipping — and thereby splits the reader from her at the moment she is most sympathetic. Her wish that her husband would kill someone is the standard she judges him by throughout, and it is not a standard he can meet.