Anna asks to keep her son

Anna wakes and cannot understand how she came to say what she said in the carriage. She saw Vronsky that evening and told him nothing, and when she asks herself why, a hot blush answers: she was ashamed. Now she dreads disgrace, imagines the steward turning her out, imagines Vronsky finding her a burden, and feels her words repeated to everyone. Religion is no use to her: she knows she can find help there only by giving up the one thing that gives her life meaning. Everything in her soul is doubled, like objects to a tired eye. Then Annushka reports that Serezha has eaten a peach on the quiet, and her son restores her — whatever happens she cannot give him up, and she must take him away before they take him from her. At breakfast she dismisses the governess, holds his hand, asks whether he loves her, and goes out crying to the verandah, where the aspen glittering in the cold sun tells her that nobody will forgive her. She writes to Karenin asking him to leave her the boy, and cannot write to Vronsky at all.

The stolen peach turns the chapter, which is Tolstoy's method throughout: a domestic triviality arrives with more force than any decision. Anna's admission that her motherhood has been partly sincere and greatly exaggerated is the most unsparing thing she says about herself. That she can write to her husband and not to her lover measures which relation is real to her now.