Sappho Stolz and Lisa Merkalova

The guests arrive: Sappho Stolz, fair-haired and black-eyed, her hair built up until her head matches her much-exposed bust, with Vaska at her heels glittering on underdone beef and Burgundy, and a second admirer she has brought and forgotten. Then Prince Kaluzhsky and Lisa Merkalova with Stremov. Betsy had said Lisa plays at being an ingenuous child; Anna, seeing her, decides she really is ingenuous, a perverted but sweet and irresponsible woman with the radiance of a real diamond among false stones, and unfathomable eyes striking in their sincerity. Lisa asks Anna to teach her how not to be bored — the gayest set in Petersburg and always the same people, the same sofas, the same evenings. Stremov, Karenin's enemy in the service, is elaborately amiable to his foe's wife and offers the rule that to sleep or to be amused one must have worked. Both press Anna to stay, and for a moment she wavers; then she remembers clutching her own hair that morning, and goes.

The alternative future is laid out for inspection and is deadly boring: two women at the top of the fashionable world, each trailed by admirers, asking Anna how she manages not to be bored. Tolstoy declines the easy satire by giving Lisa real sincerity. Stremov's kindness is calculated against her husband, which is the first time Anna is treated as a position rather than a person.