The lawyer catches moths

In the famous lawyer's crowded waiting-room Karenin, a connoisseur of writing-table accessories, is told to wait and is obliged to send in his card. The lawyer — spruce as a bridegroom, peasant-faced and dandified — catches moths out of the air mid-sentence, and his grey eyes dance with a glee Karenin recognises as resembling the gleam in his wife's. Told the case, he sets out the grounds: physical defect, five years' absence, adultery, running out of fingers as he counts. In practice it comes to detection by mutual consent or the rarer involuntary detection. He recommends adultery by mutual consent as the simplest and surest; Karenin's religion rules it out, and he offers letters instead. The lawyer makes a high-pitched sound of pity and contempt — the reverend Fathers want witnesses and the minutest details — and asks for full liberty of action, since he who desires a result accepts the means. Karenin will write in a week. Left alone, the lawyer stops catching moths and decides to have his furniture re-covered in velvet.

Tolstoy runs the moths through the whole scene — caught, refrained from out of tact, caught furtively, abandoned in triumph — so that a man's marriage ends against a background of small killings. The lawyer's delight is the professional appetite for other people's ruin, and Karenin registers it as the same gleam he saw in Anna. Velvet furniture is what the divorce is actually for.