The two who hear nothing

Everybody joins the general talk except Kitty and Levin. The subjects that should grip them — the influence of nations, the rights and education of women, which Kitty has argued over with her sister and pondered while watching Varenka's dependence — hold no interest at all; they are conducting their own mystic intercourse, which binds them tighter every moment and fills both with joyful fear of what they are entering. He describes the morning on the high road, the four-horsed coach with bells, and Kitty at the window holding the strings of her cap in both hands and thinking deeply; she wonders whether she looked untidy, sees his rapturous face, and laughs. Levin calls Turovtsyn a mere cipher, and Kitty corrects him: when Dolly's six children had scarlet fever he stayed three weeks and nursed them like a nurse. Levin looks again and cannot think how he missed it. 'I am sorry, very sorry. I shall never again think ill of anyone!'

Tolstoy sets the private channel against the public one and lets the public one be the trivial thing — the questions these two have thought hardest about become noise the moment they are within reach of each other. Kitty's defence of Turovtsyn is the first correction she ever makes to Levin and it takes immediately, which is the evidence that this marriage will work.