Fourteen hours until morning

Alone, Levin dreads the fourteen hours till morning and attaches himself to anyone who will have him. Oblonsky goes off to the ballet; Dolly congratulates him and is resented for daring to touch it; Koznyshev is silenced by having his fur collar wrapped over his face for saying Kitty seems a fine girl. At the Town Council, where money and pipes are debated, Levin sees that neither exists, that everyone is kind and estimable and extremely fond of him, and that the secretary who cannot understand his own report is a splendid fellow. Sviyazhsky, whose objections he now finds correct and delicately made, takes him home for tea, where he stays two or three hours without noticing the ladies are dead weary. Back at the hotel he keeps the attendant Egor talking about love in marriage and happiness lying within oneself. Then he sits at the little window till six, breathing frosty air, looking from the gilt cross on the church dome to the star Capella, weeping with pity for a passing gambler.

Tolstoy renders happiness as a defect of judgement — every man Levin meets is transparent, kind and fond of him, including the ones he has despised for three parts. The comedy is exact and never mocking. The cross and the star held in one gaze for six hours is the first religious image he has looked at without arguing, and it is placed here rather than at any doctrine.