Betsy on the carpet outside

Two months on, Karenin's mistake — never having considered that she might recover — is plain, and so is the discovery he made at her bedside: that the pity he had been ashamed of as weakness gives him peace, and that forgiveness makes simple what hatred made insoluble. He forgives Vronsky and pities him, reproaches himself over Serezha, and grows unaccountably fond of the newborn Anna, who would have died but for his care and whose saffron wrinkled face he watches for half an hour at a time. But a coarse power presses on him: acquaintances, especially women, greet him with a barely hidden joy, as though giving someone in marriage. The baby screams; the English governess suspects the wet-nurse has no milk, and the old family nurse's dissatisfied answer sounds to him like a hint about his position. Then, on the carpet outside the bedroom, he overhears Betsy urging Anna to see Vronsky before Tashkend. Anna tells him herself that she refused. Betsy advises him to receive the man, and smiles at his dignity.

The forgiveness holds, and Tolstoy immediately shows what will destroy it: not Anna, not Vronsky, but everybody — the footman's smile, the wet-nurse's contempt, the nurse's tone, Betsy's Order of Highmindedness. The one place Karenin is at peace is a cot containing another man's child. Society is named as a coarse power with its own decrees, and it is stronger than the grace.