The rings and the candles

Everyone says Kitty has grown plainer; Levin thinks her prettier than ever, because under the Paris dress the look of innocent truthfulness is unchanged. Oblonsky puts to him the important question of fresh candles or used ones, ten roubles' difference. Levin cannot be made to understand which hand to take, and when the couple fumble the rings twice over, the smile dies on Oblonsky's lips. The priest who heard his confession looks wearily at them both and touches Kitty's bowed head with a shade of tenderness. When the deacon prays that they be sent love, peace and help, Levin is struck — how did they find out that help is exactly what he needs? At 'Joinest them that were separate' he looks round and concludes she feels as he does. She does not: she has understood almost nothing of the service, filled instead by the one feeling of six weeks coming to fruition, and horrified at her own unconquerable indifference to her past, her mother, her father. His ideas of marriage now seem to him childishness.

Levin reads the liturgy as though it were addressed to him personally and Tolstoy immediately corrects him: she is not listening at all. The gap is not a flaw in the marriage but its condition. Against the bridegroom who finds the word 'help' and takes it, Kitty's rupture with everyone who has loved her is the chapter's colder half, and it is given no comment.