The boat seen from the bank

Three months married, Levin is happy in an entirely unexpected way — like a man who has admired a boat's smooth motion from the bank and now must keep a lookout, remember the water under his feet, and row with unaccustomed hands. The petty cares he used to smile at contemptuously turn out to make up his life, and he is astonished that the poetic Kitty can think about table-cloths, mattresses, trays and the cook; he laughs at her impossible orders to the old cook and her trouble getting Masha to obey her, and cannot help admiring it. He does not see that a woman who could never order sweets at home is now building her nest against the wet weather she feels coming. Their first quarrel comes of his being half an hour late, and teaches him that he can no longer tell where she ends and he begins: he feels like a man who turns to strike his assailant and finds he has knocked himself. The honeymoon is the most oppressive and humiliating month of both their lives, and only in the third does it start to run smoothly.

The novel's honeymoon chapter is about tablecloths and a lost half-hour, and it says plainly that the first month was humiliating — the one claim about marriage that no other book of the period makes. Tolstoy gives Levin the discovery that offence is now impossible because she is himself, and makes it a physical sensation rather than a resolution.