The hotel, and the hand on the blanket

The provincial hotel is one of the improved kind that has degenerated into a dirty pothouse whose pretensions make it worse than an honest old inn — a soldier in a filthy uniform at the door, a cast-iron staircase, a dusty bouquet of wax flowers, and a railway-induced bustle over everything. The good rooms are taken; they get the dirty one. Mary Nikolavna, unchanged but stouter, offers to go to the kitchen out of the way; Kitty opens the door and greets her, and the two women settle it between them while Levin is ashamed. He finds not what he had prepared for but a body under a blanket, one enormous rake of a hand attached to a spindle of arm, and knows it for his living brother only by the eyes, which look at him severely and reproachfully. Nicholas talks about his doctor, which tells Levin he is still hoping. Levin decides to spare Kitty and she overrules him; she goes round the bed so he need not turn his head, takes the skeleton hand in her fresh one, and starts to talk.

Two of Levin's certainties fail in one chapter: that his wife could not be in a room with Mary Nikolavna, and that he should keep her from the sickbed. Tolstoy describes the dying body in anatomical terms and then makes the eyes establish 'living relations between living people', which is the chapter's whole movement. The jealousy the dying feel for the living settles on Nicholas's face mid-sentence.