Karenin alone in the house

Having understood that all anyone wants of him is to leave his wife in peace, Karenin consents to everything and can decide nothing. Only when the English governess asks whether she is to dine with him or alone does he see his position and take fright at it. What he cannot reconcile is not the infidelity but his recent forgiveness and his love for another man's baby with the fact that he is now alone, disgraced, ridiculed and despised. For two days he holds his face; on the third a milliner's assistant calls about a bill Anna forgot to pay and asks for her address, and Karenin sits with his head on his hands and orders the carriage unharnessed. He knows the hatred is not for any badness of his — that he might have mended — but for his repulsive misery, and that men will destroy him as dogs kill a whining dog. He is entirely alone: orphaned young, a brother dead abroad, no friend at school or university or in the Service. Of women he thinks not at all.

A milliner's bill on blue paper does what the confession and the divorce could not, which is Tolstoy's rule throughout: the small administrative fact carries the grief. The insight that people punish visible suffering rather than wrongdoing is the novel's hardest social observation, and it comes from its least sympathetic man. The account of how he married Anna — cornered by an aunt — is given here and explains everything.