The Countess in love again

Lydia Ivanovna was married as an ecstatic girl to a jovial profligate who left her after two months and has met her ever since with venomous irony. She has been in love continually since — with new Princes and Princesses, a Metropolitan, a Suffragan, a priest, a journalist, three Slavs, Komisarov who saved the Tsar, a Minister, a doctor, an English missionary — and now knows that all of it was unreal and that she truly loves Karenin: for his misunderstood soul, his high-pitched voice, his weary eyes, his soft hands with their swollen veins. She dresses for him and catches herself wondering what might have been. Learning that Anna and Vronsky are in Petersburg, she steers him clear of them, and is about to breathe freely when a thick perfumed note arrives. Anna, writing in French, asks to see her son once before leaving, appealing to Lydia's Christian feelings and to the magnanimity of the person deciding. Everything in it irritates the Countess. 'Say there will be no answer.'

The catalogue of Lydia Ivanovna's loves is comic until the last name, and then it explains the whole of Part Five: Anna's letter is intercepted by a woman in love with her husband. Tolstoy has her prove to herself that this passion is the true one by the same reasoning she used for the others. The word 'magnanimity', chosen to flatter, is exactly the word that seals the refusal.