The photographs on the table

Back at the hotel Anna sits in her bonnet before a bronze clock and puts off the maid, the coffee, everything. The Italian nurse brings the baby, plump and toothless and waving her fat hands like fins, and it is impossible not to smile and kiss her — and impossible to call the feeling love beside what she feels for Serezha, who is already a person who understands and judges her, and from whom she is sundered without remedy. Turning out photographs of her son she cannot prise loose the best one, and uses a photograph of Vronsky to push it out; seeing that face she remembers he is the cause of her grief, and then feels a rush of love and sends for him. He is coming, but bringing Yashvin — and the thought arrives that he may have stopped loving her. She dresses with more care than she has taken for days. In the drawing-room he is looking at the photographs and does not hurry to look at her; she takes them from his hands, invites Yashvin to dinner, and is left asking whether he has changed toward her.

Tolstoy makes the photograph do the plot: the son's picture is dislodged by the lover's, and the thought that follows is that the lover no longer loves her. Her honesty about the baby — sweet, but not gripping the heart — is the kind of admission the novel gives to nobody else. The suspicion of Vronsky's indifference arrives on no evidence and immediately finds four proofs.