Jam on the balcony

On the balcony the women sew little shirts and knit swaddling bands while the raspberry jam is boiled without water — Kitty's method, which Agatha Mikhaylovna has twice defied, and which is now being proved in front of her while she shakes the pan hoping the fruit will not cook through. Dolly skims the scum and remembers wondering as a child why grown-ups did not eat it. In French, so the old woman shall not follow, Kitty says she expects Koznyshev to propose today and that she will see it in their eyes. The Princess recalls her own courtship — decided by the eyes and by smiles — and Kitty says Levin wrote with chalk. Talk turns to jealousy of a woman's past; Dolly says Levin is still tormented by Vronsky, and then observes that Anna was happy when Kitty was miserable and that it is now the exact reverse. The Princess calls Anna a horrid woman without a heart, and Kitty refuses to think about it. Levin comes up the steps and knows he has intruded.

Three generations settle the same question — how it is decided — over a preserving pan, and the answer is identical in every case: by the eyes. Tolstoy lets Dolly state the novel's structural reversal in one sentence, between remarks about jam. The French spoken so the servant will not understand sits in the same scene as Kitty straightening the old woman's kerchief.