Telling off the daisy petals

Walking ahead of the others on the dusty road, Kitty leans on her husband's arm and is glad of him alone; he listens less to her words than to her voice, changed by pregnancy into something soft and serious, and steers her past places where she might stumble. They talk of Koznyshev, who once loved a girl who died, and for whom, Levin thinks, women are simply human beings and not women — a man of too pure and lofty a nature to reconcile himself to realities, and Varenka is a reality. Kitty says there is less reality in her than in herself, and that he would never have loved her. Levin envies his brother for being better, for living wholly by duty, and admits that he himself is happy and dissatisfied: since Kitty and the child he works as at a set task, superficially, pretending. Asked whether he would change places with Sergius, he says of course not. Kitty picks an ox-eye daisy and they tell it off — he will propose, he won't — until Levin pulls off two petals at once.

Tolstoy uses a marriage that works as an instrument for reading one that may not happen, and the diagnosis is Levin's: Koznyshev cannot reconcile himself to a reality. Kitty's smile at her husband's self-depreciation is the chapter's best piece of marital observation — she knows the insincerity and loves its source. The daisy is cheated, and nobody counts the tiny petal.