Levin's jealousy at supper

At supper Oblonsky reports that Veslovsky has visited Anna and that he himself will spend July there; Veslovsky says one feels oneself in a family in their house. Dolly announces she will certainly go, alone and the better for it; Kitty, asked, flushes and asks why she should. Levin, watching from the other end of the table, reads her every word as a plea not to be parted from Veslovsky, and answers with the pretended politeness Kitty knows and which suits him so ill. When Veslovsky follows her from the table smiling, Levin can hardly breathe. Kitty refuses the parting hand-kiss with naïve rudeness — 'That's not customary in our house' — for which her mother later reprimands her and which Levin holds against her. In her bedroom he lets it out: he is not jealous, that is a vile word, but offended that anyone dares look at her so. She sacrifices her annoyance to his pain, tells him exactly what was said at supper, and he claps his hands to his head and begs forgiveness, offering to keep Veslovsky all summer on purpose.

Tolstoy gives Kitty a small honest reservation — she does feel something happened when Veslovsky followed her — and has her withhold it to spare her husband, which is the whole difference between this marriage and the other. Levin's insistence that he is not jealous while describing jealousy exactly is the chapter's comedy. Anna is introduced into the house as dinner-table news, seventy versts off.