Something impure by the samovar

Levin calls on Veslovsky, walks the garden and stables with him, does gymnastics on the parallel bars, and comes in to find him at the samovar telling Kitty what a pity it is that ladies are deprived of shooting. The Princess wants the Moscow house settled for the confinement; Levin, who finds the reckoning on fingers and the knitted binders an indignity, says millions of children are born without Moscow and without doctors, and then that he will do whatever he is told. But it is what he sees by the samovar that darkens him: something impure in Veslovsky's look and smile, and something impure in Kitty's pose too. Their talk is of Anna, and of whether love can rise above social conditions. Kitty, too simple to stop it or to hide the pleasure the attentions give her, knows everything she does will be construed. She follows her husband down to the study past the German mechanic, and they walk to a seat in the lime avenue past a startled gardener. 'There was,' she says, and they come back beaming.

Kitty ends it by admitting what she withheld a week ago — there was something in his tone — and the admission cures instantly what denial could not. Tolstoy frames the whole crisis in the gardener's puzzled view: two people running from nothing, returning radiant. Levin's revulsion at the preparations for the birth is his old objection to treating a mystery as a procedure.