Dolly thinks in the carriage

Dolly goes to Anna, taking Levin's horses because he will not let her hire and because he knows what twenty roubles mean to her. Four hours alone in a calèche give her the first uninterrupted thinking of her life. She goes from the children's immediate dangers to winter lodgings and a new coat to how the boys are to be started, and concludes that it is inaccurate to call childbearing woman's curse — travail is nothing, pregnancy is torture. She remembers the peasant woman at the halting-place who buried a daughter in Lent and said children are nothing but a tie, and finds crude truth in it. Then fifteen years reviewed: sickness, dullness, disfigurement, sore nipples, illnesses, Latin, and the small pink coffin with its gold lace cross. All that suffering to produce, at best, children who escape being ne'er-do-wells. On the bridge the peasant women's bright faces seem to mock her: everybody lives but her. Why is everyone down on Anna, who wished to live? She invents a romance of her own with a collective imaginary man, and smiles.

The novel's most sustained case against motherhood is made by its best mother, alone in a carriage, and Tolstoy does not soften a line of it. Dolly's defence of Anna — she wished to live, God implanted that need — is produced by a woman envying what she is about to see. The travelling looking-glass she will not take out in front of the coachman says the rest.