Anna says she is happy

Anna, noting that Dolly looks thinner and worse and that her own looks have improved, says she is ashamed to confess it but is unforgivably happy — as after a nightmare from which one wakes to find no such terrors exist. She presses to know what view Dolly takes of her position, and Dolly, who had a great deal to say in the carriage and now finds it out of place, answers only that if one loves, one loves the whole person as she is. Anna's eyes fill: for that, all sins would be forgiven. She describes the estate — employees' houses, stud farm, stables, the park renovated, Vronsky turned into a first-rate prudent landlord, stingy in farming and lavish where thousands are concerned — and the new hospital, over a hundred thousand roubles, begun because she reproached him with stinginess after he refused the peasants cheaper meadows. Dolly is given not the grand room but one Anna apologises for, full of luxuries she has never lived among. 'Simply I wish to live, not hurting anyone but myself. I have a right to do that, have I not?'

Anna asks four times what Dolly thinks of her position, which is the tell — the happiness needs a witness to confirm it. The hospital's origin, told fondly as a charming pettiness, is a hundred thousand roubles spent to answer a remark, and Tolstoy lets Anna supply the detail herself. The room that needs an apology is grander than anything Dolly has slept in, and neither woman says so.