The nursery and the little court

Alone, Dolly prices the room with a housewife's eye: French wall-papers, a carpet over the whole floor, spring and overlay mattresses, silk pillow-slips, and a lady's maid better dressed than herself, before whom she is ashamed of the patched dressing-jacket whose savings she can calculate to the kopek. Annushka is a relief until she starts on how the Count loves her mistress. Anna comes in wearing a very simple lawn dress, and Dolly knows what such simplicity costs. Asked about the baby's name, Anna answers that it is Karenina and that it troubles Alexis. The nursery holds English perambulators, a walking apparatus, a crawling table like a billiard-table, swings and new baths, a fast unpleasant Englishwoman, and nurses who converse in a peculiar French; the child is rosy and crawls beautifully; Anna cannot find her toy and gets the number of her teeth wrong. 'I feel it hard sometimes that I am as it were superfluous here.' Then she lists the household — Princess Barbara, Sviyazhsky, Tushkevich, Veslovsky, the steward, the doctor, the architect — une petite cour.

Two teeth settle the chapter: a mother who does not know her daughter's mouth, in a nursery equipped from England. Tolstoy lets Anna name her own condition — superfluous here — and then hurry past it. The court assembled to keep Alexis from wishing for anything new is described by Anna as a service she provides, which tells the reader exactly what she thinks her position rests on.