Vronsky shows off the hospital

On the verandah Princess Barbara, embroidering a chair-cover for the Count, explains that she stays out of duty until the divorce, lists half a dozen couples who were received again in the end, and praises an interior si comme il faut, tout-à-fait à l'anglaise. Tennis is proposed and refused; Anna walks with Sviyazhsky and Dolly with Vronsky. Dolly, who approves the step in the abstract and has even envied it from a distance, finds the actual circle alien and feels with Vronsky the same discomfort she felt about her patches before the maid. She praises the house, and he is delighted and carried away into showing her everything. At the hospital — a large red building with a dazzling unpainted iron roof, another going up beside it in scaffolding — he argues with the architect about the pediment while Anna says the foundations should have been raised. Inside: imitation marble, plate-glass, new ventilation, marble baths, spring mattresses, silent trollies. Dolly asks about a maternity ward and is interrupted. Watching him, she understands Anna falling in love with him.

The hospital is real, expensive and admirable, and Tolstoy's single cut is Vronsky interrupting the one woman present who knows what the district actually needs. Dolly's discomfort is located exactly — the same feeling as the maid and the patches, class registered as shame about oneself. Princess Barbara's roll-call of reinstated couples is the going rate for forgiveness, priced in comfort.