Dinner, and a quarrel underneath

Dolly, already in her best dress, has it brushed and adds clean cuffs and a bow; Anna appears in a third extremely simple dress. At dinner Dolly, who knows that not even a milk pudding comes of itself, works out from a glance and a nod to the butler that the whole splendid organisation depends on Vronsky alone, and that Anna is as much a guest as Veslovsky. Anna is hostess only of the conversation, and manages the architect, the German steward and the sickly doctor with real skill. She demonstrates a reaping machine with a knife and fork, knowing her hands are beautiful; a new coquetry jars on Dolly. Sviyazhsky raises Levin's views on machinery, Vronsky answers de haut, and Dolly flares up. Vronsky defends his election as Justice of the Peace as the return he owes as a landowner, and Anna says lightly, with irritation showing, that in six months he has joined five or six institutions. Dolly sees a private quarrel behind it. At tennis she feels she is acting badly in someone else's play, and resolves to leave tomorrow.

Dolly's housekeeping eye is the chapter's instrument: she alone can see that the house runs on Vronsky and that Anna is a guest in it. Tolstoy keeps the quarrel entirely under the surface — a light remark about five or six institutions, a face gone obstinate — and lets Dolly deduce it. The dinner's impersonality and strain is the verdict on a household that has to be entertaining every day.