Anna will have no more children

Anna comes to Dolly's room in her nightgown, having promised all day to talk, and finds she has nothing to say. She asks about Kitty, is told nobody forgives those things, and asks what being in fault means. Then she presses for Dolly's view of her life, warning that this is summer with guests and that in winter she will be alone while he is away half the time. Dolly, made Vronsky's advocate, argues for a divorce so that the children should not be nameless — and Anna answers that she will have no more children, because she does not want them: after her illness the doctor told her. Dolly, who has dreamt of this, is horrified to find it possible, and says it is too simple a solution of too complex a question. Anna's arguments follow: she is not a wife but a woman who must keep a lover's love, and children of hers would bear a stranger's name and be ashamed of their birth. Dolly, thinking of Grisha, cannot answer, and feels they have reached a question on which they can never meet.

Anna offers Dolly precisely the release Dolly spent the whole carriage journey wishing for, and Dolly recoils — Tolstoy's way of showing that the wish and the thing are not the same. The gesture of curved arms across the stomach is the chapter's argument: love held by a body. Dolly's unanswerable objection arrives as a question about Grisha, and she shakes her head to get rid of it.