Vronsky leaves without explaining

Summer and part of autumn pass with no step taken toward a divorce, and the longer the two are alone the clearer it becomes that they cannot hold out. On the face of it the life could not be improved: means, health, a child, occupations. Anna reads everything praised in the foreign papers and studies agriculture, architecture, horse-breeding and sport from the books, so that Vronsky comes to her with questions and is astounded; she plans at the hospital. But her chief preoccupation is herself as he holds her dear, and her sole aim is to compensate him for what he gave up — which he appreciates and which entangles him in love-meshes he increasingly wants to test. As landowner he is hard as flint over prices, careful in small expenditure, and resistant to his German steward except where the thing is new enough to astonish. Before the Kashin elections he announces his departure sternly, braced for a struggle, and is met with calm and a box of books from Gautier's. He leaves without an explanation for the first time: he can give her everything except his independence as a man.

Anna has made herself an expert in everything Vronsky does, which Tolstoy presents neither as devotion nor as strategy but as the only occupation available to her. The love-meshes and the desire to test them are stated plainly, and so is the arrangement he intends: everything except independence. Her calm frightens him more than a scene, and he chooses to believe it.