Kitty weeps until three

Out in the frost Levin calls her a wonderful, sweet, pathetic woman — extraordinary not for her intellect but her sincerity — and Oblonsky tells him not to judge in advance next time. At home two letters wait: the steward can get only five and a half roubles a chetvert for the wheat and has no other source of money, and his sister reproaches him for the unsettled business. He accepts the price at once, though it had seemed impossible, and resolves to go to the Court tomorrow. Reviewing the day he finds it was made entirely of conversations, all of them good, with two things not quite pleasant: what he said about the pike, and something not quite right about his tender pity for Anna. Kitty is sad; he tells her about Vronsky, blushes, tells her about Anna, blushes more, and knows now that he should not have gone. She says 'Ah!' and then, when he comes back from undressing, bursts into sobs: he has fallen in love with that horrid woman. They talk till three.

Levin's own accounting is precise: two things wrong with the day, a borrowed phrase and a feeling he cannot name. Tolstoy has the blush settle the question before Kitty does. The reconciliation requires him to call the pity an effect of wine and Anna's artful influence — a partial lie told to restore peace, and the first the marriage has needed.