The telegram, and the coffee cup

Anna packs, indifferent whether they leave Monday or Tuesday. Vronsky comes in dressed, saying he will go to maman for the money through Egorov and be ready tomorrow, and the mention pricks her. Over coffee she calls the furnished rooms expressionless and soulless and Vozdvizhensk a Promised Land. A telegram from Stiva arrives; Vronsky's attempt not to show it convinces her he hides his correspondence with women, though it says only that there is little hope but he will do everything possible and impossible. He changes the subject to Yashvin winning sixty thousand from Pevtsov. They fight over why he wants the divorce — for her sake and the children they may have; she says they will have none, and takes his wish for children as proof he does not value her beauty. Watching her drink, she sees that her hand and the sound of her lips repulse him. She calls his mother heartless; he twice asks her not to speak so. Yashvin and Voytov arrive and she talks calmly of cards and love. Vronsky comes for Gambetta's certificate, sees her pale face in the glass, and stays out all day; at night the maid says she has a headache.

Tolstoy tracks the quarrel through physical detail rather than argument: the little finger stuck out, the sips, the face that tells her she is repulsive. Yashvin's arrival shows how completely Anna can still perform, which makes the collapse afterwards a matter of privacy rather than control. Vronsky's 'tant pis pour elle' and the glimpsed reflection are the chapter's last chance, and his legs carry him out.