The face in the mirror

Alone at the window, Anna feels the dark room and the nightmare merge into icy horror and rings for the servant rather than wait. Told the Count has gone to the stables, she writes: 'I was to blame. Come home. We must talk it over. For God's sake come; I am frightened,' and sends Michael with it. Afraid to be alone, she goes to the nursery and is startled to find the black-haired little girl hammering with a bottle stopper instead of Serezha, whom her disordered mind expected; the child's laugh and eyebrows are so like Vronsky's that she leaves. She counts the minutes, cannot remember whether she did her hair, checks the mirror and does not recognise the feverish face with brilliant eyes, then kisses her own hand and wonders whether she is going mad. The messenger returns with the note undelivered — the Count had gone to the Nizhny railway station. She sends it on to the Countess Vronskaya's country house, wires 'I must speak to you, come at once', sobs to Annushka, and drives to the Oblonskys' on the Znamenka.

Tolstoy renders disintegration as lost time and failed recognition: the wrong child in the nursery, the hair she cannot remember doing, the stranger in the mirror. The note's abject four sentences cost her everything and reach nobody, and the errand's failure is mechanical rather than cruel. Annie exists here mostly as evidence of how little Anna can see her.