Dirty ice-creams, and a telegram

Anna leaves the Oblonskys' worse than she came, affronted by the meeting with Kitty. Driving home, she decides Dolly would have enjoyed her misfortune and Kitty more so — Kitty is jealous because she was amiable to Levin, and if she were truly immoral she could make him fall in love with her, and she did want to. A fat ruddy man raises his shiny hat, mistaking her for an acquaintance; two boys stop an ice-cream vendor, and she concludes that we all want something sweet and if not bon-bons then dirty ice-creams, and that we all hate one another. She reads 'Tyutkin, Coiffeur', composes a joke about it, and remembers she has no one to tell it to. Vespers ring and a tradesman crosses himself, which she takes for concealment of hatred. At home a telegram waits: 'I cannot return before ten — Vronsky.' Her messenger has not returned. She resolves to go to him and expose him, finds the 8.02 train in the paper, packs a handbag knowing she will not come back, cannot bear the smell of food, and drives to the station with Peter on the box.

The city becomes a proof-text: every stranger, vendor and church bell is read as evidence that people only hate each other. Tolstoy keeps the mechanical misunderstanding running underneath — the telegram answers her telegram, not the note, and she never learns it. Her one joke and the realisation that there is nobody to tell it to do more damage than the reasoning does.