Kitty on her husband's unbelief

The nurse drives out the flies and a bumble-bee, waves a birch branch over mother and child, and wishes God would send rain. Kitty rocks, wanting to kiss the plump arm that looks as if a thread were tied round the wrist, afraid of waking him. Hearing the Prince's voice and Katavasov's laughter upstairs, she thinks about Levin: gloomier in spring, more cheerful now. She knows what torments him is his want of faith, and although she accepts that salvation is impossible for an unbeliever she smiles and calls him funny. He has read philosophies for a year and says he would like to believe; she decides he thinks too much because he is always alone. Mid-thought she starts with the realisation that the laundress may not have returned the linen and Agatha Mikhaylovna will give Koznyshev used sheets. She prefers his unbelief to Madame Stahl's pretending. She remembers Oblonsky's penitent letter asking Dolly to sell her estate to pay his debts, and how Levin found the one way to help without offending — that Kitty give her sister her own part of the estate. 'Only be like your father,' she whispers, handing Mitya to the nurse.

The chapter states Levin's crisis from outside before he states it himself, and Kitty's version is both accurate and unworried — she holds the doctrine that would damn him and smiles at it. Tolstoy lets the bed-linen interrupt the theology at full force, which is his standing method for showing a mind that is not divided against itself.