Chapter 3 — Anna Karenina

Stiva walks to breakfast feeling clean, fragrant, and physically at ease in spite of his unhappiness, and that bodily comfort is the first clue the morning will run on habit, not repair. Scent, cufflinks, coffee, and a damp newspaper keep their schedule while Dolly has not slept and the house still wobbles. A merchant's letter about a forest on her land stings twice: he needs the sale, cannot raise it until they reconcile, and hates the thought that money might be what moves him toward his wife.

He sips coffee over a liberal paper whose opinions settled in him like a hat nobody asked him to choose. Each plank fits his life with suspicious ease: debt needs reform, marriage needs reconstructing, long church services need explaining away. The articles usually fog his brain pleasantly, but Matrona's warning and the household chaos blunt the usual ironies. A smile after good digestion lifts his face, then memory snaps him back. Tanya and Grisha arrive with their toy train. He asks lightly if Dolly is cheerful; Tanya blushes because she knows he knows the answer, and he blushes too. He gives sweets, hears a widow's impossible petition, writes a fluent note that costs him almost nothing, and only at the door remembers what he meant to forget.

His inner voice says going to her now means deceit, that he cannot make her lovable again or himself beyond love, and that lying is opposed to his nature. He tells himself it cannot go on like this, takes two whiffs of a cigarette, and opens her bedroom door anyway.