Anna Karenina

Alexey Alexandrovitch comes back from his meeting at four o'clock, but as often happens, he doesn't come to see Anna. He goes straight to his study to see people with petitions and sign papers. At dinner time, guests arrive as usual - an old lady cousin, the chief secretary and his wife, and a young man seeking patronage. Anna goes into the drawing-room to receive them and play her role as hostess. This is the life she's returned to - formal dinners, proper guests, bureaucratic conversation. Through the evening, Anna maintains appearances perfectly. She's practiced at this. But something has shifted. The chapter tracks the subtle ways she's different now, how she's going through the motions while feeling increasingly hollow. At some point during the evening or after, Anna recalls Vronsky's glance at Alexey Alexandrovitch. We don't get the full context - when did Vronsky see Karenin? Was it at the train station? Somewhere else? But the memory troubles her: "And what right had he to look at him like that?" she thinks. There's possessiveness in her reaction, a sense that Vronsky's gaze at her husband crossed some boundary. Later, when undressing for bed, Tolstoy gives us one of his most telling descriptions: "But her face had none of the eagerness which, during her stay in Moscow, had fairly flashed from her eyes and her smile; on the contrary, now the fire seemed quenched in her, hidden somewhere far away." This is what's happened to Anna. In Moscow, she was alive - the fire flashed from her eyes and smile. But back in Petersburg, back in her proper life with her husband and formal dinners and polite society, the fire has been quenched. Or not quenched exactly - "hidden somewhere far away." It still exists, but she's buried it, pushed it down, tried to return to normal. The chapter shows the impossibility of what Anna is attempting. She thinks she can go back to her old life, pretend nothing happened, be the same person she was before. But that fire can't stay hidden forever. Vronsky has awakened something in her that won't be easily extinguished. The very fact that she's thinking about his glance at her husband, that she's troubled by it, shows that he's still very much present in her mind even as she goes through the routines of her Petersburg existence.