Anna Karenina

Princess Betsy drives home from the theater without waiting for the last act. She barely has time to go to her dressing-room, powder her long pale face, rub it, set her dress to rights, and order tea in the big drawing-room before carriages start arriving at her huge house in Bolshaia Morskaia. Her guests step out at the wide entrance, passing the stout porter who reads newspapers behind the glass door in the mornings "to the edification of the passers-by." He noiselessly opens the immense door, letting visitors into the house. This is a classic Petersburg social evening - people coming from the theater to Betsy's for tea and conversation. Betsy is the kind of hostess who leaves before the last act so she can be ready to receive guests at her home. The chapter describes the social gathering, the conversations, the atmosphere of sophisticated gossip and wit. Someone mentions a French actress and is about to tell a story, but the ambassador's wife cuts him short with "playful horror": "Please don't tell us about that horror." The man responds: "All right, I won't especially as everyone knows those horrors." Then Princess Myakaya chimes in: "And we should all go to see them if it were accepted as the correct thing, like the opera." This exchange is perfect Petersburg society - they all know the scandalous stories about the French actress, they pretend to be horrified but are actually fascinated, and Myakaya wittily points out the hypocrisy: if scandal were socially acceptable like opera, they'd all attend. This chapter establishes the social world where Anna and Vronsky will conduct their early flirtation. Betsy's drawing-room becomes a key location in the novel - a place where people gather, observe each other, gossip, and where romances develop under the guise of innocent socializing. The fact that everyone knows "those horrors" about the French actress but discusses them with playful pretense shows how this society operates: scandal is everywhere, but maintained beneath a veneer of propriety. This is the world Anna must navigate - where everyone watches everyone else, where reputations can be destroyed by gossip, where appearances matter enormously. Betsy herself will become both facilitator and observer of Anna and Vronsky's affair, her drawing-room serving as one of the few places they can meet socially.