Chapter 90 — Anna Karenina

Petritsky finds Vronsky still glowing from his reckoning. The lessive is over, affairs are in order, and Vronsky moves carefully, as if any sudden gesture might upset the balance he has just achieved. Music leads them to the colonel's house, where the regiment is celebrating Serpuhovskoy's return.

Vronsky has decided he is happy in love and has sacrificed ambition, so he greets his successful friend without jealousy. The party is loud and generous: toasts, vodka, soldiers tossed in the air, the colonel dancing, then a bathroom talk where Serpuhovskoy confesses ambition and pitches a future for independent men like them. He offers carte blanche if Vronsky will retire from the regiment and let him pull him upward. Vronsky says he wants nothing to change, yet he listens, envies, and almost wishes to hear the rest.

Serpuhovskoy argues that women block careers unless love is packaged as marriage; dragging an unmarried burden ruins men, and society women are worse because you tear the load from someone else. Vronsky murmurs that Serpuhovskoy has never loved, thinking of Anna. A footman brings a note from Princess Betsy Tverskaya. Vronsky opens it, flushes crimson, claims a headache, and leaves. He promises to talk later and to look Serpuhovskoy up in Petersburg, but the evening's order is already broken.