Society in St. Petersburg is very united, and Anna Karenina had very friendly relations with the gay world of fashion, with its dinner parties and balls.  She met Vronsky at several of these brilliant reunions.  He, deeply impressed with her, notwithstanding his connection with Kitty, went everywhere that he was likely to meet her, and her joy at meeting him easily betrayed itself in her eyes and her smile.  And he did not refrain from actually making love to Anna on the occasions when they were able to engage in tete-a-tete conversations.  Nor was he positively repelled.  Soon the acquaintance became more and more intimate.  Meantime, Aleksei as usual would come home and, instead of seeking his wife’s society, would bury himself in his library amongst his books.  But suddenly the idea that his wife could form an attachment to another man filled him with terror.  He resolved to remonstrate with her, but she received his expostulations with laughing and good-humoured mockery, which entirely frustrated his purpose.  He dropped the subject; yet from that moment a new life began for the husband and wife.  There was no outward sign of the change.  Anna continued to meet Vronsky, and Aleksei felt himself powerless to intervene.

While Vronsky was thus entangling himself with Anna Karenina at St. Petersburg, the Shcherbatskys at Moscow were growing anxious about the health of Princess Kitty, their beautiful daughter who was so deeply in love with him.  She was ill, and after a consultation of physicians it was decided that travelling abroad would be advisable.  But the girl said to herself that her trouble was one that they could not fathom, that her supposed illness and the remedies she had to endure were nonsense.  What did they amount to?  Nothing more than the gathering up of the fragments of a broken vase to patch it up again.  Her heart was broken, and could it be healed by pills and powders?

VI

Absorbed by his passion, Vronsky yet proceeded in his regular manner of life, sustaining as usual his social and military relations.  He loved his regiment and was very popular in it.  Naturally, he spoke not a syllable to anyone about his passion.  He drank moderately, and not an indiscreet word escaped him.  But his mother was not a little disturbed when she discovered that his infatuation for Madame Karenina had impelled him to refuse an excellent promotion which would have necessitated his removal from the metropolis.  She feared that instead of being a flirtation of which she might not disapprove, this passion might develop into a Werther-like tragedy and lead her son to commit some imprudence.

Many fashionable young ladies who were jealous of Anna and were weary of hearing her praised, were malignantly pleased to hear rumours to her disparagement and to feel justified in alluding scornfully to her.  Vronsky received a message from his mother in Moscow.  She desired him to come to her.  His elder brother, though not himself by any means a pattern of perfect propriety, strongly expressed his dissatisfaction, because he felt that the unpleasant rumours would be likely to cause displeasure in certain high quarters.