Vronsky had not yet seen Anna.  He purposely avoided looking in her direction.  But he knew by the direction of people’s eyes where she was.  He looked round discreetly, but he was not seeking her; expecting the worst, his eyes sought for Alexey Alexandrovitch.  To his relief Alexey Alexandrovitch was not in the theater that evening.

“How little of the military man there is left in you!” Serpuhovskoy was saying to him.  “A diplomat, an artist, something of that sort, one would say.”

“Yes, it was like going back home when I put on a black coat,” answered Vronsky, smiling and slowly taking out his opera glass.

“Well, I’ll own I envy you there.  When I come back from abroad and put on this,” he touched his epaulets, “I regret my freedom.”

Serpuhovskoy had long given up all hope of Vronsky’s career, but he liked him as before, and was now particularly cordial to him.

“What a pity you were not in time for the first act!”

Vronsky, listening with one ear, moved his opera glass from the stalls and scanned the boxes.  Near a lady in a turban and a bald old man, who seemed to wave angrily in the moving opera glass, Vronsky suddenly caught sight of Anna’s head, proud, strikingly beautiful, and smiling in the frame of lace.  She was in the fifth box, twenty paces from him.  She was sitting in front, and slightly turning, was saying something to Yashvin.  The setting of her head on her handsome, broad shoulders, and the restrained excitement and brilliance of her eyes and her whole face reminded him of her just as he had seen her at the ball in Moscow.  But he felt utterly different towards her beauty now.  In his feeling for her now there was no element of mystery, and so her beauty, though it attracted him even more intensely than before, gave him now a sense of injury.  She was not looking in his direction, but Vronsky felt that she had seen him already.

When Vronsky turned the opera glass again in that direction, he noticed that Princess Varvara was particularly red, and kept laughing unnaturally and looking round at the next box.  Anna, folding her fan and tapping it on the red velvet, was gazing away and did not see, and obviously did not wish to see, what was taking place in the next box.  Yashvin’s face wore the expression which was common when he was losing at cards.  Scowling, he sucked the left end of his mustache further and further into his mouth, and cast sidelong glances at the next box.

In that box on the left were the Kartasovs.  Vronsky knew them, and knew that Anna was acquainted with them.  Madame Kartasova, a thin little woman, was standing up in her box, and, her back turned upon Anna, she was putting on a mantle that her husband was holding for her.  Her face was pale and angry, and she was talking excitedly.  Kartasov, a fat, bald man, was continually looking round at Anna, while he attempted to soothe his wife.  When the wife had gone out, the husband lingered a long while, and tried to catch Anna’s eye, obviously anxious to bow to her.  But Anna, with unmistakable intention, avoided noticing him, and talked to Yashvin, whose cropped head was bent down to her.  Kartasov went out without making his salutation, and the box was left empty.