Despite contradicting Vronsky when he said their position was an impossible one, Anna too desires above all to put an end to her false and dishonorable marriage. But where would she turn if put out of her husband's house? In her distress she imagines that Vronsky, loving her less, already finds her a burden. No, she cannot offer herself to him. Besides miserable, Anna is frightened: In her new spiritual condition she feels everything in her soul is double, each part claimed by conflicting loyalties to the two men in her life. If her relations to Vronsky and Karenin are in question, there is no ambivalence about Seriozha. Her aim and only support in life is her son. But she must act quickly to secure his helpless position. Ordering her things packed, she decides to leave with him for Moscow.
Then she reads Karenin's note which just arrived, and feels her plight more awful than ever. Shuddering at his threat that he would take her son if she persists in her unlawful ways, Anna finds her husband's insistence to lead the same life they always live further evidence of his willingness to exist by lies and hypocrisy. Enraged and frustrated, she realizes she is not strong enough to escape this intolerable situation. Never able to know freedom in love, she would remain the guilty wife constantly threatened with exposure, deceiving her husband for a disgraceful liaison with a man whose life she could not share. Weeping unconstrainedly, Anna cannot conceive how it will end. Later that afternoon she attends Princess Betsy's croquet party, leaving early to meet Vronsky at six o'clock.
As he does four or five times a year, Vronsky spends that day figuring his accounts and putting all his affairs in order. Despite his frivolous life, he hates irregularity and always manages his finances with care. He calls this day of reckoning a faire de lessive, and at this point, Tolstoy also reckons up the course of Vronsky's life.
