Dolly's hall porter informs Anna that Kitty is here, and she is immediately jealous of Vronsky's former love. Unwilling to meet her at first, Kitty's hostility vanishes when she sees "Anna's dear lovely face" again. The three women chat about the baby until Anna, rising, announces she has come to say good-bye, for they are to leave Moscow soon. Smiling, Anna expresses gladness at having seen Kitty again, she has heard so much about her, even from her husband. "He came to see me and I liked him very much," adds Anna with obvious ill intent. Dolly later remarks she has never seen Anna in "such a strange and irritable mood."
Feeling worse than before, conscious of "having been affronted and rejected" by Kitty, Anna feels that all human relationships are based on hate. At home, she reads a telegram from Vronsky: "I cannot return before ten," She would try to meet him at the railway station, she decides; if he is not there, she would go to his country home. In consequence of the scene there, she vaguely considers, she would take the train along the Nizhny line and stop at the first town she comes to. On the way to the station, her impressions crowd her mind — Kitty, Vronsky's cooled passions, her son. First we were irresistibly drawn together, and now we are irresistibly drawn apart, she thinks. My love grows more passionate and selfish while his is dying. It is not jealousy that makes me hateful but my unsatisfaction. As I demand that he give himself entirely up to me, he wants to get further and further from me. I know he is always faithful, but I want his love, not his kindness inspired by a sense of duty. That is much worse than having him hate me. Where love dies, hate begins. Anna glances at the houses she passes, where live people and "more people, and all hating each other." Would things change if she gained her divorce, Anna wonders, and concludes "No." That would not bring them happiness, just "absence of torment." I cause his unhappiness and he mine, she thinks. "Life is sundering us." Love is transient, but hate is everywhere. She loved Seriozha, but exchanged him for another love and did not complain "while this other love satisfied her.
