This petty incident lasts for ten chapters, although one is devoted to a discussion of economics among the three sportsmen. Innocent and bungling though he is, Vassenka has just been with Anna and Vronsky and, being naive and impressionable, has carried some attitudes from one host's house to the other. Thus the relationship between Anna and Vronsky has polluted the purity of Levin's home; Vassenka has become the "worm in the Garden of Eden." Newly married, Levin and Kitty are particularly sensitive to the narrow bounds between lawful and unlawful love. Their irritability on this point shows, not only the depth and intensity of their own love, but an implicit sense of guilt they feel being so happy together. Their attitude implies that married love is too transient and delicate a matter for basing one's life upon it. This foreshadows the moment when Levin finds supreme solace in religion rather than in sensual and material happiness.
Petty and insignificant though the situation may be, Tolstoy uses it as a vehicle — unconsciously or not — to suggest his own strict views of marital crnduct. Later in life, especially in the story The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy affirms the extreme position that sexual relations between men and women are basically evil. Levin, who considers Kitty "sacred" while she is pregnant, reflects Tolstoy's potential puritanism and rejection of profane love. Vassenka, on the other hand, superficial and unselfconscious, would be willing to effect a liaison with Kitty were she disposed. Usually sympathetic and compassionate towards Anna, Tolstoy here asserts his moralistic viewpoint as he presents, through Vassenka, the possibility — in parody — for another Anna-Vronsky affair.
