Vronsky, listening with half an ear, moved his opera glasses from the stalls and scanned the boxes. Near a lady in a turban and a bald old man, who seemed to blink angrily in the moving opera glasses, Vronsky suddenly caught sight of Anna's head, proud, strikingly beautiful, and smiling in its 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 Iashvin. 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 toward 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 glasses 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. Iashvin's face wore the expression which was common when he was losing at cards. Scowling, he sucked the left tip 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 Kartassovs. Vronsky knew them, and knew that Anna was acquainted with them. Madame Kartassova, 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. Kartassov, 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 Iashvin, whose cropped head was bent down to her. Kartassov went out without making his salutation, and the box was left empty.

Vronsky could not understand exactly what had passed between the Kartassovs and Anna, but he saw that something humiliating for Anna had happened. He knew this both from what he had seen, and most of all from the face of Anna, who, he could see, was taxing every nerve to carry through the part she had taken up. And in maintaining this attitude of external composure she was completely successful. Anyone who did not know her and her circle, who had not heard all the utterances of the women expressive of commiseration, indignation and amazement, that she should show herself in society, and show herself so conspicuously with her lace and her beauty, would have admired the serenity and loveliness of this woman without a suspicion that she was undergoing the sensations of a man in the stocks.

Knowing that something had happened, but not knowing precisely what, Vronsky felt a thrill of agonizing anxiety, and hoping to find out something, he went toward his brother's box. Purposely choosing the way round farthest from Anna's box, he jostled as he came out against the colonel of his old regiment, talking to two acquaintances. Vronsky heard the name of Karenin, and noticed how the colonel hastened to address Vronsky loudly by name, with a meaning glance at his companions.

`Ah, Vronsky! When are you coming to the regiment? We can't let you off without a supper. You're our - one of the most thorough,' said the colonel of his regiment.

`I can't stop, awfully sorry, another time,' said Vronsky, and he ran upstairs toward his brother's box.

The old countess, Vronsky's mother, with her steel-gray curls, was in his brother's box. Varia with the young Princess Sorokina met him in the corridor.

Leaving the Princess Sorokina with her mother, Varia held out her hand to her brother-in-law, and began immediately to speak of what interested him. She was more excited than he had ever seen her.

`I think it's mean and hateful, and Madame Kartassova had no right to do it. Madame Karenina...' she began.