This chapter functions as a precise anatomy of a marriage in terminal collapse. Tolstoy structures the scene around a series of failed communications: Alexey Alexandrovitch's measured, legalistic sentences are repeatedly cut off by Anna's eruptions, dramatising the incommensurability of their emotional registers. His slow, conditional syntax — "I, too, imagine that since he is going away, there is no sort of necessity" — enacts the bureaucratic caution that Anna finds suffocating, while her interruptions reveal a consciousness so saturated with feeling that she already knows "beforehand all he would say."
The chapter's most striking technique is Tolstoy's use of free indirect discourse to give Anna's interior monologue within the narrated scene. When she silently glosses Alexey Alexandrovitch's phrase — "No sort of necessity for a man to come and say good-bye to the woman he loves" — the reader inhabits her perspective without any authorial intrusion, intensifying sympathy for her while simultaneously exposing the self-dramatising quality of her grief. The detail of her eyes dropping to his hands "with their swollen veins" rubbing together is a masterpiece of somatic revulsion: physical disgust becomes the truest measure of emotional estrangement.
The baby subplot is far from incidental. Anna's complaint that she was not permitted to nurse her daughter condenses the novel's broader critique of patriarchal control over women's bodies: even the most intimate maternal act has been regulated by others, and Anna is then blamed for the consequences. The infant's suffering becomes a displaced image of Anna's own deprivation — she too has been denied the nourishment she craved and is now held responsible for the resulting damage.
Alexey Alexandrovitch's closing soliloquy introduces a rare moment of genuine pathos for a character Tolstoy often renders unsympathetically. His recognition of "that mysterious brutal force" — social convention — that overrides his spiritual inclinations anticipates the novel's later philosophical arguments about the tyranny of public opinion. Crucially, he arrives at a position of resigned pragmatism: he would even tolerate a renewed liaison with Vronsky if appearances and the children's legitimacy could be preserved. This willingness to compromise moral principle for social stability is both pitiable and damning, marking him as a man whose tragedy is an excess of social rather than personal identity.
The chapter's spatial symbolism reinforces its thematic content. Anna is first found lying down — prostrate, passive — but sits up "hastily" at his approach, as if bracing for assault. The drawing room where Betsy's social world operates gives way to the bedroom, the most intimate domestic space, yet intimacy here produces only dread. Alexey Alexandrovitch's exit from that room and his subsequent interior monologue in the corridor enact his permanent liminality: he belongs neither to Anna's emotional world nor, as he now senses, to the social world that he has served so faithfully.