“Anna, stop. I’m not discussing that with you. That girl would be an idiot not to dump him. How can she ever trust him again?”

“I don’t think she will, dump him, I mean,” Anna responded. “Lolly loves him. Like, not just in the regular way, but she like loves him–loves him. If she didn’t there’s no way she’d be this upset. She was an absolute wreck. I’m almost positive she’s going to forgive him in the morning.”

Alexander, now bored of this subject, asked Anna if she knew that her school was canceled for the next day. She had known, but for some reason pretended she didn’t. “Really? Oh good, because I’ve been dreading taking the 7:02 A.M. back to Greenwich to make it to Latin by nine. Do you have a snow day, too?”

Alexander chuckled at this. “No, my sweet, college doesn’t get snow days.” Anna felt foolish for a moment, but this passed because how should she know how college operated in a snowstorm? Without pausing for her response, Alexander launched into a very boring story about his Globalization and Private Governance class, so she let her mind wander back to earlier in the evening when she first met Count Vronsky.

She had heard of him before but was positive they had never met until today. She knew plenty about his mother, though, a famous socialite known for her beauty, impeccable style, and many marriages. Mrs. Geneviève R. was her married name now because she had recently wedded her fourth husband, the CEO of the third largest pharmaceutical company in the world. Normally when a woman had multiple divorces she was looked down on by society, but Geneviève was in the rare position of still being held in high regard. (This was most likely due to the fact that each time she married, it was to someone richer and more powerful than her previous husband.) Her picture frequently appeared in Vogue or in the Style section of The New York Times, and Anna had recognized her immediately when she boarded the train.

As far as Anna knew, Mrs. R. had only two sons, both from her first marriage to Mr. Vronsky. Like Anna, Mrs. R. also had show dogs, but hers were Russian wolfhounds. She fell in love with the breed after meeting Vronsky’s Russian father. The two women bonded on the train over their love of giant-breed dogs with tragically short life spans. Anna’s first Newfoundland only lived to the age of nine.