She puts Anna’s note inside the bound manuscript, which she sets in the box covered with blue cloth, saying, “I’ll read the first book another day, that’s the one that Vorkuyev, the writer and publisher, thought was really good, the one that’s a moral lesson. It can’t be anything like this one. At all.” She closes the box and ties the bow, trying to leave the knot and the creases in the ribbon the way she found them. She puts Vronsky’s calling card back where she found it. She lights the little lamp she brought down from her bedroom and blows out the ones in the study.

She climbs the stairs to the bedrooms much more slowly than usual. Exhausted but aroused (I’m like some crazy old goat), she goes to Sergei’s room instead of her own (I’m certainly not going to sleep alone), where he’s sleeping soundly, smiling, his messy hair curly, not unlike the little boy he used to be, the one Anna adored. Claudia removes her slippers, extinguishes the little lamp, and gets in bed next to Sergei, embracing him. Sergei turns, but he doesn’t notice her and keeps on sleeping. Claudia rolls over, and before she realizes it, she’s asleep.

The first thing Claudia encounters in her dreams is a scene with three women, identical to a carefully posed photograph of the Countess Tolstaya: Sonya (or Sophia), Tolstoy’s wife (she’s one of the three models) feigns spontaneity sitting next to her daughter, with whom she’s just had a bitter argument, and her niece, a born troublemaker, all three forcing smiles and pretending to be sweet, cozy, intimate.

In her dream, as in the photograph, light comes through a window, a harsh light that demands attention, much like the disguised mood of the sitters, who turn away from the corrosive ray and don’t allow it to alter the sweetness Tolstaya is determined to project.

What is this image doing in Claudia’s dream? But Claudia doesn’t ask herself that; she asks, Why am I not always here? This is where I belong, this is where I came from, I want to be with women. And without saying another word, she joins the three women. She becomes frozen like them, but as in Sonya’s photograph, she can feel movement; everything there looks dynamic, cozy, intimate, kind: like an inviting home, with its innate frenzy, its domestic energy, the sweet struggle to maintain order.

Some might specify that now they’re four women, but Claudia doesn’t need to be counted. She just wants to be with them, to be part of their world; it feels so natural to her to join in that gentle atmosphere the three Tolstayas are affecting.