“Answer me. Did you know her or not? If you did, tell me what the deuce she was doing with those troublemakers.”

The nonexistent cloud hanging over their heads becomes denser, grayer, darker, a storm cloud. To Giorgi and the footman, the demonstrators aren’t troublemakers. The footman believes that it was a religious procession—innocent, working-class fervor. Giorgi knows more, and he sympathizes with the demonstrators-turned-rebels—but not enough to have joined one of the cells. The grumpy Mercedes chauffeur is insistent.

“The tsar said someone with bad intentions stirred up the workers, there’s no doubt about it. But tell me what Aleksandra was doing there? Why’d she go and get mixed up with—”

The footman interrupts. “Shut up. You know why, it was her brother…. You’ve heard the story a thousand times.”

Silence. The limousine chauffeur wracks his small brain for something to say. There’s no wind; he’s at a loss for words. The horses on Nevsky break the silence; their hooves sound like ice cracking.

It’s these hooves, all the more noticeable for the sudden lull in conversation, that awaken Claudia. Up in Sergei’s room, she doesn’t hear the box being brought inside or the footsteps of the servants carrying it so carefully or the difficulty they have turning the corner in the hall to the study. Giorgi’s small talk (he hasn’t stopped chattering since he returned from taking Sergei to the train station) was like a lullaby, so soothing that not even the sound of the Mercedes’s motor awoke her.

Sergei didn’t wake her up; he left early for Moscow to attend to a personal matter that enrages him, one of the many loose ends left by his uncle Stiva (Prince Oblonski) that concern him because they affect his inheritance. He’s attending to this specific (and tedious) one today because it’s an excuse not to be at home; he hasn’t set eyes on the portrait of Anna Karenina since that time he saw it in front of his house, and he has no intention to either.

Unusually, Claudia has slept late. And she’s surprised to find herself in Sergei’s bed. Suddenly she remembers she brought Anna’s manuscript upstairs. She makes a decision before jumping out of bed, and unusually, without dressing, she sits down at the desk and writes. Carefully, she composes a letter to the director of the Hermitage.

Dear Ivan Vsevolozhsky, we have decided to include, along with the portrait, two books….

Here Claudia hesitates. “If I say two books, is that more confusing?” She decides to and starts over.