When Anna Karenina arrives in Darya Alexandrovna’s room, her sister-in-law is dealing with her youngest son and nervously knitting a coverlet. She has prepared for Anna Karenina’s arrival, despite her depressed state, because she has no reason to blame her for her brother’s behavior and she has never been anything but kind and gracious to her—despite her impression that there was something artificial in Anna Karenina’s family life. Darya Alexandrovna is torn between the need to talk to someone about her problems and sharing her humiliation with her husband’s sister.

Anna Karenina’s greeting is warm, but she is in no hurry to have a private discussion just yet; instead she meets all the children and remembers them by name as well as particulars about each one. When the women are finally alone, Anna Karenina simply says that her brother told her what happened and she is so very sorry for her. Tears glisten in her eyes, and she asks what Darya Alexandrovna is feeling and thinking: “sympathy and love unfeigned” are written on her face.

Darya Alexandrovna explains that when she married her husband she had no idea, in her innocence, that there had ever been other women in his life. Infidelity was something she never thought possible and then, after eight years of thinking that her marriage was perfectly sound, she was confronted with his affair with a governess. She was mortified that he could have gone on being a husband to her while carrying on with another woman, and she tells Anna Karenina that she cannot understand the torment. On the contrary, Anna Karenina says she does understand and then speaks for her brother.

He is a good-natured but proud man, and he is ashamed for the children’s sake but also because he has hurt the woman he loves—a sentiment Anna Karenina guesses will move her sister-in-law, and it does, for a moment. Then she wails in her distress at not knowing how to go on after such a tragedy. Anna Karenina suggests that her brother is the kind of man who gets carries away completely but also repents completely, but she has only been looking at the situation from his point of view. Now she sees Darya Alexandrovna’s true suffering and only wonders if there is enough love still in her heart to forgive her husband for this great wrong.

Darya Alexandrovna begins to despair at the thought of her husband talking about her derisively with the other woman, of his kissing the governess yet coming home to her; Anna Karenina interrupts those thoughts to remind her that Stepan Arkadyevitch has always held his wife in the highest esteem and this was not an infidelity of the heart. Anna Karenina says that she could forgive such a thing, though things could not be the same; she could forgive it as though it had never been. Darya Alexandrovna begins to see that she can forgive and is glad her sister-in-law has come.