When she was a young, sentimental girl, Countess Lidia Ivanovna was married to a wealthy man of high rank. Though he was jovial and good-natured, he was also an “extremely dissipated rake” who abandoned her just two months after the marriage. When the countess protested passionately and professed her love for him, her husband mocked her and was even hostile. People who knew his good heart and her sentimental nature were at a loss to explain why the couple got divorced. They lived apart and he had his freedom, yet every time the husband met the wife he invariably treated her malignantly, though she never understood why.

The countess has long ago given up being in love with her husband, but since then she has not given up being in love with someone. Often she is in love with several people at once, both men and women. Almost everyone who has lived a rather distinguished life has been the object of her love: the new princes and princesses who married into the royal family; several dignitaries of the church; a journalist, a doctor, a missionary; and Alexey Alexandrovitch.

Despite her fluctuating emotions, Lidia Ivanovna is able to maintain the complicated relations with the court and with fashionable society. After Alexey Alexandrovitch’s trouble, she takes him “under her special protection” and feels as if her other relationships are not true love. Now she is genuinely in love with only one person, and her feelings for Alexey Alexandrovitch seem stronger to her than any of her former feelings of love. She analyzes her feeling for each former love and justifies her feelings for them; her conclusion is that she only fell in love with each of them due to some act or circumstance. She loves Alexey Alexandrovitch only for himself.

Lidia Ivanovna loves Alexey Alexandrovitch for (to her) his lofty soul; his sweet, high voice; his weary eyes; his character; and his “soft white hands with their swollen veins.” She is always overjoyed to see him, but she is also eager to read in his face the impact she is having on his life. She tries to please him with her whole person, so she has begun lavishing even greater care on her dress. She finds herself dreaming about what might have been if both of them had been free earlier in life, and she blushes whenever he says anything amiable to her.

For the past few days, the countess has been upset because she has heard that Anna Karenina and Vronsky are in St. Petersburg. It is now her goal that Alexey Alexandrovitch be spared having to see them or run into them unexpectedly. Finally she hears that they are leaving the next day and she is able to calm down a bit—until she receives a letter from Anna Karenina. In what the countess considers a “free and easy manner,” Anna Karenina wants to see her son and asks the countess to speak to Alexey Alexandrovitch on her behalf, confident that he will accede to her request.

The countess tells the messenger there is no reply and then writes Alexey Alexandrovitch a note (which she does several times a day) requesting that he meet her to talk about a ”grave and painful subject.”