Hearing of the close intimacy between Alexey Alexandrovitch and
Countess Lidia Ivanovna, Anna decided on the third day to write
to her a letter, which cost her great pains, and in which she
intentionally said that permission to see her son must depend on
her husband's generosity. She knew that if the letter were shown
to her husband, he would keep up his character of magnanimity,
and would not refuse her request.

The commissionaire who took the letter had brought her back the
most cruel and unexpected answer, that there was no answer. She
had never felt so humiliated as at the moment when, sending for
the commissionaire, she heard from him the exact account of how
he had waited, and how afterwards he had been told there was no
answer. Anna felt humiliated, insulted, but she saw that from
her point of view Countess Lidia Ivanovna was right. Her
suffering was the more poignant that she had to bear it in
solitude. She could not and would not share it with Vronsky.
She knew that to him, although he was the primary cause of her
distress, the question of her seeing her son would seem a matter
of very little consequence. She knew that he would never be
capable of understanding all the depth of her suffering, that for
his cool tone at any allusion to it she would begin to hate him.
And she dreaded that more than anything in the world, and so she
hid from him everything that related to her son. Spending the
whole day at home she considered ways of seeing her son, and had
reached a decision to write to her husband. She was just
composing this letter when she was handed the letter from Lidia
Ivanovna. The countess's silence had subdued and depressed her,
but the letter, all that she read between the lines in it, so
exasperated her, this malice was so revolting beside her
passionate, legitimate tenderness for her son, that she turned
against other people and left off blaming herself.