Darya Alexandrovna, by Levin's advice, started before daybreak.
The road was good, the carriage comfortable, the horses trotted
along merrily, and on the box, besides the coachman, sat the
counting-house clerk, whom Levin was sending instead of a groom
for greater security. Darya Alexandrovna dozed and waked up only
on reaching the inn where the horses were to be changed.

After drinking tea at the same well-to-do peasant's with whom
Levin had stayed on the way to Sviazhsky's, and chatting with the
women about their children, and with the old man about Count
Vronsky, whom the latter praised very highly, Darya Alexandrovna,
at ten o'clock, went on again. At home, looking after her
children, she had no time to think. So now, after this journey
of four hours, all the thoughts she had suppressed before rushed
swarming into her brain, and she thought over all her life as she
never had before, and from the most different points of view.
Her thoughts seemed strange even to herself. At first she
thought about the children, about whom she was uneasy, although
the princess and Kitty (she reckoned more upon her) had promised
to look after them. "If only Masha does not begin her naughty
tricks, if Grisha isn't kicked by a horse, and Lily's stomach
isn't upset again!" she thought. But these questions of the
present were succeeded by questions of the immediate future. She
began thinking how she had to get a new flat in Moscow for the
coming winter, to renew the drawing room furniture, and to make
her elder girl a cloak. Then questions of the more remote future
occurred to her: how she was to place her children in the world.
"The girls are all right," she thought; "but the boys?"