Levin on aristocracy and treasury-bills

Oblonsky comes upstairs with his pockets full of treasury-bills, in the best of spirits and wanting to dispel Levin's temper, which the news that Kitty is unmarried has begun to work on. Levin refuses to shake Ryabinin's hand — the footman is a hundred times better — and is called a reactionary. What hurts him, he says, is the impoverishment of the noblesse, not by extravagance but by simplicity: a Polish leaseholder buying an estate at half value, land worth ten roubles leased for one, thirty thousand made over to a scamp for want of counting trees. Then he redefines aristocracy against Vronsky, whose father crawled up by intrigues, claiming it for families of three or four honourable generations who have never cringed or depended on anyone. Finally, unable to find the form or the moment all evening, he asks where Vronsky is, and then says outright that he proposed, was refused, and that Kitty is a humiliating memory. They agree to shoot at dawn.

Levin's economics and his jealousy are the same speech, which is why Tolstoy lets him deliver them in one breath: the argument about counting trees is really an argument about being slighted. The cake of scented soap stalls the question for a page. Saying the humiliation aloud cures him instantly, and the chapter ends with him restored.