Dolly's household at Ergushovo

Oblonsky has gone to Petersburg to remind the Ministry of his existence, taking all the money in the house and filling his time with races and country visits, while Dolly moves the children to Ergushovo to cut expenses. He had inspected the house in spring when he sold the forest, ordered new cretonne, curtains and a bridge by the lake, and forgotten everything essential. The rain comes through into the nursery the first night; of nine cows none give butter; there are no eggs, no scullery-maid, no women to scrub floors because they are planting potatoes, a restive horse, a bull in the broken garden, wardrobes that open of themselves, no mangle and no ironing board. Dolly despairs. Then Matrena Filimonovna, promising that everything will shape itself, establishes a club under the laburnums with the steward's wife, the village elder and the clerk, and within a week it has. Dolly's cares are the only happiness open to her, and the joys her children give are grains of gold in sand.

A full inventory of domestic failure, itemised because nobody else in the novel would count it as event. Matrena Filimonovna solves in a week what a steward and a husband could not, by drinking tea with the right four people — Tolstoy's clearest picture of how anything actually gets done. The gold among sand is Dolly's own accounting, and it concedes how much sand there is.