Taking six children to Communion

Oblonsky writes asking forgiveness and promising to come, and does not. On the Sunday before St Peter's Day Dolly takes all six children to Communion — she believes privately in the transmigration of souls and little in dogma, but fulfils what the Church asks with her whole heart. Frocks are altered, the governess nearly ruins Tanya's, and Matrena Filimonovna saves it with wedge-shaped pieces and a fichu. Dolly dresses carefully, no longer for her own looks but so as not to spoil the general effect, and is satisfied. In the empty church she feels the peasants' rapture at her children; Lily, having swallowed the bread and wine, asks in English for more. At lunch Grisha is sent without pudding for whistling and weeps at the injustice, and Dolly, going to have him forgiven, finds Tanya feeding him her own share in the window seat. The day ends with mushrooms, bathing, and peasant women who admire her children and laugh at the governess's third petticoat.

The novel's one sustained chapter of ordinary happiness, and it belongs to the woman with the worst marriage in it. Tolstoy builds it from tapes and buttons and wet stockings rather than from sentiment. Tanya's pudding is the only wholly unmixed good act in the book, and it is watched from a doorway and never mentioned again.