Setting out for the marshes

Laska is in the cart before anyone, disapproving of the delay. Veslovsky emerges in new thigh-boots, a new cartridge-belt smelling of leather, the Scotch bonnet and a new English gun; Oblonsky follows in raw hide shoes, linen wound round his feet, tattered trousers and the ruins of a hat, with a gun like a toy and a worn game-bag of the best quality — and Veslovsky grasps for the first time that the stylishness of a real sportsman is rags over excellent equipment. Levin has run back to be forgiven again, to beg Kitty to keep clear of the children, and to arrange that a man ride out tomorrow with a word to say all is well. On the porch he settles the carpenter, who has built a staircase without calculating the elevation and wants to add three steps, and who is convinced only when Levin draws it in the dust with a ramrod. On the road he is ashamed of yesterday: Veslovsky is simple, kind-hearted and jolly, and would have been a friend in bachelor days. Then Veslovsky misses a pocket-book with three hundred and seventy roubles.

Two costumes and one dog establish the whole social grammar of the expedition before a word is spoken. The staircase that goes up and up and just reaches is Tolstoy's best joke about confident incompetence, and it takes a diagram to end it. Levin's affection for Veslovsky returns the moment the man is not in a room with his wife, which is the honest measure of last night's torment.