The riding party on the road

A curly-headed old peasant with bast round his head gives directions to Vozdvizhensk and lingers to talk; then the party itself comes down the road — Vronsky with his jockey, Veslovsky and Anna on horseback, Princess Barbara and Sviyazhsky in a char-a-banc, back from watching the new reaping machines. Anna rides in front on a small English cob, and Dolly, who thinks for a moment that riding is unsuitable to a woman in her position, is reconciled at once by the simple quiet dignity of it. Anna jumps down unaided and runs to the calèche. Dolly's face shows displeasure at Princess Barbara, her husband's aunt, a lifelong hanger-on now living in a stranger's house — and Anna blushes and stumbles on her habit. Sviyazhsky glances at the ill-matched horses and the patched mud-guard and offers seats in the char-a-banc. What strikes Dolly most is the temporary beauty that comes to women in moments of love, which Anna has and knows she has. The peasants take up their scythes.

Tolstoy brings the whole establishment down one road so Dolly can appraise it in a paragraph, and gives the coachman Philip his own verdict on the raven trotter — good for a promenade, not forty versts in a day. Princess Barbara's presence tells Dolly what the household is before anyone speaks. The peasants watching and going back to work close the chapter from outside the frame.