We guard the fire

In the crowded smoking room the leaders direct the impending battle while the rank and file eat and pace. Levin, who will not join his own set because Vronsky is standing in it, sits at the window with a toothless old man in naval uniform, the only two uninterested people there. He falls in with the grey-moustached landowner from Sviyazhsky's, who says the Nobility is an obsolete institution acting through inertia, that the uniforms prove it — an assembly of Justices of the Peace and officials, not nobles — and that he comes from habit, for his connections, and because his son-in-law wants a permanent membership. Still, he says, a century-old tree, rugged and old, is not cut down for a flower-bed; it takes a thousand years to grow. Both men farm at about five per cent, counting their own labour at nothing, and cannot say why they go on. A merchant would fell a thousand limes for bast and lease the land at a profit. 'We guard the fire,' says the landowner: the peasant ploughs bad land at a loss for the same reason.

The only conversation of the elections that means anything happens at a window between two men who are losing money. Tolstoy gives the reactionary landowner the century-old tree and the guarded fire, and makes them better arguments than anything said at the Provincial table. Levin's vestals — living without gain, as if appointed — is the nearest he has come to naming what he does.