Money going like a drunkard's glasses

Kitty sends Levin to call on the Bols — five minutes, the weather, then leave — and he says he would rather go without dinner for two days than pay a call. Then she says there are only fifty roubles left, and he coughs the cough she knows, which means displeasure with himself over a thing he has been trying to forget: the wheat is to be sold and the mill money drawn in advance. She wishes they had stayed in the country; he says that not once since their marriage has he thought things could be better, and means it. Downstairs Kuzma reports the lame carriage horse, and Levin, who came to Moscow meaning to keep his own horses cheaply and now hires them as well, orders a hired pair. Money has gone the way of a drunkard's glasses: the first hundred-rouble note for liveries he measured against two labourers for a summer, the next against nine chetverts of oats threshed and winnowed, and now the notes fly like wee birds. The rye went fifty kopeks cheaper than he was offered a month ago, and the bank is empty.

The drunkard's three glasses is Tolstoy's account of how town life dissolves a man's arithmetic, and the detail that bites is the labour each note used to stand for — three hundred days of heavy work, oats threshed with sweat and groans. Levin's principle about not selling grain below a price goes without his noticing. The lame horse solved by hiring another is the same surrender in miniature.