The call on the Countess Bol

At the Countess Bol's the hall-porter takes his coat before he can escape. He sits with his hat in his hand among the daughters and a Moscow Colonel and produces what everyone has heard hundreds of times about Lucca's talent, while the Countess pretends to listen. The Colonel leaves noisily; Levin rises and, seeing from the Countess's face that it is too soon, sits down again for another minute or two and can think of nothing to say. At last the ladies send mille choses to his wife, and the porter writes his address in a large well-bound book. It is stupid and shaming, he thinks, and everybody does it. At the committee meeting he hears a summary everyone calls interesting, is invited by Sviyazhsky to the Agricultural Society that evening, and meets Oblonsky back from the races. Talking of a foreigner on trial he says that banishing him would be like punishing a pike by throwing it into the water — and remembers afterwards that it is Krylov, passed to him by an acquaintance who had it from a feuilleton.

The call Levin dreaded is exactly as empty as he predicted, and Tolstoy's cruelty is in the timing — he stands up too early and must sit back down. The pike borrowed from a man who borrowed it from a feuilleton is the day's summary: town life reduces him to repeating other people's phrases and forgetting they are not his.