Oblonsky goes after a soft post

Oblonsky's affairs are bad: the forest money is spent, the merchant will advance no more since Dolly has at last claimed a right to her own property and refused to endorse the receipt, and his salary goes on the household and small pressing bills. The cause, as he understands it, is that his salary is too small — Petrov gets twelve thousand, Mitin fifty. So he has found a soft post, Member of the Committee of the Joint Agency of the Mutual Credit Balance of Southern Railways and Banking Houses, worth seven to ten thousand and needing knowledge no one man could have, and goes to Petersburg with fifty roubles from Dolly. Karenin reads him his article on Russian finance and objects that huge salaries are fixed by personal influence rather than supply and demand, and that honesty is only a negative quality. Oblonsky blushes at the name of Bolgarinov, in whose waiting-room he spent two hours that morning, walking about, smoothing his whiskers and inventing a pun, uncomfortable without knowing why.

Tolstoy gives Karenin the correct analysis of the job Oblonsky wants and Oblonsky the word 'honest' in its Moscow sense, which means capable of annoying the Government. The two hours in Bolgarinov's waiting-room are the chapter's real event: a descendant of Rurik concealing his humiliation from himself with a pun that does not work. Dolly's refusal to endorse the receipt is her first exercise of a legal right.