War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [300]
“I’ve been waiting a long time for you,” this frightened and happy girl seemed to say by her smile, shining through ready tears, as she raised her arm to Prince Andrei’s shoulder. They were the second couple to enter the circle. Prince Andrei was one of the best dancers of his time. Natasha’s dancing was excellent. Her little feet in satin ball slippers did their work quickly, lightly, and independently of herself, and her face shone with the rapture of happiness. Her bared neck and arms were thin and unattractive compared to Hélène’s shoulders. Her shoulders were thin, her bosom undefined, her arms slender; but on Hélène there was already a sort of varnish from all the thousands of gazes that had passed over her body, while Natasha looked like a young girl who was bared for the first time and would have been very ashamed of it, if she had not been assured that it had necessarily to be so.
Prince Andrei liked to dance and, wishing to rid himself quickly of the political and intellectual conversations with which everyone addressed him, and wishing to break quickly this vexatious circle of embarrassment caused by the presence of the sovereign, had gone to dance and had asked Natasha because Pierre had pointed her out to him and because she was the first pretty woman his eyes fell on; but as soon as he put his arm around her slender, mobile, quivering waist, and she began to move so close to him and smile so close to him, the wine of her loveliness went to his head: he felt himself revived and rejuvenated when, catching his breath and leaving her, he stopped and began to look at the dancers.
XVII
After Prince Andrei, Boris came up to Natasha and asked her to dance, then also that dancer adjutant who had opened the ball, and other young men, and Natasha, sending her surplus partners to Sonya, happy and flushed, did not stop dancing all evening. She noticed nothing and did not see any of what interested everyone at this ball. Not only did she not notice how the sovereign had a long talk with the French ambassador, how he talked with particular graciousness with a certain lady, how prince so-and-so did and said such-and-such, how Hélène had great success and was granted the special attentions of so-and-so; she did not even see the sovereign, and noticed that he had gone only because the ball became more animated after his departure. In one of the merry cotillions before supper, Prince Andrei danced again with Natasha. He reminded her of their first meeting in the Otradnoe avenue, and how she could not fall asleep on that moonlit night, and how he involuntarily overheard her. Natasha blushed at this reminder and tried to justify herself, as if there was something shameful in that feeling which Prince Andrei had involuntarily overheard from her.
Prince Andrei, like all people who have grown up in society, liked to encounter things in society that did not have the general society stamp on them. And Natasha was just that, with her astonishment, joy, and timidity, and even her mistakes in French. He treated her and talked to her with particular tenderness and care. Sitting next to her, talking with her about the simplest and most insignificant subjects, Prince Andrei admired the joyful shining of her eyes and smile, which referred not to what they were saying, but to her inner happiness. At those times when Natasha was chosen, and she got up with a smile and danced through the room, Prince Andrei especially admired her timid grace. In the middle of the cotillion, Natasha, having finished a figure, still breathing hard, was going to her seat. A new partner again asked her to dance. She was tired and out of breath, and obviously wanted to refuse, but then again cheerfully raised her arm to her partner’s shoulder and smiled to Prince Andrei.
That smile said: “I’d be glad to rest and sit