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By Root 4152 0

honor, and that if he loved Natasha, he could do without the permission of his crackbrained father. For a moment he hesitated whether he should not ask for a leave in order to see Natasha as a fiancée, but then came maneuvers, considerations about Sonya, about the confusion, and Nikolai put it off again. But in the spring of that year he received a letter from his mother, written in secret from the count, and this letter persuaded him to go. She wrote that if Nikolai did not come and take things in hand, their property would be sold at auction, and they would all go begging. The count was so weak, so trusting in Mitenka, and so kind, and everyone deceived him so, that it was all getting worse and worse. “For God’s sake, I beg you, come at once, if you don’t want to make me and your whole family miserable,” wrote the countess.

This letter made an impression on Nikolai. He had that common sense of mediocrity which told him what he ought to do.

Now he ought to go, if not into retirement, then at least on leave. Why he had to go, he did not know; but, having slept after dinner, he gave orders to saddle his gray Mars, a long unridden and terribly ill-tempered stallion, and returning home with the stallion all in a lather, he announced to Lavrushka (Denisov’s footman, who had remained with Rostov) and the comrades who came in the evening that he was taking a leave and going home. Difficult and strange as it was for him to think that he would go without having learned from staff what especially interested him—whether he was to be promoted to captain or get an Anna2 for the last maneuvers; strange as it was to think that he would go without selling to Count Goluchowski a troika of grays that the Polish count wanted to buy, and that Rostov had bet he could sell for two thousand; incomprehensible as it seemed that he would not be at the ball the hussars were to give for Panna Przazdiecka, to spite the uhlans, who were giving a ball for their Panna Borzozowska—he knew that he had to go from this clear, good world to somewhere where everything was nonsense and confusion. A week later the leave came through. The hussars, his comrades not only of the regiment but of the brigade, gave Rostov a subscription dinner that cost them fifteen roubles each—two bands played, two choruses sang songs; Rostov danced the trepak with Major Basov; drunken officers tossed, embraced, and dropped Rostov; the soldiers of the third squadron also tossed him and shouted “Hurrah!” Then Rostov was laid in a sleigh and accompanied to the first posting station.

For half the journey, as always happens, from Kremenchug to Kiev, all Rostov’s thoughts still lay behind him, in his squadron; but having passed the midpoint, he began to forget the troika of grays, his sergeant major, and Panna Borzozowska, and began asking himself uneasily what he would find at Otradnoe and how it would be. The closer he came, the more strongly, far more strongly (as if moral feeling was also subject to the law of attraction, which increases in inverse proportion to the square of the distance), he thought of his home; at the last station before Otradnoe, he gave the driver three roubles for vodka and soon, breathless as a boy, was running up the front porch of the house.

After the raptures of the meeting and after that strange feeling of dissatisfaction compared with what one expected (“it’s all just the same, why was I hurrying so!”), Nikolai began to live his way into his old world of home. His father and mother were the same, only a little older. What was new in them was a sort of anxiety and sometimes disagreement, which had never happened before, and which, as Nikolai soon learned, came from the bad state of their affairs. Sonya was already going on twenty. She had already stopped growing prettier, nothing more was promised than what was there; but even that was enough. She breathed out happiness and love from the moment Nikolai arrived, and the faithful, unshakeable love of this girl had a gladdening effect on him. Petya and Natasha surprised Nikolai most. Petya was now a big,