War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [32]
“Yes, nice, nice children,” agreed the count, who always resolved all tangled questions by finding everything nice. “Just look at him! Decided to be a hussar! Well, what do you want, ma chère!”
“What a sweet creature your younger one is!” said the guest. “A ball of fire!”
“Yes, a ball of fire,” said the count. “She takes after me! And what a voice! Though she’s my daughter, I’ll tell you the truth: she’ll be a singer, another Salomoni. We’ve hired an Italian to teach her.”
“Isn’t it too early? They say it harms the voice to study at that age.”
“Oh, no, not too early at all!” said the count. “How is it, then, that our mothers got married when they were twelve or thirteen?”
“She’s already in love with Boris now! What a one!” said the countess, smiling quietly, looking at Boris’s mother, and, evidently responding to the thought that always preoccupied her, she went on: “Well, so you see, if I were strict with her, if I forbade her…God knows what they’d do on the sly” (the countess meant they would be kissing), “but now I know her every word. She’ll come running to me herself in the evening and tell me everything. I may be spoiling her, but it really seems better. I was strict with the elder one.”
“Yes, I was brought up quite differently,” said the elder one, the beautiful Countess Vera, smiling.
But the smile did not embellish Vera’s face, as usually happens; on the contrary, her face became unnatural and therefore unpleasant. The elder one, Vera, was good-looking, far from stupid, an excellent student, well-brought-up, had a pleasant voice, and what she said was correct and appropriate; but, strangely, everyone, both the guest and the countess, turned to look at her, as if wondering why she had said it, and they felt awkward.
“One is always too clever with the older children, wanting to do something extraordinary,” said the guest.
“There’s no use denying it, ma chère! The dear countess was too clever with Vera,” said the count. “Well, so what! She still turned out nice,” he added, winking at Vera approvingly.
The guests got up and left, promising to come for dinner.
“What manners! They sat and sat!” said the countess, after seeing the guests off.
X
When Natasha left the drawing room and ran off, she ran no further than the conservatory. In that room she stopped, listening to the talk in the drawing room and waiting for Boris to come out. She was already growing impatient and, stamping her little foot, was about to cry because he did not come at once, when she heard the neither slow nor quick, but proper footsteps of the young man. Natasha quickly darted among the tubs of plants and hid herself.
Boris stopped in the middle of the room, looking around, brushed some specks of dust off the sleeve of his uniform with his hand, and went up to a mirror, studying his handsome face. Natasha kept still, peeking from her ambush, waiting to see what he would do. He stood for some time before the mirror, smiled, and walked to the other door. Natasha was about to call him, but then changed her mind.
“Let him search,” she said to herself. As soon as Boris left, the flushed Sonya came from the other door, whispering something spitefully through her tears. Natasha restrained her first impulse to rush out to her and remained in her ambush, as if under the cap of invisibility, observing what went on in the world. She experienced a special new pleasure. Sonya was whispering something and kept looking back at the door of the drawing room. Nikolai came out of that door.
“Sonya! what’s wrong? how can you?” said Nikolai, rushing to her.
“Never mind, never mind, leave me alone!” Sonya burst into sobs.
“No, I know what it is.”
“So you know, and that’s wonderful, and so