War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [358]
But the princess, without finishing, began to cry.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me today. Don’t listen to me, forget what I’ve told you.”
All of Pierre’s cheerfulness vanished. He asked the princess worried questions, begged her to tell him everything, to confide her grief to him; but she only repeated that she begged him to forget what she had said, that she did not remember what she had said, that she had no grief except the one he knew—that Prince Andrei’s marriage threatened to make father and son quarrel.
“Have you heard anything about the Rostovs?” she asked in order to change the conversation. “I was told they would be here soon. I also expect André any day. I wish they could see each other here.”
“And how does he look at the matter now?” asked Pierre, meaning the old prince. Princess Marya shook her head.
“But what’s to be done? There are only a few months before the year is out. And it’s bound to happen. I only wish I could spare my brother the first moments. I wish they’d come soon. I hope to become close with her…You’ve known them a long time,” said Princess Marya, “tell me, hand on heart, the whole real truth: what kind of girl is she and how you find her? But the whole truth; because, you understand, Andrei is risking so much in doing this against his father’s will that I’d like to know…”
A vague instinct told Pierre that all these reservations and repeated requests to tell the whole truth expressed Princess Marya’s ill-will towards her future sister-in-law, that she wished Pierre to disapprove of Prince Andrei’s choice; but Pierre said what he felt rather than what he thought.
“I don’t know how to answer your question,” he said, blushing without knowing why himself. “I decidedly don’t know what kind of girl she is; I simply cannot analyze her. She’s enchanting. But why, I don’t know: that’s all one can say about her.”
Princess Marya sighed, and the expression of her face said: “Yes, that’s what I expected and was afraid of.”
“Is she intelligent?” asked Princess Marya. Pierre pondered.
“I don’t think so,” he said, “although—yes. She doesn’t deign to be intelligent…Ah, no, she’s enchanting, that’s all.”
Princess Marya again shook her head disapprovingly…
“Ah, I wish so much to love her! Tell her that if you see her before I do.”
“I’ve heard they’ll be here one of these days,” said Pierre.
Princess Marya told Pierre that she planned, as soon as the Rostovs arrived, to become close with her future sister-in-law and to try to get the old prince used to her.
V
Boris had failed to marry a rich bride in Petersburg and had come with the same purpose to Moscow. In Moscow, Boris hesitated between the two richest brides—Julie and Princess Marya. Though Princess Marya, despite her plainness, seemed more attractive to him than Julie, he found it awkward, for some reason, to court Princess Bolkonsky. During his last meeting with her, on the old prince’s name day, to all his attempts to talk about feelings with her, she had responded beside the point and had obviously not been listening to him.
Julie, on the contrary, though in her own peculiar way, willingly accepted his courtship.
Julie was twenty-seven years old. After the death of her brothers, she had become very rich. She was by now utterly plain, but she thought she was not only as good-looking, but was even far more attractive now than she had been before. She was maintained in this delusion by the fact that, first of all, she had become a very rich bride, and second, that the older she became, the less dangerous she was for men, the more freely men treated her and, without taking any obligations upon themselves, profited from her suppers, soirées, and the lively company that gathered in her house. A man who, ten years before, would have been afraid of going every day to a house where there was a seventeen-year-old girl, so as not to compromise her and bind himself, now boldly came to her every day and treated her not as a prospective bride, but as an acquaintance who had no sex.
That winter the Karagins’ house was the most