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Bors remembered Natsha in a short dress, with dark eyes shining from under her curls and boisterous, childish laughter, as he had known her four years before; and so he was taken aback when quite a different Natsha entered, and his face expressed rapturous astonishment. This expression on his face pleased Natsha.
“Well, do you recognize your little madcap playmate?” asked the countess.
Bors kissed Natsha’s hand and said that he was astonished at the change in her.
“How handsome you have grown!”
“I should think so!” replied Natsha’s laughing eyes.
“And is Papa older?” she asked.
Natsha sat down and, without joining in Bors’ conversation with the countess, silently and minutely studied her childhood’s suitor. He felt the weight of that resolute and affectionate scrutiny and glanced at her occasionally.
Bors’ uniform, spurs, tie, and the way his hair was brushed were all comme il faut and in the latest fashion. This Natsha noticed at once. He sat rather sideways in the armchair next to the countess, arranging with his right hand the cleanest of gloves that fitted his left hand like a skin, and he spoke with a particularly refined compression of his lips about the amusements of the highest Petersburg society, recalling with mild irony old times in Moscow and Moscow acquaintances. It was not accidentally, Natsha felt, that he alluded, when speaking of the highest aristocracy, to an ambassador’s ball he had attended, and to invitations he had received from N.N. and S.S.
All this time Natsha sat silent, glancing up at him from under her brows. This gaze disturbed and confused Bors more and more. He looked round more frequently toward her, and broke off in what he was saying. He did not stay more than ten minutes, then rose and took his leave. The same inquisitive, challenging, and rather mocking eyes still looked at him. After his first visit Bors said to himself that Natsha attracted him just as much as ever, but that he must not yield to that feeling, because to marry her, a girl almost without fortune, would mean ruin to his career, while to renew their former relations without intending to marry her would be dishonorable. Bors made up his mind to avoid meeting Natsha, but despite that resolution he called again a few days later and began calling often and spending whole days at the Rostvs’. It seemed to him that he ought to have an explanation with Natsha and tell her that the old times must be forgotten, that in spite of everything... she could not be his wife, that he had no means, and they would never let her marry him. But he failed to do so and felt awkward about entering on such an explanation. From day to day he became more and more entangled. It seemed to her mother and Snya that Natsha was in love with Bors as of old. She sang him his favorite songs, showed him her album, making him write in it, did not allow him to allude to the past, letting it be understood how delightful was the present; and every day he went away in a fog, without having said what he meant to, and not knowing what he was doing or why he came, or how it would all end. He left off visiting Hlne and received reproachful notes from her every day, and yet he continued to spend whole days with the Rostvs.
One night when the old countess, in nightcap and dressing jacket, without her false curls, and with her poor little knob of hair showing under her white cotton cap, knelt sighing and groaning on a rug and bowing to the ground in prayer, her door creaked and Natsha, also in a dressing jacket with slippers on her bare feet and her hair in curlpapers, ran in. The countess—her prayerful mood dispelled—looked round and frowned. She was finishing her last prayer: “Can it be that this couch will be my grave?” Natsha, flushed and eager, seeing her mother in prayer, suddenly checked her rush, half sat down, and unconsciously put out her tongue as if chiding herself. Seeing that her mother was still praying she ran on tiptoe to the bed and, rapidly slipping one little foot against the other, pushed off her slippers and jumped onto the bed the countess had feared might become her grave. This couch was high, with a feather bed and five pillows each smaller than the one below. Natsha jumped on it, sank into the feather bed, rolled over to the wall, and began snuggling up the bedclothes as she settled down, raising her knees to her chin, kicking out and laughing almost inaudibly, now covering herself up head and all, and now peeping at her mother. The countess finished her prayers and came to the bed with a stern face, but seeing, that Natsha’s head was covered, she smiled in her kind, weak way.
“Now then, now then!” said she.
“Mamma, can we have a talk? Yes?” said Natsha. “Now, just one on your throat and another... that’ll do!” And seizing her mother round the neck, she kissed her on the throat. In her behavior to her mother Natsha seemed rough, but she was so sensitive and tactful that however she clasped her mother she always managed to do it without hurting her or making her feel uncomfortable or displeased.
“Well, what is it tonight?” said the mother, having arranged her pillows and waited until Natsha, after turning over a couple of times, had settled down beside her under the quilt, spread out her arms, and assumed a serious expression.
These visits of Natsha’s at night before the count returned from his club were one of the greatest pleasures of both mother, and daughter.
“What is it tonight?—But I have to tell you...”
Natsha put her hand on her mother’s mouth.
“About Bors... I know,” she said seriously; “that’s what I have come about. Don’t say it—I know. No, do tell me!” and she removed her hand. “Tell me, Mamma! He’s nice?”
“Natsha, you are sixteen. At your age I was married. You say Bors is nice. He is very nice, and I love him like a son. But what then?... What are you thinking about? You have quite turned his head, I can see that....”
As she said this the countess looked round at her daughter. Natsha was lying looking steadily straight before her at one of the mahogany sphinxes carved on the corners of the bedstead, so that the countess only saw her daughter’s face in profile. That face struck her by its peculiarly serious and concentrated expression.
Natsha was listening and considering.
“Well, what then?” said she.
“You have quite turned his head, and why? What do you want of him? You know you can’t marry him.”
“Why not?” said Natsha, without changing her position.
“Because he is young, because he is poor, because he is a relation... and because you yourself don’t love him.”
