The count moved in his affairs as in a huge net, trying not to believe that he was entangled but becoming more and more so at every step, and feeling too feeble to break the meshes or to set to work carefully and patiently to disentangle them. The countess, with her loving heart, felt that her children were being ruined, that it was not the count’s fault for he could not help being what he was⁠—that (though he tried to hide it) he himself suffered from the consciousness of his own and his children’s ruin, and she tried to find means of remedying the position. From her feminine point of view she could see only one solution, namely, for Nikoláy to marry a rich heiress. She felt this to be their last hope and that if Nikoláy refused the match she had found for him, she would have to abandon the hope of ever getting matters right. This match was with Julie Karágina, the daughter of excellent and virtuous parents, a girl the Rostóvs had known from childhood, and who had now become a wealthy heiress through the death of the last of her brothers.