She was gazing where she knew him to be; but she could not imagine him otherwise than as he had been here. She now saw him again as he had been at Mytíshchi, at Tróitsa, and at Yaroslávl.
She saw his face, heard his voice, repeated his words and her own, and sometimes devised other words they might have spoken.
There he is lying back in an armchair in his velvet cloak, leaning his head on his thin pale hand. His chest is dreadfully hollow and his shoulders raised. His lips are firmly closed, his eyes glitter, and a wrinkle comes and goes on his pale forehead. One of his legs twitches just perceptibly, but rapidly. Natásha knows that he is struggling with terrible pain. “What is that pain like? Why does he have that pain? What does he feel? How does it hurt him?” thought Natásha. He noticed her watching him, raised his eyes, and began to speak seriously:
“One thing would be terrible,” said he: “to bind oneself forever to a suffering man. It would be continual torture.” And he looked searchingly at her. Natásha as usual answered before she had time to think what she would say. She said: “This can’t go on—it won’t. You will get well—quite well.”
She now saw him from the commencement of that scene and relived what she had then felt. She recalled his long sad and severe look at those words and understood the meaning of the rebuke and despair in that protracted gaze.
“I agreed,” Natásha now said to herself, “that it would be dreadful if he always continued to suffer. I said it then only because it would have been dreadful for him, but he understood it differently. He thought it would be dreadful for me. He then still wished to live and feared death. And I said it so awkwardly and stupidly! I did not say what I meant. I thought quite differently. Had I said what I thought, I should have said: even if he had to go on dying, to die continually before my eyes, I should have been happy compared with what I am now. Now there is nothing …