“Is it possible that this hand, that face, those eyes, all this treasure of feminine charm so strange to me now, is it possible that it will one day be mine forever, as familiar to me as I am to myself? … No, that’s impossible! …”
“Goodbye, Count,” she said aloud. “I shall look forward very much to your return,” she added in a whisper.
And these simple words, her look, and the expression on her face which accompanied them, formed for two months the subject of inexhaustible memories, interpretations, and happy meditations for Pierre. “ ‘I shall look forward very much to your return. …’ Yes, yes, how did she say it? Yes, ‘I shall look forward very much to your return.’ Oh, how happy I am! What is happening to me? How happy I am!” said Pierre to himself.
XIX
There was nothing in Pierre’s soul now at all like what had troubled it during his courtship of Elèn.
He did not repeat to himself with a sickening feeling of shame the words he had spoken, or say: “Oh, why did I not say that?” and, “Whatever made me say ‘ Je vous aime ’?” On the contrary, he now repeated in imagination every word that he or Natásha had spoken and pictured every detail of her face and smile, and did not wish to diminish or add anything, but only to repeat it again and again. There was now not a shadow of doubt in his mind as to whether what he had undertaken was right or wrong. Only one terrible doubt sometimes crossed his mind: “Wasn’t it all a dream? Isn’t Princess Márya mistaken? Am I not too conceited and self-confident? I believe all this—and suddenly Princess Márya will tell her, and she will be sure to smile and say: ‘How strange! He must be deluding himself. Doesn’t he know that he is a man, just a man, while I … ? I am something altogether different and higher.’ ”