Excuse me, goodbye!” and suddenly she began to cry and was hurrying from the room.
“Princess, for God’s sake!” he exclaimed, trying to stop her. “Princess!”
She turned round. For a few seconds they gazed silently into one another’s eyes—and what had seemed impossible and remote suddenly became possible, inevitable, and very near.
VII
In the winter of 1813 Nikoláy married Princess Márya and moved to Bald Hills with his wife, his mother, and Sónya.
Within four years he had paid off all his remaining debts without selling any of his wife’s property, and having received a small inheritance on the death of a cousin he paid his debt to Pierre as well.
In another three years, by 1820, he had so managed his affairs that he was able to buy a small estate adjoining Bald Hills and was negotiating to buy back Otrádnoe—that being his pet dream.
Having started farming from necessity, he soon grew so devoted to it that it became his favorite and almost his sole occupation. Nikoláy was a plain farmer: he did not like innovations, especially the English ones then coming into vogue. He laughed at theoretical treatises on estate management, disliked factories, the raising of expensive products, and the buying of expensive seed corn, and did not make a hobby of any particular part of the work on his estate. He always had before his mind’s eye the estate as a whole and not any particular part of it. The chief thing in his eyes was not the nitrogen in the soil, nor the oxygen in the air, nor manures, nor special plows, but that most important agent by which nitrogen, oxygen, manure, and plow were made effective—the peasant laborer. When Nikoláy first began farming and began to understand its