nothing, nothing, nothing! No, don’t marry, my dear fellow; don’t marry!” concluded Prince Andréy.
“It seems funny to me,” said Pierre, “that you , you should consider yourself incapable and your life a spoiled life. You have everything before you, everything. And you …”
He did not finish his sentence, but his tone showed how highly he thought of his friend and how much he expected of him in the future.
“How can he talk like that?” thought Pierre. He considered his friend a model of perfection because Prince Andréy possessed in the highest degree just the very qualities Pierre lacked, and which might be best described as strength of will. Pierre was always astonished at Prince Andréy’s calm manner of treating everybody, his extraordinary memory, his extensive reading (he had read everything, knew everything, and had an opinion about everything), but above all at his capacity for work and study. And if Pierre was often struck by Andréy’s lack of capacity for philosophical meditation (to which he himself was particularly addicted), he regarded even this not as a defect but as a sign of strength.