“Little countess!” the count’s voice called from behind the door. “You’re not asleep?” Natásha jumped up, snatched up her slippers, and ran barefoot to her own room.
It was a long time before she could sleep. She kept thinking that no one could understand all that she understood and all there was in her.
“Sónya?” she thought, glancing at that curled-up, sleeping little kitten with her enormous plait of hair. “No, how could she? She’s virtuous. She fell in love with Nikólenka and does not wish to know anything more. Even Mamma does not understand. It is wonderful how clever I am and how … charming she is,” she went on, speaking of herself in the third person, and imagining it was some very wise man—the wisest and best of men—who was saying it of her. “There is everything, everything in her,” continued this man. “She is unusually intelligent, charming … and then she is pretty, uncommonly pretty, and agile—she swims and rides splendidly … and her voice! One can really say it’s a wonderful voice!”
She hummed a scrap from her favorite opera by Cherubini, threw herself on her bed, laughed at the pleasant thought that she would immediately fall asleep, called Dunyásha the maid to put out the candle, and before Dunyásha had left the room had already passed into yet another happier world of dreams, where everything was as light and beautiful as in reality, and even more so because it was different.
Next day the countess called Borís aside and had a talk with him, after which he ceased coming to the Rostóvs’.
XIV
On the thirty-first of December, New Year’s Eve, 1809–10 an old grandee of Catherine’s day was giving a ball and midnight supper. The diplomatic corps and the Emperor himself were to be present.