spontaneous, happy, ringing laughter. “And do you know,” she suddenly said, “I know that I shall never again be as happy and tranquil as I am now.”
“Rubbish, nonsense, humbug!” exclaimed Nikoláy, and he thought: “How charming this Natásha of mine is! I have no other friend like her and never shall have. Why should she marry? We might always drive about together!”
“What a darling this Nikoláy of mine is!” thought Natásha.
“Ah, there are still lights in the drawing room!” she said, pointing to the windows of the house that gleamed invitingly in the moist velvety darkness of the night.
VIII
Count Ilyá Andréevich had resigned the position of Marshal of the Nobility because it involved him in too much expense, but still his affairs did not improve. Natásha and Nikoláy often noticed their parents conferring together anxiously and privately and heard suggestions of selling the fine ancestral Rostóv house and estate near Moscow. It was not necessary to entertain so freely as when the count had been Marshal, and life at Otrádnoe was quieter than in former years, but still the enormous house and its lodges were full of people and more than twenty sat down to table every day. These were all their own people who had settled down in the house almost as members of the family, or persons who were, it seemed, obliged to live in the count’s house. Such were Dimmler the musician and his wife, Vogel the dancing master and his family, Belóva, an old maiden lady, an inmate of the house, and many others such as Pétya’s tutors, the girls’ former governess, and other people who simply found it preferable and more advantageous to live in the count’s house than at home. They had not as many visitors as before, but