the old habits of life without which the count and countess could not conceive of existence remained unchanged. There was still the hunting establishment which Nikoláy had even enlarged, the same fifty horses and fifteen grooms in the stables, the same expensive presents and dinner parties to the whole district on name days; there were still the count’s games of whist and boston, at which—spreading out his cards so that everybody could see them—he let himself be plundered of hundreds of rubles every day by his neighbors, who looked upon an opportunity to play a rubber with Count Ilyá Andréevich as a most profitable source of income.
The count moved in his affairs as in a huge net, trying not to believe that he was entangled but becoming more and more so at every step, and feeling too feeble to break the meshes or to set to work carefully and patiently to disentangle them. The countess, with her loving heart, felt that her children were being ruined, that it was not the count’s fault for he could not help being what he was—that (though he tried to hide it) he himself suffered from the consciousness of his own and his children’s ruin, and she tried to find means of remedying the position. From her feminine point of view she could see only one solution, namely, for Nikoláy to marry a rich heiress. She felt this to be their last hope and that if Nikoláy refused the match she had found for him, she would have to abandon the hope of ever getting matters right. This match was with Julie Karágina, the daughter of excellent and virtuous parents, a girl the Rostóvs had known from childhood, and who had now become a wealthy heiress through the death of the last of her brothers.
The countess had written direct to Julie’s mother in Moscow suggesting a marriage between their children and had received a favorable answer from her. Karágina had replied that for her part she was agreeable, and everything depend on her daughter’s inclination. She invited Nikoláy to come to Moscow.