“Oh, I don’t know. I feel awkward, ashamed.”

“I know why she’d be ashamed,” said Petya, offended at Natasha’s previous remark, “because she fell in love with that fat fellow in spectacles” (this was how Petya used to describe his namesake, the new Count Bezuhov); “and now she’s in love with that singing fellow” (Petya meant Natasha’s Italian singing- master), “that’s why she’s ashamed.”

“Petya, you’re a stupid,” said Natasha.

“No stupider than you, ma’am,” said nine-year-old Petya, exactly as though he had been an elderly brigadier.

The countess had been prepared by Anna Mihalovna’s hints during dinner. On returning to her room she had sat down in a low chair with her eyes fixed on the miniature of her son, painted on the lid of her snuff-box, and the tears started into her eyes. Anna Mihalovna, with the letter, approached the countess’s room on tiptoe, and stood still at the door.

“Don’t come in,” she said to the old count, who was following her; “later,” and she closed the door after her. The count put his ear to the keyhole, and listened.

At first he heard the sound of indifferent talk, then Anna Mihalovna’s voice alone, uttering a long speech, then a shriek, then silence, then both voices talking at once with joyful intonations, then there were steps, and Anna Mihalovna opened the door. Her face wore the look of pride of an operator who has performed a difficult amputation, and invites the public in to appreciate his skill.

“It is done,” she said to the count triumphantly, motioning him to the countess, who was holding in one hand the snuff-box with the portrait, in the other the letter, and pressing her lips first to one and then to the other. On seeing the count, she held out her arms to him, embraced his bald head, and looked again over the bald head at the letter and the portrait, and in order again to press them to her lips, slightly repelled the bald head from her. Vera, Natasha, Sonya, and Petya came into the room, and the reading of the letter began. The letter briefly described the march and the two battles in which Nikolushka had taken part, and the receiving of his commission, and said that he kissed the hands of his mamma and papa, begging their blessing, and sent kisses to Vera, Natasha, and Petya. He sent greetings, too, to Monsieur Schelling and Madame Schoss, and his old nurse, and begged them to kiss for him his darling Sonya, whom he still loved and thought of the same as ever. On hearing this, Sonya blushed till the tears came into her eyes. And unable to stand the eyes fixed upon her, she ran into the big hall, ran about with a flushed and smiling face, whirled round and round and ducked down, making her skirts into a balloon. The countess was crying.

“What are you crying about, mamma?” said Vera. “From all he writes, we ought to rejoice instead of crying.”

This was perfectly true, but the count and the countess and Natasha all looked at her reproachfully. “And who is it that she takes after!” thought the countess.

Nikolushka’s letter was read over hundreds of times, and those who were considered worthy of hearing it had to come in to the countess, who did not let it go out of her hands. The tutors went in, the nurses, Mitenka, and several acquaintances, and the countess read the letter every time with fresh enjoyment and every time she discovered from it new virtues in her Nikolushka. How strange, extraordinary, and joyful it was to her to think that her son—the little son, whose tiny limbs had faintly stirred within her twenty years ago, for whose sake she had so often quarrelled with the count, who would spoil him, the little son, who had first learnt to say grusha, and then had learnt to say baba—that that son was now in a foreign land, in strange surroundings, a manly warrior, alone without help or guidance, doing there his proper manly work. All the world-wide experience of ages, proving that children do imperceptibly from the cradle grow up into men, did not exist for the countess. The growth of her son had been for her at every stage of his growth just as extraordinary as though millions of millions of men had not grown