men as much in love with you? And he’s very nice, very, very nice! Only not quite to my liking—he’s so narrow, somehow, like a clock on the wall.… Don’t you understand?…Narrow, you know, grey, light-coloured…”

“What nonsense you talk!” said the countess.

Natasha went on:

“Don’t you really understand? Nikolenka would understand…Bezuhov now—he’s blue, dark blue and red, and he’s quadrangular.”

“You’re flirting with him, too,” said the countess, laughing.

“No, he’s a freemason, I have heard. He’s jolly, dark blue and red; how am I to explain to you…”

“Little countess,” they heard the count’s voice through the door, “you’re not asleep?” Natasha skipped up, snatched up her slippers, and ran barefoot to her own room. For a long while she could not go to sleep. She kept musing on no one’s being able to understand all she understood and all that was in her.

“Sonya?” she wondered, looking at her friend asleep, curled up like a kitten with her great mass of hair. “No, how could she! She’s virtuous. She’s in love with Nikolenka and doesn’t care to know anything more. Mamma, even she doesn’t understand. It’s wonderful how clever I am and how…she is charming,” she went on, speaking of herself in the third person, and fancying that it was some very clever, the very cleverest and finest of men, who was saying it of her… “There is everything, everything in her,” this man continued, “extraordinarily clever, charming and then pretty, extraordinarily pretty, graceful. She swims, rides capitally, and a voice!—a marvellous voice, one may say!” She hummed her favourite musical phrase from an opera of Cherubini, flung herself into bed, laughed with delight at the thought that she would soon be asleep, called to Dunyasha to blow out the candle; and before Dunyasha had left her room she had already passed into another still happier world of dreams, where everything was as easy and as beautiful as in reality, and was only better because it was all different.