The gathering at the governor’s consisted of the best society in Voronezh.

There were a great many ladies, among them several Moscow acquaintances of Nikolay’s; but among the men there was no one who could be compared with the cavalier of St. George, the gallant hussar, the good-natured, well-bred Count Rostov. Among the men there was an Italian prisoner—an officer of the French army; and Nikolay felt that the presence of this prisoner gave an added lustre to him—the Russian hero. He was, as it were, a trophy of victory. Nikolay felt this, and it seemed to him as though every one looked at the Italian in the same light, and he treated the foreign officer with gracious dignity and reserve.

As soon as Nikolay came in in his full-dress uniform of an officer of hussars, diffusing a fragrance of scent and wine about him, and said himself and heard several times said to him, the words, “Better late than never,” people clustered round him. All eyes were turned on him, and he felt at once that he had stepped into a position that just suited him in a provincial town—a position always agreeable, but now after his long privation of such gratifications, intoxicatingly delightful—that of a universal favourite. Not only at the posting-stations, at the taverns, and in the smoking-room of the horse-breeding gentleman, had he found servant-girls flattered by his attention, but here, at the governor’s assembly, there were (so it seemed to Nikolay) an inexhaustible multitude of young married ladies and pretty girls, who were only waiting with impatience for him to notice them. The ladies and the young girls flirted with him, and the old people began even from this first evening bestirring themselves to try and get this gallant young rake of an hussar married and settled down. Among the latter was the governor’s wife herself, who received Rostov as though he were a near kinsman, and called him “Nikolay.”

Katerina Petrovna did in fact proceed to play waltzes and écossaises, and dancing began, in which Nikolay fascinated the company more than ever by his elegance. He surprised every one indeed by his peculiarly free and easy style in dancing. Nikolay was a little surprised himself at his own style of dancing at that soirée. He had never danced in that manner at Moscow, and would indeed have regarded such an extremely free and easy manner of dancing as not correct, as bad style; but here he felt it incumbent on him to astonish them all by something extraordinary, something that they would be sure to take for the usual thing in the capital, though new to them in the provinces.

All the evening Nikolay paid the most marked attention to a blue-eyed, plump, and pleasing little blonde, the wife of one of the provincial officials. With the naïve conviction of young men who are enjoying themselves, that other men’s wives are created for their special benefit, Rostov never left this lady’s side, and treated her husband in a friendly way, almost as though there were a private understanding between them, as though they knew without speaking of it how capitally they, that is, how Nikolay and the wife, would get on. The husband did not, however, appear to share this conviction, and tried to take a gloomy tone with Rostov. But Nikolay’s good-humoured naïveté was so limitless that at times the husband could not help being drawn into his gay humour. Towards the end of the evening, however, as the wife’s face grew more flushed and animated, the husband’s grew steadily more melancholy and stolid, as though they had a given allowance of liveliness between them, and as the wife’s increased, the husband’s dwindled.