‘Two more letters I’ll let through, but the third one I shall read,’ said the prince severely. ‘I’m afraid you must be writing a lot of nonsense. The third one I shall read.’
‘Read this one, Father,’ answered the princess, redder still, and she offered him the letter.
‘The third one, I said the third one,’ the prince cried brusquely, thrusting the letter away before leaning his elbows on the table and bringing up the book with the geometrical figures in it.
‘Now, madam,’ began the old man, poring over the book close to his daughter and placing one arm along the back of the chair she was sitting on, so that the princess felt herself completely swamped by her father and his long-familiar acrid odour of tobacco and old age. ‘Come along, madam, these triangles are equal. Be so good as to note that the angle ABC . . .’
The princess glanced in trepidation at her father’s gleaming eyes so close beside her. More red blotches spread across her face, and she was obviously taking nothing in. So scared was she that fear itself prevented her from understanding any of the explanations her father went on to give, however clear they might have been. Whoever was to blame, teacher or pupil, every day the selfsame scene repeated itself. The princess’s eyes glazed over, she could see and hear nothing, she could feel nothing but the close proximity of her strict father with his desiccated face, stale breath and body odour, and she could think of nothing but how to get away from there as soon as possible and somehow work out the problem in the freedom of her room. The old man would lose patience, scraping his chair backwards and forwards, then struggle to control himself, not to lose his temper, which he almost always did, and then he shouted at her, sometimes flinging the book across the room.
The princess got one of her answers wrong.
‘How can you be so stupid?’ he roared, pushing the book away, and turning from her sharply. But then he got up, paced up and down, laid a hand on the princess’s hair and sat down again. He drew close to the table and went on with his explanations.
‘No, no, you can’t do that,’ he said, as Princess Marya took the exercise-book with the homework in it, closed it and made as if to leave the room. ‘Mathematics is a great subject, madam. And you, being like the silly young ladies of today is something I do not want. Persevere and all will come clear.’ He patted her on the cheek. ‘This will drive the silliness out of your head.’ She tried to get away, but he signalled for her to stop and took a new book with uncut pages38 down from the high desk.
‘And here’s a book from your Héloïse. Hm . . .
He patted her on the shoulder, and went himself to close the door after her.
Princess Marya went back to her room with that gloomy, frightened look that rarely left her, making her sickly, plain face even plainer. She sat down at her desk with its miniature portraits and scattered books and writing paper. The princess was as untidy as her father was tidy. She put down the geometry exercise-book and eagerly tore open the letter. It was from her dearest childhood friend, the very Julie Karagin who had been at the Rostovs’ name-day party, and was written in French:
My dear and excellent friend,
What a terrible and awful thing absence is! I tell myself that half of my existence and happiness is in you, that for all the distance that divides us, our hearts are united by indissoluble bonds, yet my own rebels against destiny, and in spite of the pleasures and distractions that surround me, I cannot overcome a certain secret sadness which I have sensed at the bottom of my heart ever since our separation. Why are we not together as we were last summer in your huge study, on that blue sofa, the ‘sofa of secrets’? Why can I not, as I did three months ago, draw new moral strength from those eyes of yours, so gentle, so calm, so penetrating, eyes that I have loved so well and seem to see before me even as I write.
At this point, Princess Marya sighed and looked around at the tall mirror to her right. The glass reflected a feeble, unattractive body and a skinny face. The ever-gloomy eyes looked at themselves more hopelessly than ever. ‘She’s flattering me,’ thought the princess as she turned back to read on. But Julie was not flattering her friend; her eyes were large, deep and radiant (sometimes a warm light seemed to pour out of them), really so winsome that very often, in spite of the plainness of the face as a whole, her eyes held a greater appeal than mere beauty. But the princess had never seen the beautiful expression in her own eyes, an expression they assumed only when she wasn’t thinking about herself. Like everyone else’s, her face took on a strained, artificial and disagreeable expression the moment she looked at herself in the mirror.
