behind. Her bust, which had always to Pierre looked like marble, was so close to his short-sighted eyes that he could discern all the living charm of her neck and shoulders, and so near his lips that he need scarcely have stooped to kiss it. He felt the warmth of her body, the fragrance of scent, and heard the creaking of her corset as she moved. He saw not her marble beauty making up one whole with her gown; he saw and felt all the charm of her body, which was only veiled by her clothes. And having once seen this, he could not see it otherwise, just as we cannot return to an illusion that has been explained.
‘So you have never noticed till now that I am lovely?’ Ellen seemed to be saying. ‘You haven’t noticed that I am a woman? Yes, I am a woman, who might belong to any one—to you, too,’ her eyes said. And at that moment Pierre felt that Ellen not only could, but would become his wife, that it must be so.
He knew it at that moment as surely as he would have known it, standing under the wedding crown beside her. Plow would it be? and when? He knew not, knew not even if it would be a good thing (he had a feeling, indeed, that for some reason it would not), but he knew it would be so.
Pierre dropped his eyes, raised them again, and tried once more to see her as a distant beauty, far removed from him, as he had seen her every day before. But he could not do this. He could not, just as a man who has been staring in a fog at a blade of tall steppe grass and taking it for a tree cannot see a tree in it again, after he has once recognised it as a blade of grass. She was terribly close to him. Already she had power over him. And between him and her there existed no barriers of any kind, but I the barrier of his own will.
‘Very good, I will leave you in your little corner. I see you are very comfortable there,’ said Anna Pavlovna’s voice. And Pierre, trying panic- stricken to think whether he had done anything reprehensible, looked about him,.crimsoning. It seemed to him as though every one knew, as well as he did, what was passing in him. A little later, when he went up to the bigger group, Anna Pavlovna said to him:
‘I am told you are making improvements in your Petersburg house.’ (This was the fact: the architect had told him it was necessary, and Pierre, without knowing with what object, was having his immense house; in Petersburg redeco-rated.) ‘That is all very well, but do not move from Prince Vassily’s. It is a good thing to have such a friend as the prince,’ she said, smiling to Prince Vassily. ‘I know something about that. Don’t I? And you are so young. You need advice. You mustn’t be angry with me for making use of an old woman’s privileges.’ She paused, as women ' always do pause, in anticipation of something, after speaking of their: age. ‘If you marry, it’s a different matter.’ And she united them in one! glance. Pierre did not look at Ellen, nor she at him. But she was still a| terribly close to him.
He muttered something and blushed.
After Pierre had gone home, it was a long while before he could get tch
sleep; he kept pondering on what was happening to him. What was happening? Nothing. Simply he had grasped the fact that a woman, whom he had known as a child, of whom he had-said, without giving her a thought, ‘Yes, she’s nice-looking,’ when he had been told she was a beauty, he had grasped the fact that that woman might belong to him.
