‘No, prince, our regiment has gone to the front. But I’m attached. What is it I’m attached to, papa?’ Anatole turned to his father with a laugh.
‘He is a credit to the service, a credit. What is it I’m attached to! Ha-ha-ha!’ laughed the old prince, and Anatole laughed still louder.
Suddenly the old prince frowned. ‘Well, you can go,’ he said to Anatole. With a smile Anatole returned to the ladies.
‘So you had him educated abroad, Prince Vassily? Eh?’ said the old prince to Prince Vassily.
‘I did what I could, and I assure you the education there is far better than ours.’
‘Yes, nowadays everything’s different, everything’s new-fashioned. A fine fellow! a fine fellow! Well, come to my room.’ He took Prince Vassily’s arm and led him away to his study.
Left alone with the old prince, Prince Vassily promptly made known to him his wishes and his hopes.
‘Why, do you imagine,’ said the old prince wrathfully, ‘that I keep her, that I can’t part with her? What an idea!’ he protested angrily. ‘I am ready for it to-morrow! Only, I tell you, I want to know my future son-in-law better. You know my principles: everything open! To-morrow I will ask her in your presence; if she wishes it, let him stay on. Let him stay on, and I’ll see.’ The prince snorted. ‘Let her marry, it’s nothing to me,’ he screamed in the piercing voice in which he had screamed at saying good-bye to his son.
‘I will be frank with you,’ said Prince' Vassily in the tone of a crafty man, who is convinced of the uselessness of being crafty with so penetrating a companion. ‘You see right through people, I know. Anatole is not a genius, but a straightforward, good-hearted lad, good as a son or a kinsman.’
‘Well, well, very good, we shall see.’
As is always the case with women who have for a long while been living a secluded life apart from masculine society, on the appearance of Anatole on the scene, all the three women in Prince Nikolay Andreivitch’s house felt alike that their life had not been real life till then. Their powers of thought, of feeling, of observation, were instantly redoubled. It seemed as though their life had till then been passed in darkness, and was all at once lighted up by a new brightness that was full of significance.
Princess Marya did not remember her face and her coiffure. The handsome, open face of the man who might, perhaps, become her husband, absorbed her whole attention. She thought him kind, brave, resolute, manly, and magnanimous. She was convinced of all that. Thousands of dreams of her future married life were continually floating into her imagination. She drove them away and tried to disguise them.
‘But am I not too cold with him?’ thought Princess Marya. ‘I try to check myself, because at the bottom of my heart I feel myself too close to him. But of course he doesn’t know all I think of him, and may imagine I don’t like him.’
And she tried and knew not how to be cordial to him.
‘The poor girl is devilish ugly,’ Anatole was thinking about her.
Mademoiselle Bourienne, who had also been thrown by Anatole’s arrival into a high state of excitement, was absorbed in reflections of a different order. Naturally, a beautiful young girl with no defined position
in society, without friends or relations, without even a country of her own, did not look forward to devoting her life to waiting on Prince Nikolay Andreivitch, to reading him books and being a friend to Princess Marya. Mademoiselle Bourienne had long been looking forward to the Russian prince, who would have the discrimination to discern her superiority to the ugly, badly dressed, ungainly Russian princesses—who would fall in love with her and bear her away. And now this Russian prince at last had come. Mademoiselle Bourienne knew a story she had heard from her aunt, and had finished to her own taste, which she loved to go over in her own imagination. It was the story of how a girl had been seduced, and her poor mother (sa pauvre mere) had appeared to her and reproached her for yielding to a man’s allurements without marriage. Mademoiselle was often touched to tears, as in imagination she told ‘him,’ her seducer, this tale. Now this ‘he,’ a real Russian prince, had appeared. He would elope with her, then ‘my poor mother' would come on the scene, and he would marry her. This was how all her future history shaped itself in Mademoiselle Bourienne’s brain at the very moment when she was talking to him of Paris. Mademoiselle Bourienne was not guided by calculations (she did not even consider for one instant what she would do), but it had all been ready within her long before, and now it all centred about Anatole as soon as he appeared, and she wished and tried to attract him as much as possible.
The little princess, like an old warhorse hearing the blast of the trumpet, was prepared to gallop off into a flirtation as her habit was, unconsciously forgetting her position, with no ulterior motive, no struggle, nothing but simple-hearted, frivolous gaiety in her heart.
