《War And Peace》　Book8 　CHAPTER XIV
　　　　by Leo Tolstoy

THE MORNING came with daily cares and bustle. Every one got up and began to
move about and to talk; dressmakers came again; again Marya Dmitryevna went out
and they were summoned to tea. Natasha kept uneasily looking round at every one
with wide-open eyes, as though she wanted to intercept every glance turned upon
her. She did her utmost to seem exactly as usual.

After luncheon-it was always her best time-Marya Dmitryevna seated herself in
her own arm-chair and drew Natasha and the old count to her.

"Well, my friends, I have thought the whole matter over now, and I'll tell
you my advice," she began. "Yesterday, as you know, I was at Prince Bolkonsky's;
well, I had a talk with him...He thought fit to scream at me. But there's no
screaming me down! I had it all out with him."

"Well, but what does he mean?" asked the count.

"He's crazy...he won't hear of it, and there's no more to be said. As it is we
have given this poor girl worry enough," said Marya Dmitryevna. "And my advice
to you is, to make an end of it and go home to Otradnoe...and there to
wait."

"Oh no!" cried Natasha.

"Yes, to go home," said Marya Dmitryevna, "and to wait there. If your
betrothed comes here now, there'll be no escaping a quarrel; but alone here
he'll have it all out with the old man, and then come on to you."

Count Ilya Andreitch approved of this suggestion, and at once saw all the
sound sense of it. If the old man were to come round, then it would be better to
visit him at Moscow or Bleak Hills, later on; if not, then the wedding, against
his will, could only take place at Otradnoe.

"And that's perfectly true," said he. "I regret indeed that I ever went to
see him and took her too," said the count.

"No, why regret it? Being here, you could do no less than show him respect.
If he wouldn't receive it, that's his affair," said Marya Dmitryevna, searching
for something in her reticule. "And now the trousseau's ready, what have you to
wait for? What is not ready, I'll send after you. Though I'm sorry to lose you,
still the best thing is for you to go, and God be with you." Finding what she
was looking for in her reticule, she handed it to Natasha. It was a letter from
Princess Marya. "She writes to you. How worried she is, poor thing! She is
afraid you might think she does not like you."

"Well, she doesn't like me," said Natasha.

"Nonsense, don't say so," cried Marya Dmitryevna.

"I won't take any one's word for that, I know she doesn't like me," said
Natasha boldly as she took the letter, and there was a look of cold and angry
resolution in her face, that made Marya Dmitryevna look at her more closely and
frown.

"Don't you answer me like that, my good girl," she said. "If I say so, it's
the truth. Write an answer to her."

Natasha made no reply, and went to her own room to read Princess Marya's
letter.

Princess Marya wrote that she was in despair at the misunderstanding that had
arisen between them. Whatever her father's feelings might be, wrote Princess
Marya, she begged Natasha to believe that she could not fail to love her, as the
girl chosen by her brother, for whose happiness she was ready to make any
sacrifice.

"Do not believe, though," she wrote, "that my father is ill-disposed to you.
He is an old man and an invalid, for whom one must make excuses. But he is
good-hearted and generous, and will come to love the woman who makes his son
happy." Princess Marya begged Natasha, too, to fix a time when she might see her
again.

After reading the letter, Natasha sat down to the writing-table to answer it.
"Dear princess," she began, writing rapidly and mechanically in French, and
there she stopped. What more could she write after what had happened the day
before? "Yes, yes, all that had happened, and now everything was different," she
thought, sitting before the letter she had begun. "Must I refuse him? Must I
really? That's awful!..." And to avoid these horrible thoughts, she went in to
Sonya, and began looking through embroidery designs with her.

After dinner Natasha went to her own room and took up Princess Marya's letter
again. "Can everything be over?" she thought. "Can all this have happened so
quickly and have destroyed all that went before?" She recalled in all its past
strength her love for Prince Andrey, and at the same time she felt that she
loved Kuragin. She vividly pictured herself the wife of Prince Andrey, of her
happiness with him, called up the picture she had so often dwelt on in her
imagination, and at the same time, all aglow with emotion, she recalled every
detail of her interview the previous evening with Anatole.

"Why could not that be as well?" she wondered sometimes in complete
bewilderment. "It's only so that I could be perfectly happy: as it is, I have to
choose, and without either of them I can't be happy. There's one thing," she
thought, "to tell Prince Andrey what has happened; to hide it from him-are
equally impossible. But with him nothing is spoilt. But can I part for
ever from the happiness of Prince Andrey's love, which I have been living on for
so long?"

"Madame," whispered a maid, coming into the room with a mysterious air, "a
man told me to give you this." The girl gave her a letter. "Only for Christ's
sake ..." said the girl, as Natasha, without thinking, mechanically broke the seal
and began reading a love-letter from Anatole, of which she did not understand a
word, but understood only that it was a letter from him, from the man whom she
loved. "Yes, she loved him; otherwise, how could what had happened have
happened? How could a love-letter from him be in her hand?"

With trembling hands Natasha held that passionate love-letter, composed for
Anatole by Dolohov, and as she read it, she found in it echoes of all that it
seemed to her she was feeling herself.

"Since yesterday evening my fate is sealed: to be loved by you or to die.
There is nothing else left for me," the letter began. Then he wrote that he knew
her relations would never give her to him, to Anatole; that there were secret
reasons for that which he could only reveal to her alone; but that if she loved
him, she had but to utter the word Yes, and no human force could hinder
their happiness. Love would conquer all. He could capture her and bear her away
to the ends of the earth.

"Yes, yes, I love him!" thought Natasha, reading the letter over for the
twentieth time, and finding some special deep meaning in every word.

That evening Marya Dmitryevna was going to the Arharovs', and proposed taking
the young ladies with her. Natasha pleaded a headache and stayed at home.