household met together, they
began to express their opinions of him as people always do after a new
acquaintance has left, but as seldom happens, no one said anything but
what was good of him.

CHAPTER XV

When returning from his leave, Rostov felt, for the first time, how
close was the bond that united him to Denisov and the whole regiment.

On approaching it, Rostov felt as he had done when approaching his home
in Moscow. When he saw the first hussar with the unbuttoned uniform of
his regiment, when he recognized red-haired Dementyev and saw the
picket ropes of the roan horses, when Lavrushka gleefully shouted to his
master, "The count has come!" and Denisov, who had been asleep on his
bed, ran all disheveled out of the mud hut to embrace him, and the
officers collected round to greet the new arrival, Rostov experienced
the same feeling as when his mother, his father, and his sister had
embraced him, and tears of joy choked him so that he could not speak.
The regiment was also a home, and as unalterably dear and precious as
his parents' house.

When he had reported himself to the commander of the regiment and had
been reassigned to his former squadron, had been on duty and had gone
out foraging, when he had again entered into all the little interests
of the regiment and felt himself deprived of liberty and bound in one
narrow, unchanging frame, he experienced the same sense of peace, of
moral support, and the same sense of being at home here in his own
place, as he had felt under the parental roof. But here was none of
all that turmoil of the world at large, where he did not know his right
place and took mistaken decisions; here was no Sonya with whom he ought,
or ought not, to have an explanation; here was no possibility of going
there or not going there; here there were not twenty-four hours in the
day which could be spent in such a variety of ways; there was not that
innumerable crowd of people of whom not one was nearer to him or farther
from him than another; there were none of those uncertain and undefined
money relations with his father, and nothing to recall that terrible
loss to Dolokhov. Here, in the regiment, all was clear and simple.
The whole world was divided into two unequal parts: one, our Pavlograd
regiment; the other, all the rest. And the rest was no concern of
his. In the regiment, everything was definite: who was lieutenant, who
captain, who was a good fellow, who a bad one, and mos