t possible setting for this strikingly poetic, charming girl,
overflowing with life!"

In Natasha Prince Andrew was conscious of a strange world completely
alien to him and brimful of joys unknown to him, a different world,
that in the Otradnoe avenue and at the window that moonlight night had
already begun to disconcert him. Now this world disconcerted him no
longer and was no longer alien to him, but he himself having entered it
found in it a new enjoyment.

After dinner Natasha, at Prince Andrew's request, went to the clavichord
and began singing. Prince Andrew stood by a window talking to the ladies
and listened to her. In the midst of a phrase he ceased speaking and
suddenly felt tears choking him, a thing he had thought impossible for
him. He looked at Natasha as she sang, and something new and joyful
stirred in his soul. He felt happy and at the same time sad. He had
absolutely nothing to weep about yet he was ready to weep. What about?
His former love? The little princess? His disillusionments?... His hopes
for the future?... Yes and no. The chief reason was a sudden, vivid
sense of the terrible contrast between something infinitely great and
illimitable within him and that limited and material something that he,
and even she, was. This contrast weighed on and yet cheered him while
she sang.

As soon as Natasha had finished she went up to him and asked how he
liked her voice. She asked this and then became confused, feeling that
she ought not to have asked it. He smiled, looking at her, and said he
liked her singing as he liked everything she did.

Prince Andrew left the Rostovs' late in the evening. He went to bed from
habit, but soon realized that he could not sleep. Having lit his candle
he sat up in bed, then got up, then lay down again not at all troubled
by his sleeplessness: his soul was as fresh and joyful as if he had
stepped out of a stuffy room into God's own fresh air. It did not enter
his head that he was in love with Natasha; he was not thinking about
her, but only picturing her to himself, and in consequence all life
appeared in a new light. "Why do I strive, why do I toil in this narrow,
confined frame, when life, all life with all its joys, is open to me?"
said he to himself. And for the first time for a very long while he
began making happy plans for the future. He decided that he must attend
to his son's education by finding a tutor and putting the boy in his
charge, then he ought to retir