rtain whether the time had not already come to
put her project into execution.

Often, listening to the pilgrims' tales, she was so stimulated by their
simple speech, mechanical to them but to her so full of deep meaning,
that several times she was on the point of abandoning everything and
running away from home. In imagination she already pictured herself by
Theodosia's side, dressed in coarse rags, walking with a staff, a wallet
on her back, along the dusty road, directing her wanderings from one
saint's shrine to another, free from envy, earthly love, or desire, and
reaching at last the place where there is no more sorrow or sighing, but
eternal joy and bliss.

"I shall come to a place and pray there, and before having time to get
used to it or getting to love it, I shall go farther. I will go on till
my legs fail, and I'll lie down and die somewhere, and shall at last
reach that eternal, quiet haven, where there is neither sorrow nor
sighing..." thought Princess Mary.

But afterwards, when she saw her father and especially little Koko
(Nicholas), her resolve weakened. She wept quietly, and felt that she
was a sinner who loved her father and little nephew more than God.

BOOK SEVEN: 1810 - 11

CHAPTER I

The Bible legend tells us that the absence of labor--idleness--was a
condition of the first man's blessedness before the Fall. Fallen man has
retained a love of idleness, but the curse weighs on the race not only
because we have to seek our bread in the sweat of our brows, but because
our moral nature is such that we cannot be both idle and at ease. An
inner voice tells us we are in the wrong if we are idle. If man could
find a state in which he felt that though idle he was fulfilling his
duty, he would have found one of the conditions of man's primitive
blessedness. And such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness
is the lot of a whole class--the military. The chief attraction of
military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and
irreproachable idleness.

Nicholas Rostov experienced this blissful condition to the full when,
after 1807, he continued to serve in the Pavlograd regiment, in which he
already commanded the squadron he had taken over from Denisov.

Rostov had become a bluff, good-natured fellow, whom his Moscow
acquaintances would have considered rather bad form, but who was liked
and respected by his comrades, subordinates, and superiors, and was we