h, there are still lights in the drawingroom!" she said, pointing to
the windows of the house that gleamed invitingly in the moist velvety
darkness of the night.

CHAPTER VIII

Count Ilya Rostov had resigned the position of Marshal of the Nobility
because it involved him in too much expense, but still his affairs did
not improve. Natasha and Nicholas often noticed their parents conferring
together anxiously and privately and heard suggestions of selling the
fine ancestral Rostov house and estate near Moscow. It was not necessary
to entertain so freely as when the count had been Marshal, and life at
Otradnoe was quieter than in former years, but still the enormous house
and its lodges were full of people and more than twenty sat down to
table every day. These were all their own people who had settled down
in the house almost as members of the family, or persons who were, it
seemed, obliged to live in the count's house. Such were Dimmler the
musician and his wife, Vogel the dancing master and his family, Belova,
an old maiden lady, an inmate of the house, and many others such as
Petya's tutors, the girls' former governess, and other people who simply
found it preferable and more advantageous to live in the count's house
than at home. They had not as many visitors as before, but the old
habits of life without which the count and countess could not
conceive of existence remained unchanged. There was still the hunting
establishment which Nicholas had even enlarged, the same fifty horses
and fifteen grooms in the stables, the same expensive presents and
dinner parties to the whole district on name days; there were still the
count's games of whist and boston, at which--spreading out his cards so
that everybody could see them--he let himself be plundered of hundreds
of rubles every day by his neighbors, who looked upon an opportunity to
play a rubber with Count Rostov as a most profitable source of income.

The count moved in his affairs as in a huge net, trying not to believe
that he was entangled but becoming more and more so at every step, and
feeling too feeble to break the meshes or to set to work carefully and
patiently to disentangle them. The countess, with her loving heart, felt
that her children were being ruined, that it was not the count's fault
for he could not help being what he was--that (though he tried to
hide it) he himself suffered from the consciousness of his own and his
children's ruin, and she