wheels
squeaking over the snow. Natasha and Sonya, holding up their dresses,
jumped out quickly. The count got out helped by the footmen, and,
passing among men and women who were entering and the program sellers,
they all three went along the corridor to the first row of boxes.
Through the closed doors the music was already audible.

"Natasha, your hair!..." whispered Sonya.

An attendant deferentially and quickly slipped before the ladies and
opened the door of their box. The music sounded louder and through the
door rows of brightly lit boxes in which ladies sat with bare arms and
shoulders, and noisy stalls brilliant with uniforms, glittered before
their eyes. A lady entering the next box shot a glance of feminine envy
at Natasha. The curtain had not yet risen and the overture was being
played. Natasha, smoothing her gown, went in with Sonya and sat down,
scanning the brilliant tiers of boxes opposite. A sensation she had not
experienced for a long time--that of hundreds of eyes looking at
her bare arms and neck--suddenly affected her both agreeably and
disagreeably and called up a whole crowd of memories, desires and
emotions associated with that feeling.

The two remarkably pretty girls, Natasha and Sonya, with Count Rostov
who had not been seen in Moscow for a long time, attracted general
attention. Moreover, everybody knew vaguely of Natasha's engagement to
Prince Andrew, and knew that the Rostovs had lived in the country ever
since, and all looked with curiosity at a fiancee who was making one of
the best matches in Russia.

Natasha's looks, as everyone told her, had improved in the country, and
that evening thanks to her agitation she was particularly pretty. She
struck those who saw her by her fullness of life and beauty, combined
with her indifference to everything about her. Her black eyes looked at
the crowd without seeking anyone, and her delicate arm, bare to
above the elbow, lay on the velvet edge of the box, while, evidently
unconsciously, she opened and closed her hand in time to the music,
crumpling her program. "Look, there's Alenina," said Sonya, "with her
mother, isn't it?"

"Dear me, Michael Kirilovich has grown still stouter!" remarked the
count.

"Look at our Anna Mikhaylovna--what a headdress she has on!"

"The Karagins, Julie--and Boris with them. One can see at once that
they're engaged...."

"Drubetskoy has proposed?"

"Oh yes, I heard it today," said Shinshin, coming into the R