new how to keep them. Her whole
house was scrubbed and cleaned on Saturdays; neither she nor the
servants worked, and they all wore holiday dress and went to church. At
her table there were extra dishes at dinner, and the servants had vodka
and roast goose or suckling pig. But in nothing in the house was the
holiday so noticeable as in Marya Dmitrievna's broad, stern face, which
on that day wore an invariable look of solemn festivity.

After Mass, when they had finished their coffee in the dining room
where the loose covers had been removed from the furniture, a servant
announced that the carriage was ready, and Marya Dmitrievna rose with
a stern air. She wore her holiday shawl, in which she paid calls, and
announced that she was going to see Prince Nicholas Bolkonski to have an
explanation with him about Natasha.

After she had gone, a dressmaker from Madame Suppert-Roguet waited
on the Rostovs, and Natasha, very glad of this diversion, having shut
herself into a room adjoining the drawing room, occupied herself trying
on the new dresses. Just as she had put on a bodice without sleeves and
only tacked together, and was turning her head to see in the glass how
the back fitted, she heard in the drawing room the animated sounds of
her father's voice and another's--a woman's--that made her flush. It
was Helene. Natasha had not time to take off the bodice before the door
opened and Countess Bezukhova, dressed in a purple velvet gown with
a high collar, came into the room beaming with good-humored amiable
smiles.

"Oh, my enchantress!" she cried to the blushing Natasha. "Charming! No,
this is really beyond anything, my dear count," said she to Count Rostov
who had followed her in. "How can you live in Moscow and go nowhere? No,
I won't let you off! Mademoiselle George will recite at my house
tonight and there'll be some people, and if you don't bring your lovely
girls--who are prettier than Mademoiselle George--I won't know you! My
husband is away in Tver or I would send him to fetch you. You must come.
You positively must! Between eight and nine."

She nodded to the dressmaker, whom she knew and who had curtsied
respectfully to her, and seated herself in an armchair beside the
looking glass, draping the folds of her velvet dress picturesquely. She
did not cease chattering good-naturedly and gaily, continually praising
Natasha's beauty. She looked at Natasha's dresses and praised them, as
well as a new dress of her own m