itself
and runs at once to the arms of its mother or nurse to have the aching
spot rubbed or kissed, and it feels better when this is done. The child
cannot believe that the strongest and wisest of its people have no
remedy for its pain, and the hope of relief and the expression of its
mother's sympathy while she rubs the bump comforts it. The doctors were
of use to Natasha because they kissed and rubbed her bump, assuring her
that it would soon pass if only the coachman went to the chemist's in
the Arbat and got a powder and some pills in a pretty box for a ruble
and seventy kopeks, and if she took those powders in boiled water at
intervals of precisely two hours, neither more nor less.

What would Sonya and the count and countess have done, how would they
have looked, if nothing had been done, if there had not been those pills
to give by the clock, the warm drinks, the chicken cutlets, and all the
other details of life ordered by the doctors, the carrying out of which
supplied an occupation and consolation to the family circle? How would
the count have borne his dearly loved daughter's illness had he not
known that it was costing him a thousand rubles, and that he would not
grudge thousands more to benefit her, or had he not known that if her
illness continued he would not grudge yet other thousands and would take
her abroad for consultations there, and had he not been able to explain
the details of how Metivier and Feller had not understood the symptoms,
but Frise had, and Mudrov had diagnosed them even better? What would the
countess have done had she not been able sometimes to scold the invalid
for not strictly obeying the doctor's orders?

"You'll never get well like that," she would say, forgetting her grief
in her vexation, "if you won't obey the doctor and take your medicine at
the right time! You mustn't trifle with it, you know, or it may turn to
pneumonia," she would go on, deriving much comfort from the utterance of
that foreign word, incomprehensible to others as well as to herself.

What would Sonya have done without the glad consciousness that she had
not undressed during the first three nights, in order to be ready to
carry out all the doctor's injunctions with precision, and that she
still kept awake at night so as not to miss the proper time when the
slightly harmful pills in the little gilt box had to be administered?
Even to Natasha herself it was pleasant to see that so many sacrifices
were being