then, but he could no longer do it. He could not, any more
than a man who has been looking at a tuft of steppe grass through the
mist and taking it for a tree can again take it for a tree after he has
once recognized it to be a tuft of grass. She was terribly close to him.
She already had power over him, and between them there was no longer any
barrier except the barrier of his own will.

"Well, I will leave you in your little corner," came Anna Pavlovna's
voice, "I see you are all right there."

And Pierre, anxiously trying to remember whether he had done anything
reprehensible, looked round with a blush. It seemed to him that everyone
knew what had happened to him as he knew it himself.

A little later when he went up to the large circle, Anna Pavlovna said
to him: "I hear you are refitting your Petersburg house?"

This was true. The architect had told him that it was necessary, and
Pierre, without knowing why, was having his enormous Petersburg house
done up.

"That's a good thing, but don't move from Prince Vasili's. It is good to
have a friend like the prince," she said, smiling at Prince Vasili. "I
know something about that. Don't I? And you are still so young. You need
advice. Don't be angry with me for exercising an old woman's privilege."

She paused, as women always do, expecting something after they have
mentioned their age. "If you marry it will be a different thing," she
continued, uniting them both in one glance. Pierre did not look at
Helene nor she at him. But she was just as terribly close to him. He
muttered something and colored.

When he got home he could not sleep for a long time for thinking of what
had happened. What had happened? Nothing. He had merely understood that
the woman he had known as a child, of whom when her beauty was
mentioned he had said absent-mindedly: "Yes, she's good looking," he had
understood that this woman might belong to him.

"But she's stupid. I have myself said she is stupid," he thought. "There
is something nasty, something wrong, in the feeling she excites in me.
I have been told that her brother Anatole was in love with her and she
with him, that there was quite a scandal and that that's why he was sent
away. Hippolyte is her brother... Prince Vasili is her father... It's
bad...." he reflected, but while he was thinking this (the reflection
was still incomplete), he caught himself smiling and was conscious
that another line of thought had sprung up, and while