m perfectly,
remember everything?" said Natasha, with an expressive gesture,
evidently wishing to give her words a very definite meaning. "I remember
Nikolenka too, I remember him well," she said. "But I don't remember
Boris. I don't remember him a bit."

"What! You don't remember Boris?" asked Sonya in surprise.

"It's not that I don't remember--I know what he is like, but not as I
remember Nikolenka. Him--I just shut my eyes and remember, but Boris...
No!" (She shut her eyes.) "No! there's nothing at all."

"Oh, Natasha!" said Sonya, looking ecstatically and earnestly at her
friend as if she did not consider her worthy to hear what she meant to
say and as if she were saying it to someone else, with whom joking was
out of the question, "I am in love with your brother once for all and,
whatever may happen to him or to me, shall never cease to love him as
long as I live."

Natasha looked at Sonya with wondering and inquisitive eyes, and said
nothing. She felt that Sonya was speaking the truth, that there was such
love as Sonya was speaking of. But Natasha had not yet felt anything
like it. She believed it could be, but did not understand it.

"Shall you write to him?" she asked.

Sonya became thoughtful. The question of how to write to Nicholas, and
whether she ought to write, tormented her. Now that he was already an
officer and a wounded hero, would it be right to remind him of herself
and, as it might seem, of the obligations to her he had taken on
himself?

"I don't know. I think if he writes, I will write too," she said,
blushing.

"And you won't feel ashamed to write to him?"

Sonya smiled.

"No."

"And I should be ashamed to write to Boris. I'm not going to."

"Why should you be ashamed?"

"Well, I don't know. It's awkward and would make me ashamed."

"And I know why she'd be ashamed," said Petya, offended by Natasha's
previous remark. "It's because she was in love with that fat one in
spectacles" (that was how Petya described his namesake, the new Count
Bezukhov) "and now she's in love with that singer" (he meant Natasha's
Italian singing master), "that's why she's ashamed!"

"Petya, you're a stupid!" said Natasha.

"Not more stupid than you, madam," said the nine-year-old Petya, with
the air of an old brigadier.

The countess had been prepared by Anna Mikhaylovna's hints at dinner.
On retiring to her own room, she sat in an armchair, her eyes fixed on a
miniature portrait of her son on the