“It’s probably the work of Vines,” said Pierre, mentioning a celebrated miniature painter. He bent over the table to take the snuff-box, listening all the while to the conversation going on in the larger group. He got up to move towards it, but the aunt handed him the snuff-box, passing it across Ellen, behind her back. Ellen bent forward to make room, and looked round smiling. She was, as always in the evening, wearing a dress cut in the fashion of the day, very low in the neck both in front and behind. Her bust, which had always to Pierre looked like marble, was so close to his short-sighted eyes that he could discern all the living charm of her neck and shoulders, and so near his lips that he need scarcely have stooped to kiss it. He felt the warmth of her body, the fragrance of scent, and heard the creaking of her corset as she moved. He saw not her marble beauty ****** up one whole with her gown; he saw and felt all the charm of her body, which was only veiled by her clothes. And having once seen this, he could not see it otherwise, just as we cannot return to an illusion that has been explained.
“So you have never noticed till now that I am lovely？” Ellen seemed to be saying. “You haven’t noticed that I am a woman？ Yes, I am a woman, who might belong to any one—to you, too,” her eyes said. And at that moment Pierre felt that Ellen not only could, but would become his wife, that it must be so.
He knew it at that moment as surely as he would have known it, standing under the wedding crown beside her. How would it be？ and when？ He knew not, knew not even if it would be a good thing （he had a feeling, indeed, that for some reason it would not）, but he knew it would be so.
Pierre dropped his eyes, raised them again, and tried once more to see her as a distant beauty, far removed from him, as he had seen her every day before. But he could not do this. He could not, just as a man who has been staring in a fog at a blade of tall steppe grass and taking it for a tree cannot see a tree in it again, after he has once recognised it as a blade of grass. She was terribly close to him. Already she had power over him. And between him and her there existed no barriers of any kind, but the barrier of his own will.
“Very good, I will leave you in your little corner. I see you are very comfortable there,” said Anna Pavlovna’s voice. And Pierre, trying panic-stricken to think whether he had done anything reprehensible, looked about him, crimsoning. It seemed to him as though every one knew, as well as he did, what was passing in him. A little later, when he went up to the bigger group, Anna Pavlovna said to him：
“I am told you are ****** improvements in your Petersburg house.” （This was the fact： the architect had told him it was necessary, and Pierre, without knowing with what object, was having his immense house in Petersburg redecorated.） “That is all very well, but do not move from Prince Vassily’s. It is a good thing to have such a friend as the prince,” she said, smiling to Prince Vassily. “I know something about that. Don’t I？ And you are so young. You need advice. You mustn’t be angry with me for ****** use of an old woman’s privileges.” She paused, as women always do pause, in anticipation of something, after speaking of their age. “If you marry, it’s a different matter.” And she united them in one glance. Pierre did not look at Ellen, nor she at him. But she was still as terribly close to him.
He muttered something and blushed.
After Pierre had gone home, it was a long while before he could get to sleep; he kept pondering on what was happening to him. What was happening？ Nothing. Simply he had grasped the fact that a woman, whom he had known as a child, of whom he had said, without giving her a thought, “Yes, she’s nice-looking,” when he had been told she was a beauty, he had grasped the fact that that woman might belong to him. “But she’s stupid, I used to say myself that she was stupid,” he thought. “There is something nasty in the feeling she excites in me, something not legitimate. I have been told that her brother, Anatole, was in love with her, and she in love with him, that there was a regular scandal, and that’s why Anatole was sent away. Her brother is Ippolit.…Her father is Prince Vassily.…That’s bad,” he mused; and at the very moment that he was reflecting thus （the reflections were not followed out to the end） he caught himself smiling, and became conscious that another series of reflections had risen to the surface across the first, that he was at the same time meditating on her worthlessness, and dreaming of how she would be his wife, how she might love him, how she might become quite different, and how all he had thought and heard about her might be untrue. And again he saw her, not as the daughter of Prince Vassily, but saw her whole body, only veiled by her grey gown. “But, no, why didn’t that idea ever occur to me before？” And again he told himself that it was impossible, that there would be something nasty, unnatural, as it seemed to him, and dishonourable in this marriage. He recalled her past words and looks, and the words and looks of people, who had seen them together. He remembered the words and looks of Anna Pavlovna, when she had spoken about his house, he recollected thousands of such hints from Prince Vassily and other people, and he was overwhelmed with terror that he might have bound himself in some way to do a thing obviously wrong, and not what he ought to do. But at the very time that he was expressing this to himself, in another part of his mind her image floated to the surface in all its womanly beauty.