he stopped her with a gesture
“Well, you are too stupid!” cried the prince, pushing away the book, and turning sharply away. But he got up immediately, walked up and down, laid his hand on the princess’s hair, and sat down again. He drew himself up to the table and continued his explanations. “This won’t do; it won’t do,” he said, when Princess Marya, taking the exercise-book with the lesson set her, and shutting it, was about to leave the room: “mathematics is a grand subject, madam. And to have you like the common run of our silly misses is what I don’t want at all. Patience, and you’ll get to like it.” He patted her on the cheek. “It will drive all the nonsense out of your head.” She would have gone; he stopped her with a gesture, and took a new, uncut book from the high table.
“Here’s a book, too, your Heloise sends you some sort of Key to the Mystery. Religious. But I don’t interfere with any one’s belief…. I have looked at it. Take it. Come, run along, run along.”
He patted her on the shoulder, and himself closed the door after her.
Princess Marya went back to her own room with that dejected, scared expression that rarely left her, and made her plain, sickly face even plainer. She sat down at her writing-table, which was dotted with miniature portraits, and strewn with books and manuscripts. The princess was as untidy as her father was tidy. She put down the geometry exercise-book and impatiently opened the letter. The letter was from the princess’s dearest friend from childhood; this friend was none other than Julie Karagin, who had been at the Rostovs’ name-day party.
Julie wrote in French:
“DEAR AND EXCELLENT FRIEND,—What a terrible and frightful thing is absence! I say to myself that half of my existence and of my happiness is in you, that notwithstanding the distance that separates us, our hearts are united by invisible bonds; yet mine rebels against destiny, and in spite of the pleasures and distractions around me, I cannot overcome a certain hidden sadness which I feel in the bottom of my heart since our separation. Why are we not together as we were this summer in your great study, on the blue sofa, the confidential sofa? Why can I not, as I did three months ago, draw new moral strength from that gentle, calm, penetrating look of yours, a look that I loved so well and that I seem to see before me as I write to you.”
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