many happy returns of your name
day," said the visitor. "What a charming child," she added, addressing
the mother.

This black-eyed, wide-mouthed girl, not pretty but full of life--with
childish bare shoulders which after her run heaved and shook her
bodice, with black curls tossed backward, thin bare arms, little legs
in lace-frilled drawers, and feet in low slippers--was just at that
charming age when a girl is no longer a child, though the child is not
yet a young woman. Escaping from her father she ran to hide her
flushed face in the lace of her mother's mantilla--not paying the least
attention to her severe remark--and began to laugh. She laughed, and in
fragmentary sentences tried to explain about a doll which she produced
from the folds of her frock.

"Do you see?... My doll... Mimi... You see..." was all Natasha managed
to utter (to her everything seemed funny). She leaned against her mother
and burst into such a loud, ringing fit of laughter that even the prim
visitor could not help joining in.

"Now then, go away and take your monstrosity with you," said the mother,
pushing away her daughter with pretended sternness, and turning to the
visitor she added: "She is my youngest girl."

Natasha, raising her face for a moment from her mother's mantilla,
glanced up at her through tears of laughter, and again hid her face.

The visitor, compelled to look on at this family scene, thought it
necessary to take some part in it.

"Tell me, my dear," said she to Natasha, "is Mimi a relation of yours? A
daughter, I suppose?"

Natasha did not like the visitor's tone of condescension to childish
things. She did not reply, but looked at her seriously.

Meanwhile the younger generation: Boris, the officer, Anna Mikhaylovna's
son; Nicholas, the undergraduate, the count's eldest son; Sonya, the
count's fifteen-year-old niece, and little Petya, his youngest boy,
had all settled down in the drawing room and were obviously trying to
restrain within the bounds of decorum the excitement and mirth that
shone in all their faces. Evidently in the back rooms, from which they
had dashed out so impetuously, the conversation had been more amusing
than the drawing-room talk of society scandals, the weather, and
Countess Apraksina. Now and then they glanced at one another, hardly
able to suppress their laughter.

The two young men, the student and the officer, friends from childhood,
were of the same age and both handsome fellows, t