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Every visitor who came to the house paid his tribute to the melancholy mood of the hostess, and then amused himself with society gossip, dancing, intellectual games, and bouts rimes, which were in vogue at the Karagins'. Only a few of these young men, among them Boris, entered more deeply into Julie's melancholy, and with these she had prolonged conversations in private on the vanity of all worldly things, and to them she showed her albums filled with mournful sketches, maxims, and verses.
On Friday the Rostovs were to return to the country, but on Wednesday the count went with the prospective purchaser to his estate near Moscow. On the day the count left, Sonya and Natasha were invited to a big dinner party at the Karagins', and Marya Dmitrievna took them there.
A man who would have been afraid ten years before of going every day to the house when there was a girl of seventeen there, for fear of compromising her and committing himself, would now go boldly every day and treat her not as a marriageable girl but as a sexless acquaintance. That winter the Karagins' house was the most agreeable and hospitable in Moscow.
He spent every day and whole days at the Karagins', and every day on thinking the matter over told himself that he would propose tomorrow. Julie saw Boris' indecision, and sometimes the thought occurred to her that she was repulsive to him, but her feminine self-deception immediately supplied her with consolation, and she told herself that he was only shy from love.
Kuragin asked her opinion of the performance and told her how at a previous performance Semenova had fallen down on the stage. "And do you know, Countess," he said, suddenly addressing her as an old, familiar acquaintance, "we are getting up a costume tournament; you ought to take part in it! It will be great fun. We shall all meet at the Karagins'! Please come! No! Really, eh?" said he.
"Look at our Anna Mikhaylovna what a headdress she has on!" "The Karagins, Julie and Boris with them. One can see at once that they're engaged...." "Drubetskoy has proposed?" "Oh yes, I heard it today," said Shinshin, coming into the Rostovs' box.
The idea of being made a fool of and of having thrown away that whole month of arduous melancholy service to Julie, and of seeing all the revenue from the Penza estates which he had already mentally apportioned and put to proper use fall into the hands of another, and especially into the hands of that idiot Anatole, pained Boris. He drove to the Karagins' with the firm intention of proposing.
Her melancholy, however, began to turn to irritability, and not long before Boris' departure she formed a definite plan of action. Just as Boris' leave of absence was expiring, Anatole Kuragin made his appearance in Moscow, and of course in the Karagins' drawing room, and Julie, suddenly abandoning her melancholy, became cheerful and very attentive to Kuragin.
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