Masks Off, Hearts Revealed — War and Peace

Pelagéya Danílovna Melyukóva, broadly built and energetic in spectacles, is keeping her daughters from dullness with melted wax in snow when hussars, ladies, witches, clowns, and bears wipe hoarfrost in the vestibule and crowd the ballroom. She cannot recognize Dimmler, the Rostóvs, her own daughters, or her late husband's dressing gowns. She asks her governess who the Kazán-Tartar is, offers fruit jelly to the Turk because that is not forbidden by his law, and shakes with kindly elderly laughter at Sásha's capers. After Russian country dances she makes serfs and gentry join one large circle with a ring, a string, and a silver ruble.

In an hour costumes are crumpled and cork smeared on flushed faces. At supper an old maid who lives with the Melyukóvs tells of a young lady who laid a table in an empty bathhouse, met an officer-shaped visitor, hid her face, and was nearly carried off before the maids ran in. Sónya asks how one tells fortunes in a barn: hammering is bad, shifting grain is good. She volunteers at once, saying she is not afraid of anything. Nicholas has not left her side. The burnt-cork mustache seems to have taught him who she is; he thinks what a fool he has been, gazing at a rapturous smile he has never seen before.

They hand her a fur cloak. She glances at him and goes out the back way, told not to look back. Nicholas, claiming the house is too hot, runs round by snow-covered firewood and lime-tree shadows to the path to the barn, whose log walls sparkle as if hewn from stone. A tree snaps with frost. He hears an old maidservant say straight along the path, and Sónya answer that she is not afraid. A couple of paces away she sees him in a woman's dress, tousled and smiling, not the Nicholas she has always slightly feared. They kiss on lips that smell of burnt cork. She presses her hands to his cheeks. They run to the barn and back, re-entering by separate doors while the party still roars inside.