He himself played with her like a little boy.
Natasha is clever beyond her age. When she wants to seize something forbidden and you threaten to tell her mother, she at once becomes quiet, but if you simply tell her to stop, she will begin to laugh and continue all the more. When she sees that her father is in an ill-humour she is very quiet and only gazes at him; if he turns to her she laughs loudly and waves her hands.
She fondles him like a grown up person.
I have a queer feeling when I watch her doing this. The child not only seems to love him, but also to pity him, as if she knew and saw something about him which no one else is yet aware of. It is an uncanny feeling, like that which I felt when I saw the father and mother in a dark prophetic mirror.
March 2.
“I know she loves me; she left everything for my sake,” he said once in reference to his wife.
Now that I understand the Tsarevitch better, I no longer can attach all the blame to him only for their hard life together. Both are innocent and both at fault. They are too different, too melancholy, each in their own way. Small common griefs unite, but grief great and intense divides.
They are like two persons seriously ill—wounded—lying on a bed together. They cannot help each other: and the least movement of either causes pain to both.
There are people to whom suffering has become second nature; without it they feel out of their natural element. With such persons thoughts and sentiments once having drooped will droop perpetually, like the branches of a weeping willow. Her Highness is one of these beings.
The Tsarevitch has much grief of his own, and every time he sees his wife, he sees another grief, a grief which cannot be allayed, so he pities her. But love and pity are not one and the same; he who wants to be loved must eschew pity. I know from personal experience what torture it is to pity where no help can be given; at last one begins to dread him for whom pity has so long proved in vain.