I looked at Juliana. A marvellous change was taking place in my soul. The sad things that, up to then, had oppressed me, now faded away, disappeared, gave place to a salutary feeling that the mere sight of her and of my brother sufficed to awaken in me. She was seated in a careless and nonchalant attitude, holding on her knees a book that I recognized, the book that I had given her some days before, Tolstoï's Peace and War. Truly, all about her, her attitude, her look, breathed sweetness and goodness. And in me an emotion was born similar to that which I should doubtless have felt if, in the same place, beneath the familiar elms, that shed their dead flowers, I had seen Constance, the poor sister, side by side with Federico.
The elms rained thousands of flowers at every breath of the wind. There was, in the white light, a continual and very slow rain of diaphanous, almost impalpable pellicles, that loitered in the air, hesitating, trembling like the wings of dragon-flies, of an indefinable color between green and blond, and whose incessant fall imparted a sensation of vertigo. They fell on Juliana's knees, on her shoulders; from time to time she made a movement to remove one that had ensconced itself in her hair.
"Ah! If Tullio stays at the Badiola," said Federico, addressing her, "we will do great things. We will promulgate the new agrarian laws; we will establish the foundations of the new agricultural constitution... You smile? You also will have your share in our work; we will confide to you the execution of two or three precepts of our Decalogue. You will work like the others. Apropos, Tullio, when shall we commence this novitiate? Your hands are too white. Eh! It is not enough to simply prick them with thorns...."
He spoke gayly, in his clear and strong voice, that immediately inspired every listener with a feeling of security and confidence. He spoke of his old and new projects relative to the interpretation of the primitive Christian law on alimentary labor with a gravity of thought and emotion that tempered that sportive gayety with which he protected himself as with a veil of modesty against the admiration and eulogy of his auditors. In him all appeared simple, easy, spontaneous. This young man, by the sole power of a mind that illumined his inborn virtue, had had, for several years already, the intuition of the social theory that the Moujik Bondareff inspired in Leo Tolstoï. At that time, he had not the least knowledge of Peace and War, the great book that had just appeared in the East.
"Here is a book for you," I said to him, taking the volume from Juliana's knees.
"Thanks; lend it to me. I will read it."
"Do you like it?" I asked Juliana.
"Yes; very much. It is sad and consoling at the same time. I already love Marie Bolkonsky, and Pierre Besoukhow too."
I sat down near her, on a bench. It seemed to me that I was thinking of nothing, that I had not one precise thought; but my soul kept vigil and meditated. There was a manifest contrast between the feeling that sprang from the circumstance, from the neighboring objects, and that which corresponded with Federico's words, with that book, with the names of the characters whom Juliana loved.
The time passed slowly and gently, almost lazily, in this diffused and whitish mist in which the elms gradually shed their flowers. The sound of the piano reached us, muffled, unintelligible, rendering the light more melancholy, cradling, so to speak, the drowsy atmosphere.