She knew those verses and loved them, but was not guided by them. All her nature was an expression of that thought; all her life was this one unconscious weaving of invisible roses in the lives of those with whom she came in contact. She had followed her husband to Siberia only because she loved him; she had not thought what she could do for him, and instinctively had done everything. She had made his bed, had put away his things, had prepared his dinner and his tea, and, above all, had always been where he was, and no woman could have given more happiness to her husband.
In the drawing-room the samovár was boiling on the round table. Natálya Nikoláevna sat near it. Sónya wrinkled her face and smiled under her mother's hand, which was tickling her, when father and son, with wrinkled finger-tips and glossy cheeks and foreheads (the father's bald spot was particularly glistening), with fluffy white and black hair, and with beaming countenances, entered the room.
"It has grown brighter since you have come in," said Natálya Nikoláevna. "O Lord, how white you are!"
She had been saying that each Saturday, for several decades, and each Saturday Pierre experienced bashfulness and delight, whenever he heard that. They seated themselves at the table; there was an odour of tea and of the pipe, and there were heard the voices of the parents, the children, and the servants, who received their cups in the same room. They recalled everything funny that had happened on the road, admired Sónya's hair-dressing, and laughed. Geographically they were all transferred a distance of five thousand versts, into an entirely different, strange milieu, but morally they were that evening still at home, just such as the peculiar, long, solitary family life had made them to be. It will not be so to-morrow. Peter Ivánovich seated himself near the samovár, and lighted his pipe. He was not in a cheerful mood.
"So here we are," he said, "and I am glad that we shall not see any one to-night; this is the last evening we shall pass with the family," and he washed these words down with a large mouthful of tea.
"Why the last, Pierre?"
"Why? Because the eaglets have learned to fly, and they have to make their own nests, and from here they will fly each in a different direction—"
"What nonsense!" said Sónya, taking his glass from him, and smiling at him, as she smiled at everything. "The old nest is good enough!"
"The old nest is a sad nest; the old man did not know how to make it,—he was caught in a cage, and in the cage he reared his young ones, and was let out only when his wings no longer would hold him up. No, the eaglets must make their nests higher up, more auspiciously, nearer to the sun; that is what they are his children for, that his example might serve them; but the old one will look on, so long as he is not blind, and will listen, when he becomes blind— Pour in some rum, more, more—enough!"