He hears Sonya and Natasha sing a duet, he hears Sonya try to persuade her cousin to sleep and Natasha's protest:
"Sonya! Sonya! How can you go to sleep? Just see how lovely it is! How lovely! Come wake up, Sonya," she said again with, tears in her voice. "Come, now, such a lovely, lovely night was never seen!"
Prince Andrei meets her again at a ball in St. Petersburg, where her childlike happiness brings a breath of pure air into the artificial atmosphere; Natasha is so completely unaffected that, in the very midst of affectations, she keeps her unspoilt romance.
Prince Andrei proposes for her hand, but the Rostofs' family affairs are in confusion, and Prince Andrei's father insists on a year's delay; for that space of time he goes abroad. Prince Andrei does not find the time of delay unreasonably long, and cannot understand that Natasha should do so, but the girl suffers the dangers of her inexperience; Prince Andrei has roused her to a full consciousness of womanhood, and her sensuous and passionate nature cannot endure the blank of his absence; also, since she is extremely sensitive, she is grieved by the cold attitude his family persistently maintain.
She meets Anatol Kuragin, a man exceedingly handsome but unscrupulous, who at once makes violent love to her; she writes a letter to Prince Andrei breaking off their engagement, and consents to elope with Kuragin, this plan being discovered and frustrated by her family. Natasha wakens from her brief madness, realises how badly she has behaved to her betrothed, and, in her remorse and shame, attempts suicide.
Prince Andrei, returning, learns the whole story; he is stung to the quick in his haughty pride; his spiritual nature makes him totally unable to understand the temptation, and he cannot forgive.
It is Natasha's innate generosity which gives them, however, their last chance of reconciliation; the Rostofs are carting their family property away from Moscow, which is threatened by the French, but there are not sufficient horses to transport the Russian wounded, and Natasha, keenly opposing her mother, demands that the family property shall be sacrificed, and the wounded rescued instead; the Rostofs discover Prince Andrei's presence and forbid Natasha to see him, but her own daring takes her to his side, and there follows the most simple but touching of reconciliations.
Natasha becomes his nurse, and proves the depth of her nature by her skill and tenderness. But the brief time of joy is soon over; Prince Andrei's sufferings are agonising, and he passes away.
Natasha feels bereavement with the same intensity as everything else; she herself seems to sink out of the world; thin and pale and visibly wasting away, she sits for hours in silence, gazing at the place where Prince Andrei has lain. Her family have lost all hope of saving her life, but tragic news arrives; the younger brother—Petya—has been killed in battle, and the mother is mad with grief; she screams for her beloved Natasha, who is the only person who can comfort her, and, in straining every nerve to save her mother's reason, the girl herself is restored to life. She lives again by virtue of those profound and passionate affections which had almost destroyed her. She is so greatly changed, however, that, when Pierre meets her again, he does not know her; he cannot recognise in her thin, pale, and stern face the Natasha of adorable and abounding life; yet the moment he shows that he loves her, the old Natasha, with her radiant joy, flashes back into his view, and she is willing, almost at once, to become Pierre's affianced. To the Princess Mariya, with a nature much less emotional but infinitely more constant, Natasha is a continual marvel, and, though she is glad of her friend's happiness, the Princess grieves at the inconstancy to her brother.
The whole portrait is wonderful in its realism, glowing with vitality and with charm, and, just as in the case of the men, Natasha deepens and changes before our very eyes.