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Nicholas' letter was read over hundreds of times, and those who

were considered worthy to hear it had to come to the countess,

for she did not let it out of her hands. The tutors came, and the

nurses, and Dmitri, and several acquaintances, and the countess

reread the letter each time with fresh pleasure and each time

discovered in it fresh proofs of Nikolenka's virtues. How

strange, how extraordinary, how joyful it seemed, that her son,

the scarcely perceptible motion of whose tiny limbs she had felt

twenty years ago within her, that son about whom she used to have

quarrels with the too indulgent count, that son who had first

learned to say "pear" and then "granny," that this son should now

be away in a foreign land amid strange surroundings, a manly

warrior doing some kind of man's work of his own, without help or

guidance. The universal experience of ages, showing that children

do grow imperceptibly from the cradle to manhood, did not exist

for the countess.