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CHAPTER VI

Having thanked Anna Pavlovna for her charming soiree, the guests

began to take their leave.

Pierre was ungainly. Stout, about the average height, broad, with

huge red hands; he did not know, as the saying is, how to enter a

drawing room and still less how to leave one; that is, how to say

something particularly agreeable before going away. Besides this

he was absent-minded. When he rose to go, he took up instead of

his own, the general's three-cornered hat, and held it, pulling

at the plume, till the general asked him to restore it. All his

absent-mindedness and inability to enter a room and converse in

it was, however, redeemed by his kindly, simple, and modest

expression. Anna Pavlovna turned toward him and, with a Christian

mildness that expressed forgiveness of his indiscretion, nodded

and said: "I hope to see you again, but I also hope you will

change your opinions, my dear Monsieur Pierre."