"You think so?" rejoined Anna Pavlovna in order to say something and
get away to attend to her duties as hostess. But Pierre now
committed a reverse act of impoliteness. First he had left a lady
before she had finished speaking to him, and now he continued to speak
to another who wished to get away. With his head bent, and his big
feet spread apart, he began explaining his reasons for thinking the
abbe's plan chimerical.

"We will talk of it later," said Anna Pavlovna with a smile.

And having got rid of this young man who did not know how to behave,
she resumed her duties as hostess and continued to listen and watch,
ready to help at any point where the conversation might happen to
flag. As the foreman of a spinning mill, when he has set the hands
to work, goes round and notices here a spindle that has stopped or
there one that creaks or makes more noise than it should, and
hastens to check the machine or set it in proper motion, so Anna
Pavlovna moved about her drawing room, approaching now a silent, now a
too-noisy group, and by a word or slight rearrangement kept the
conversational machine in steady, proper, and regular motion. But amid
these cares her anxiety about Pierre was evident. She kept an
anxious watch on him when he approached the group round Mortemart to
listen to what was being said there, and again when he passed to
another group whose center was the abbe.

Pierre had been educated abroad, and this reception at Anna
Pavlovna's was the first he had attended in Russia. He knew that all
the intellectual lights of Petersburg were gathered there and, like
a child in a toyshop, did not know which way to look, afraid of