He closed his eyes. One image succeeded another. He lingered long and joyfully over one of them. He vividly recalled one evening in Petersburg. Natasha was telling him with an animated, excited face how she had gone to pick mushrooms the previous summer and lost her way in a big forest. She incoherently described to him the dense forest and her feelings, and a talk with a beekeeper she met, and, interrupting herself every moment, said: ‘No, I can’t, I’m not telling it right; no, you don’t understand,’ even though Prince Andrei reassured her, saying that he did understand, and indeed he understood everything she wanted to say. Natasha was displeased with her own words; she sensed that she was not conveying the passionately poetic feeling which she had experienced that day and which she wanted to bring out. ‘He was so lovely, that old man, and it was so dark in the forest…and he had such a kind…No, I don’t know how to tell it,’ she said, flushed and excited. Prince Andrei now smiled the same joyful smile that he had smiled then, looking in her eyes. ‘I understood her,’ thought Prince Andrei.”
- Tolstoy, from “War and Peace”