other.  In our circumstances it is almost a crime against humanity.  The luxury of private grief is not for us.  Nowadays the devil is not combated by prayers and fasting.  And what is fasting after all but starvation.  You must not starve yourself, Natalia Victorovna.  Strength is what we want.  Spiritual strength, I mean.  As to the other kind, what could withstand us Russians if we only put it forth?  Sin is different in our day, and the way of salvation for pure souls is different too.  It is no longer to be found in monasteries but in the world, in the...”

The deep sound seemed to rise from under the floor, and one felt steeped in it to the lips.  Miss Haldin’s interruption resembled the effort of a drowning person to keep above water.  She struck in with an accent of impatience—­

“But, Peter Ivanovitch, I don’t mean to retire into a monastery.  Who would look for salvation there?”

“I spoke figuratively,” he boomed.

“Well, then, I am speaking figuratively too.  But sorrow is sorrow and pain is pain in the old way.  They make their demands upon people.  One has got to face them the best way one can.  I know that the blow which has fallen upon us so unexpectedly is only an episode in the fate of a people.  You may rest assured that I don’t forget that.  But just now I have to think of my mother.  How can you expect me to leave her to herself...?”

“That is putting it in a very crude way,” he protested in his great effortless voice.

Miss Haldin did not wait for the vibration to die out.

“And run about visiting amongst a lot of strange people.  The idea is distasteful for me; and I do not know what else you may mean?”

He towered before her, enormous, deferential, cropped as close as a convict and this big pinkish poll evoked for me the vision of a wild head with matted locks peering through parted bushes, glimpses of naked, tawny limbs slinking behind the masses of sodden foliage under a cloud of flies and mosquitoes.  It was an involuntary tribute to the vigour of his writing.  Nobody could doubt that he had wandered in Siberian forests, naked and girt with a chain.  The black broadcloth coat invested his person with a character of austere decency—­something recalling a missionary.

“Do you know what I want, Natalia Victorovna?” he uttered solemnly.  “I want you to be a fanatic.”

“A fanatic?”

“Yes.  Faith alone won’t do.”

His voice dropped to a still lower tone.  He raised for a moment one thick arm; the other remained hanging down against his thigh, with the fragile silk hat at the end.

“I shall tell you now something which I entreat you to ponder over carefully.  Listen, we need a force that would move heaven and earth—­nothing less.”

The profound, subterranean note of this “nothing less” made one shudder, almost, like the deep muttering of wind in the pipes of an organ.

“And are we to find that force in the salon of Madame de S—?  Excuse me, Peter Ivanovitch, if I permit myself to doubt it.  Is not that lady a woman of the great world, an aristocrat?”