“There will be more trouble, more persecutions for this.  They may be even closing the University.  There is neither peace nor rest in Russia for one but in the grave.

“Yes.  The way is hard,” came from the daughter, looking straight before her at the Chain of Jura covered with snow, like a white wall closing the end of the street.  “But concord is not so very far off.”

“That is what my children think,” observed Mrs. Haldin to me.

I did not conceal my feeling that these were strange times to talk of concord.  Nathalie Haldin surprised me by saying, as if she had thought very much on the subject, that the occidentals did not understand the situation.  She was very calm and youthfully superior.

“You think it is a class conflict, or a conflict of interests, as social contests are with you in Europe.  But it is not that at all.  It is something quite different.”

“It is quite possible that I don’t understand,” I admitted.

That propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression, is very Russian.  I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all the practical forms of political liberty known to the western world.  I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and hopeless cynicism.  I think sometimes that the psychological secret of the profound difference of that people consists in this, that they detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas we westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its sentimental value.  But this is a digression indeed....

I helped these ladies into the tramcar and they asked me to call in the afternoon.  At least Mrs. Haldin asked me as she climbed up, and her Natalka smiled down at the dense westerner indulgently from the rear platform of the moving car.  The light of the clear wintry forenoon was softened in her grey eyes.

Mr. Razumov’s record, like the open book of fate, revives for me the memory of that day as something startlingly pitiless in its freedom from all forebodings.  Victor Haldin was still with the living, but with the living whose only contact with life is the expectation of death.  He must have been already referring to the last of his earthly affections, the hours of that obstinate silence, which for him was to be prolonged into eternity.  That afternoon the ladies entertained a good many of their compatriots—­more than was usual for them to receive at one time; and the drawing-room on the ground floor of a large house on the Boulevard des Philosophes was very much crowded.

I outstayed everybody; and when I rose Miss Haldin stood up too.  I took her hand and was moved to revert to that morning’s conversation in the street.

“Admitting that we occidentals do not understand the character of your...”  I began.