It was as if she had been prepared for me by some mysterious fore-knowledge.  She checked me gently—­

“Their impulses—­their...” she sought the proper expression and found it, but in French..."their mouvements d’ame.”

Her voice was not much above a whisper.

“Very well,” I said.  “But still we are looking at a conflict.  You say it is not a conflict of classes and not a conflict of interests.  Suppose I admitted that.  Are antagonistic ideas then to be reconciled more easily—­can they be cemented with blood and violence into that concord which you proclaim to be so near?”

She looked at me searchingly with her clear grey eyes, without answering my reasonable question—­my obvious, my unanswerable question.

“It is inconceivable,” I added, with something like annoyance.

“Everything is inconceivable,” she said.  “The whole world is inconceivable to the strict logic of ideas.  And yet the world exists to our senses, and we exist in it.  There must be a necessity superior to our conceptions.  It is a very miserable and a very false thing to belong to the majority.  We Russians shall find some better form of national freedom than an artificial conflict of parties—­which is wrong because it is a conflict and contemptible because it is artificial.  It is left for us Russians to discover a better way.”

Mrs. Haldin had been looking out of the window.  She turned upon me the almost lifeless beauty of her face, and the living benign glance of her big dark eyes.

“That’s what my children think,” she declared.

“I suppose,” I addressed Miss Haldin, “that you will be shocked if I tell you that I haven’t understood—­I won’t say a single word; I’ve understood all the words....  But what can be this era of disembodied concord you are looking forward to.  Life is a thing of form.  It has its plastic shape and a definite intellectual aspect.  The most idealistic conceptions of love and forbearance must be clothed in flesh as it were before they can be made understandable.”

I took my leave of Mrs. Haldin, whose beautiful lips never stirred.  She smiled with her eyes only.  Nathalie Haldin went with me as far as the door, very amiable.

“Mother imagines that I am the slavish echo of my brother Victor.  It is not so.  He understands me better than I can understand him.  When he joins us and you come to know him you will see what an exceptional soul it is.”  She paused.  “He is not a strong man in the conventional sense, you know,” she added.  “But his character is without a flaw.”

“I believe that it will not be difficult for me to make friends with your brother Victor.”

“Don’t expect to understand him quite,” she said, a little maliciously.  “He is not at all—­at all—­western at bottom.”

And on this unnecessary warning I left the room with another bow in the doorway to Mrs. Haldin in her armchair by the window.  The shadow of autocracy all unperceived by me had already fallen upon the Boulevard des Philosophes, in the free, independent and democratic city of Geneva, where there is a quarter called “La Petite Russie.”  Whenever two Russians come together, the shadow of autocracy is with them, tinging their thoughts, their views, their most intimate feelings, their private life, their public utterances—­haunting the secret of their silences.