re 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 ha