was quite passive, untroubled, and of a
marvellous, almost selfish happiness.

"Our friendship continued very easily. It soon came to our meeting
every day. In the summer they moved to their house in Finland and I
went to stay with them. But it was not until her return to Petrograd
in September that I told her that I loved her. Upon one of the first
autumn days, upon an evening, when the little green tree outside their
door was gold and there was a slip of an apricot moon, when the first
fires were lighted (Andrey Vassilievitch had English fireplaces),
sitting alone together in her little faded old-fashioned room, I told
her that I loved her. She listened very quietly as I talked, her eyes
on my face, grave, sad perhaps, and yet humorous, secure in her own
settled life but sharing also in the life of others. She watched me
rather as a mother watches her child.... I told her that it mattered
nothing the conditions that she put upon me; that so long as I saw her
and knew that she believed me to be her friend I asked for nothing.
She answered, still very quietly but putting her hand on mine, that
she had loved me from the first moment of our meeting. That she
wondered that yet once again love should have come into her life when
she had thought that that was all finished for her. She told me that
love had been in her life nothing but pain and distress, and then she
asked me, very simply, whether I would try to keep this thing so that
it should be happy and should endure. I said that I would obey her in
anything that she should command.... There followed then the strangest
life for me. Lovers in the fullest sense we were and yet it was
different from any love that I had ever known. When I ask myself why,
in what, it differed I cannot answer. Two old grey middle-aged people
who happened to suit one another.... Not romantic.... But I think in
the end of it all the reason was that she never revealed herself to me
entirely. I was always curious about her, always felt that other
people knew more of her than I did, always thought that one day I
should know all. It is 'knowing all' that kills love, and I never knew
all. We were always together. She was a woman of very remarkable
intelligence, loving music, literature, painting, with a most
excellently critical love. Her friendship with me gave her, I do
believe, a new youth and happiness. We became inseparable, and all my
earlier life had passed away from me like worn-out clothes.